Archives offer glimpse of Apple roots
PALO ALTO, Calf. — In the interview, Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs recall a seminal moment in Silicon Valley history — how they named their upstart computer company some 35 years ago.
“I remember driving down Highway 85,” Wozniak says. “We’re on the freeway, and Steve mentions, ‘I’ve got a name: Apple Computer.’ We kept thinking of other alternatives to that name, and we couldn’t think of anything better.”
Adds Jobs: “And also remember that I worked at Atari, and it got us ahead of Atari in the phone book.”
The interview, recorded for an in-house video for company employees in the mid-1980s, was among a storehouse of materials Apple had been collecting for a company museum. But in 1997, soon after Jobs returned to the company, Apple officials contacted Stanford University and offered to donate the collection to the school’s Silicon Valley Archives.
The collection, the largest assembly of Apple historical materials, can help historians, entrepreneurs and policymakers understand how a startup launched in a Silicon Valley garage became a global technology giant.
“Through this one collection you can trace out the evolution of the personal computer,” said Stanford historian Leslie Berlin.
The collection of documents, books, software, videotapes and marketing materials is stored in hundreds of boxes taking up more than 600 feet of shelf space at Stanford’s off-campus storage facility.
Interest in Apple and its founder has grown dramatically since Jobs died in October at age 56, just weeks after he stepped down as CEO and handed the reins to Tim Cook.
“Apple as a company is in a very, very select group,” said Stanford curator Henry Lowood. “It survived through multiple generations of technology. To the credit of Steve Jobs, it meant reinventing the company at several points.”
After Stanford received the Apple donation, former company executives, early employees, business partners and Mac enthusiasts have come forward and added their own items to the archives.
The archive shows the Apple founders were far ahead of their time, Lowood said.
“What they were doing was spectacularly new,” he said. “The idea of building computers out of your garage and marketing them and thereby creating a successful business — it just didn’t compute for a lot of people.”
