How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford | Hacker News Reader

How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford

annamancini.substack.com

251 pointspupilus48 comments

I'm so happy to see this. It should live on folklore.org. The librarians were heroes (loved the "pink slips", ha ha).

I was an engineer at the time — my manager had apparently heard a little bird and told his reports that we might want to go through the Apple Library and check out any books that looked interesting ... because we would likely not ever have to return them.

I grabbed Foley and Van Dam, maybe a few others. It was sad to see the library go but having only been at Apple for two years, perhaps it served to give me a taste of what Mr. Jobs at the helm would be like.

> Every corporate librarian or archivist keeps a plan to save their archives in their back pocket. We have to. Corporate archives can come under attack at any time when someone in power—a new CEO, a legal department, the consulting firm behind an acquisition, even a random IT person cleaning up servers—suddenly doesn’t like the idea of a bunch of old stuff lying around. (If you want to know how the Hewlett-Packard Company Archives was saved after enduring a major spinoff, 6 CEOs in 10 years and a company split, read my 2020 article.)

I like the idea that corporate librarians and archivists know they have a professional and ethical responsibility that supersedes what the current corporate leadership believes is their current business interest. (Think about the reasons someone would decide they don't "like the idea of a bunch of old stuff lying around")

Engineers could use some of this too.

It is striking to me how the library staff is all smiling big on their last day of work -- because they know they saved the archives, without Steve Jobs noticing.

Do you have a link to that article?

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol11/iss1/3/

It's linked from the article under discussion:

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol11/iss1/3/

Software "engineers" could use a lot of this professional and ethical responsibility too.

Accountants and engineers have professional license requirements. The license could be taken away as punishments for unethical behavior. Software "engineers" don't.

Those of us that have taken the degree in countries with professional orders, do have.

No one is allowed to call themselves "engineers" after a six week boot camp.

And while few take the professional exam, it is required by law if you are signing legal documents with Eng as part of your name, or where you are taking liability.

https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/pt/a-ordem/colegios-e-especi... (sorry only in portuguese)

> Accountants and engineers have professional license requirements. The license could be taken away as punishments for unethical behavior. Software "engineers" don't.

Oddly enough, I am an accountant. I'd say that it's rare for accountants in the US to lose their license but not unheard of.

> If you want to know how the Hewlett-Packard Company Archives was saved after enduring a major spinoff, 6 CEOs in 10 years and a company split, read my 2020 article.

These Hewlett Packard archives ?

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/business/hewlett-packa...

That's sad. HP was a great company, and I'd guess some documents gave insight into things we could learn (or re-learn) from HP leadership.

> I like the idea that corporate librarians and archivists know they have a professional and ethical responsibility that supersedes what the current corporate leadership believes is their current business interest. [...] Engineers could use some of this too.

The history of the Web shows this hope to be futile. HTML started out from SGML - which, as a reminder, was introduced with the expectation that

> [computer users] will no longer have to work at every computer task as if it had no need to share data [...]; they will not have to act as if the computer is simply a complicated slightly more lively replacement for paper [...]; not have to appease software programs that seem to be at war with one another [1].

But then the dilettantes and bogeymen of our profession found ways to smuggle tons of unnecessary additional syntax and multiple language runtimes into document languages.

[1]: https://books.google.de/books?id=RilvKya0EnwC&pg=PR7&source=...

Exported to PDF in case this get taken down by Apple.

>But then I read the New York Times article about Laurene Jobs starting the Steve Jobs Archive. Here’s what that article said.

>When Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, a dozen years after he was forced out, one of the first things he did was offer Stanford University the company’s corporate archives, said Henry Lowood, the curator of Stanford libraries’ History of Science and Technologies Collections. “Stanford had a signed document from Apple’s legal department within 24 hours, allowing it to transport some 800 boxes from the company’s campus to the university.”

This story wasn't made up by her. It was reported, may be misreporting, may be Apple's Submarine PR for years. And she kept the story going. ( So to speak )

And then this interview [1] with Jony, Tim Cook and Laurene Jobs. I guess people can make up their own mind after watching the interview. But if anything a lot of what was being said by Tim Cook and Laurene Jobs was repeating what Steve had said publicly. Intentionally or not.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdvzYtgmIjs

Oh wow I really enjoyed this read. Thank you so much for sharing. Bless the Apple librarians for saving history.

> “Who uses all of this?” asked Steve.

> Monica answered, “The engineers use this to do research.”

> Steve’s response: “They should know all that already.”

Sounds like Jobs alright.

Christ, what an asshole.

"Should know this stuff already" - wow, SJ, the arrogance. SMH.

When people act like they know it alls, they act like SJ, and rest assured: they, contrary to popular believe, do not know it all. In general, fire the KITAs because they need to be assholes who make everyone around them miserable. Infinite talent or not, morale of the team "superorganism" is more important.

Jobs may have saved Apple, but this is heartbreaking and seems very short-sighted. Did he really want to discourage Apple staff from learning new things that might help them in their work? It also looks like it was a nice work and study space.

I'm pretty sure Woz would have understood the benefits of having a library as well as company historical archives.

Certainly with the zillions of dollars that Apple currently has, it should be able to afford a library.

A sad aftereffect is that Apple's modern history is probably not particularly well-documented or curated.

In 1997, the company was at its lowest point. 70% of the products were cancelled, 3000 jobs were cut. Running a library was certainly an untenable luxury.

If Jobs was short-sighted it was because Apple was literally weeks away from bankruptcy.

