In 1997, Apple didn’t look as if it had much of a future. The company was losing money, and its co-founder Steve Jobs had just come back to try to reverse the decline. “It was a low point for the company,” says Henry Lowood, curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections and the Film and Media Collections at Stanford University.
Streamlining operations, Apple decided to donate many of its research-and-development records and advertising materials, some historic machines, and other pieces of company history to Stanford. It’s now part of Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archive, which includes Valley-related material dating from to the early-20th-century days of radio engineering up through the computer and biotech start-ups of recent years.
Apple’s donation came “with virtually no strings attached,” Mr. Lowood says. (The university does have to keep track of who owns the rights to individual pieces of the collection, such as Ridley Scott’s famous, Orwell-themed Superbowl commercial that announced the imminent debut of the Mac.)
The donation included all of the materials produced by Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, a corporate research lab that was shut down by Mr. Jobs when he returned. Stanford’s Apple archive also includes a corporate-speeches collection, records from Apple’s testing lab, and the collection it was building for an in-house Apple history museum, according to Mr. Lowood. “We have a huge amount of documentation about the making of the Macintosh,” he says.
There’s a lot in the collection about Steve Jobs but “not a lot of manuscripts in his own hand,” Mr. Lowood says. “Even though the voice of Steve Jobs is not represented in a coherent sense in the collection, there are many perspectives on him, especially from the early period of his work in the 70s and 80s.” There are Bay Area computer user-group sign-in sheets that include Mr. Jobs’s signature, for instance, notes from marketing presentations he did, and other records “that reveal different sides of him,” Mr. Lowood says.
There’s even documentation from the printing company hired to produce the manual for the original Macintosh. The owner of that company wrote “a two-page note about this scruffy kid who came into his office and ordered copies of the manual for the computer he was building,” according to the curator.
There’s also an extensive collection of photographs of Mr. Jobs taken during his exile from Apple. Those pictures are the work of Doug Menuez, who had “very uninhibited, behind-the-walls access” to Mr. Jobs during a period that included his stint at NeXT, the company he founded after being kicked out of Apple.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has a big first-person presence. “We have lots and lots of of files that he created while working on the early computers,” the curator says.
Mr. Lowood doesn’t know yet what materials from Apple’s recent glory days—the decade of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—might find their way to Stanford. Usually it takes years for archives to be handed over, he says. But Apple took the time to gather and hand over a lot of its historic material up to 1997. That’s rare in Silicon Valley, where “it’s often very hard to visibly create resources—a line item in the budget—that’s devoted to history,” Mr. Lowood says. “For the most part, it’s a really hard sell inside companies, especially companies that are moving really fast.”
Many of Stanford’s Silicon Valley holdings came from individual employees rather than by corporate gift. “There are often very dedicated people within those companies who are very dedicated to their companies and are avid packrats,” he says. “There’s an intensity to those companies that translates to loyalty to those companies.”