a several-hour tour

[calimac]

Another of the many tasks I wanted to complete before Potlatch has been finished, and that's updating my driving tour of historic Silicon Valley. I first wrote this up for a Potlatch in Oakland eleven years ago, so it needed geographic rejiggering, as well as a lot of updating. In the old version, Yahoo and Netscape were the hot young kids on the block, and Google isn't mentioned at all. (The search engine - which I first used a few months later - already existed, but the company didn't.)

I was never interested in computers for their own sake, and only developed an interest in computer history as a branch of specifically local history in the early 1980s, when Apple rose to fame and I saw how much of its history - and that of the (previously unknown to me) integrated circuit industry - had been taking place in my neighborhood and practically under my nose. So I started reading everything I could about Apple corporate history. Had my parents bought that other house we were looking at, I would have gone to Homestead High School three years behind Steve Jobs. A childhood friend of mine lived on the same block as Steve Wozniak, a fact I learned when, frustrated by the tantalizing but unspecific microgeography in Apple histories, I looked his parents up in an old phone book. I remember riding my bike past the Byte Shop at about the time it was selling the Apple I, though I certainly never went inside.

Over the years I picked up various tidbits of local tech history, both new and old, and had a collection of sites from the invention of the motion picture in the 1870s (Stanford) and of the vacuum tube around 1910 (Palo Alto), through that the disk drive (San Jose) and the integrated circuit (Palo Alto again) in the 1950s, down to current corporate campuses. And I put them all on my tour.

I needed some help in recent history. johnnyeponymous read the old version over and offered some suggestions. This Google history page is exactly the kind of specific trivia I needed. And this site cleared up for me a lot of apparent contradictions in the history of the Apple Mac. Other firms were more elusive. Everybody I know who's worked at Sun has been at the campus in the Menlo Park baylands, but apparently the company's headquarters is in Santa Clara. It's not the only firm with separated branches, but I'm not sure what the relationship of this one is, and there's little that I can find on corporate history trivia on their website. So my result is biased towards Apple, Google, and HP, for all three of which I have the sites of their original garages. (Google's is listed on their website, HP's actually has a state historic marker in front, and as for Apple's, the old phone books came to the rescue again.)

I went out over the last couple of days to test-drive the sections I'd re-routed to make sure the directions were clear, and that everything I'd last gone out looking for ten years ago is still there. I also looked through the computer history displays at Stanford's Gates Hall: I hadn't even known about the displays until johnnyeponymous told me about it. It's weirdly charming. Here's an Apple II+, a Commodore Pet, an Osborne (one of the oddest-looking computers ever), and a Trash-80: more early PC suckitude in one display case than you're ever likely elsewhere to see. And over here, a punch card impaled on a spindle. If anybody wonders what that word means in the once-famous caution, "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate," here's the graphic evidence.

Comments

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

That's perfect. I hope people have time to go, it's really worth it.