Jobs and Apple were certainly in severe cost cutting mode (and cutting in general - even profitable parts that Jobs thought diluted Apple's focus) but closing the library probably wasn't needed to save Apple. Librarians were a drop in Apple's cost bucket (vs. useless middle managers who survived Jobs, hundreds of millions in restructuring costs, the $75M repurchase of Power Computing's macOS license, etc.) and the productivity and morale benefit from the library was likely greater than its cost.

A glib Jobsian "they should know all that already" was also simply wrong.

In any case, a few years later Apple could easily afford it, but it was gone forever.

Stanford keeps ending up with that sort of thing. That's what the Stanford Auxiliary Library holds. They now have SAL1 and SAL2 on campus, and SAL3 is a warehouse in Livermore. It's not just data. Stanford ended up with the Museum of Magnetic Recording from AMPEX in 2001. Somewhere in there is the first video tape recorder.

They also host the world's largest curated videogame collection. Henry is a treasure.

Is it possible for non students or Stanford affiliates to get access to this stuff?

You can visit some of the libraries (listed below from [0]) and request access to most of the archival collections, but you won't be able to borrow anything from either. Note that [0] also applies to the free visits (7 days per year) as well, not just the fee-based library card holders.

- Art & Architecture

- Branner Earth Sciences

- East Asia

- Green

- Music

- Science (Li & Ma)

- Terman Engineering

Note that the video games in the collection are considered archival materials, it requires requesting material online ahead of time and you may only use it in a reading room[1] (unless I think you're assigned as a proxy lender by a faculty member, but you have to be a student/affiliate to be one) and the process is open to the public[2]. IIRC from my freshman year when I did a paper on video games, they had special reading rooms with equipment to use the video games, but that was over 10 years ago now. You may need to also request/reserve the necessary equipment as well.

0: https://library.stanford.edu/using/access-and-privileges/pri...

1: https://guides.library.stanford.edu/c.php?g=1024656&p=786581...

2: https://library.stanford.edu/spc/using-our-collections

The Cantor Museum is also free and open to the public and has an impressive collection.

Interestingly, they have one each of the gold and silver spikes from the Transcontinental railroad. (They're not at Promontory, UT.) The Museum of the City of New York has the other silver spike. The other golden spike was presumed lost until 2005 but is now on display in the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

Corporate libraries are another thing that doesn't quite exist anymore. The Apple's of today will possibly have no archives at all.

For both of my startups, I created a shared folder where anyone can dump things with the specific purpose of, "If we get super big and world famous, this would be interesting early history".

Sadly we never got big or famous, but the idea was there! Most of what was in there were early pictures of the team at important events.

And now presumably all that stuff is totally gone?

30 years ago, the "folder" would have been an actual manilla folder, and you'd still have it sitting in a drawer at home somewhere.

Nah, I kept it all, moved it to a personal Dropbox folder.

I did this at a recent startup where I was first engineering hire. It was our "Nostalgia" Google Drive.

To keep it quick and low-maintenance, every entry (photo, video, copy&paste of a Slack discussion, etc.) was just its own file, with a filename starting with the date in "yyyy-mm-dd" format, followed by a caption. No other curation or presentation.

Even a few months after an event, there was already some significant nostalgia value (and look how far you came already), and it also was a partial chronology.

This stuff needs to be curated. There's The Autodesk Files, collected by the founder himself:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

My wife is a corporate librarian for one of the older tech companies. You are correct.

how do you get that job?

Get an ML(I)S degree, do a relevant internship, then apply... 20 years ago.

Yeah, basically. (But she never had the internship — and it was 25 years ago, ha ha.)

So is mine. Which company?

Agilent (was HP).

Do a little research on the HP historical archives. Shudder...

Yeah, I was surprised to read nothing in her article about the HP archives about how much of the earliest stuff was burned in the Tubbs fire.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/business/hewlett-packa...

This was a great window back in time. It really conveys how what apple accomplished was the product of many hard working, passionate people self-organizing as needed to make things happen. It's sad that so much of the popular history of apple seems to focus on steve jobs as this mythical singular figure who is clearly given more credit than he is owed at the expense of real stories like this, which are much more compelling.

Yeah, this article had me pissed off at Steve Jobs. You know what else pissed me off? Putting usb ports on the back of the iMac where they are hard to reach. Steve did some good things and some bad things.

And yet, if he hadn't put USB on the first iMac, how many more years would we as a species have had to wait for widespread adoption of USB by peripheral makers? PC makers were perfectly happy to keep putting parallel port and serial port connectors on motherboards for like 10 more years. In fact my 2019 AM3 board can still plug in a mouse from 1992.

I thought it was a good compromise to have them on the side on the first generation iMac, and the G4 could be swiveled to put them on the side as well. Even the G5, though it moved the ports to the back, still had them in a vertical row where your fingers naturally fall if you wrap your hands around the sides of the screen. I would've loved it if they'd kept ports on the side somehow but I'm sure somebody (Jobs? Ive?) thought it would look messy.

It's funny, Jobs talked a lot about being unsentimental but then he reached back to Beatles and Bob Dylan songs for quotes.

was he going to pull quotes from the future?

the sentimental quality is picking quotes from musicians of his younger days. He could have picked quotes by Mayakovsky or Kirkegaard. I don't think anyone would have called that sentimental.

I'll start digging for something like this that could exist within the company I currently work for. Honeywell has more than a century of history covering a much broader area than Apple. If we do, it must be something mind blowing.

> I let it go, for the moment. But then I read the New York Times article about Laurene Jobs starting the Steve Jobs Archive.

That's the problem unfortunately. NYT, like most newspapers, publishes many mistakes, most of which remain uncorrected.

non-paywall https://archive.ph/rleNu

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