Silicon Insider: Digital Toys in the Attic
Aug. 7, 2003 -- — Each year, the City of Santa Clara, at the very heart of Silicon Valley, offers a special garbage collection program. Anything you want to pile on the curb, the city will take to the dump.
It's the perfect opportunity to clear out that old filing cabinet in the den and the box of old company documents in the garage. And they take full advantage of it: By the night before, the streets of this suburban city look like one gigantic, unattended flea market.
Santa Clarans love the pick-up. I hate it.
Living next door in Sunnyvale, I lie in bed the night before the pick-up thinking about the high-tech history that is about to become landfill. Old laboratory notebooks, aging 4-bit PCs and home video games, the motherboard with the 8008 chipset, the 64K Macintosh. The crucial Intel memo, the forgotten Atari prototype, the dusty of HP audio oscillator still in its original crate, the unrecognized Apple I. Gone forever.
Not long ago, The Wall Street Journal ran one of its slice o'capitalism cover features on a guy named Henry Wilhelm. Wilhelm, a 60-year-old engineer based in Grinnell, Iowa, is an expert on the durability of graphic images, especially photographs. He puts the output of laser printers and other devices through a gauntlet of environmental forces designed to replicate, at an accelerated rate, the affects of time and age.
Why? Because over the last century we've learned, to our rue, that the products of modern technology don't endure the way we thought they would. Like silver nitrate film. And high wood-pulp content paper. And videotape.
Remember when CDs were going to be the all-but immortal replacement for LPs? Even solid-state semiconductor chips, seemingly as durable and stable as rock crystal, have proven to be delicate little creatures ready to succumb at any moment to static electricity, a bad cooling fan, or a good bounce on a lobby floor.
But even as we struggle to find better ways to better preserve the past, we also face the attendant question of what it is that we should save. The former is a task for scientists, the latter is a question posed to all of us.
Treasures from the Past
Every family has its stories of lost treasures — the Tiffany lamp that was dropped off at the junk shop during the move in 1946, the Kentucky long rifle that Aunt Petunia put in the garage and can't find anymore, the gold Russian icon grandpa pawned after he lost his job in the Depression.
My father used to talk about that day in the late '30s when the local drugstore offered to trade one new comic book for 10 old ones, and he, of course, took in his stack of Action #1, Detective #1. And he never forgave my mother for not letting him spend six months salary of a 1st lieutenant stationed in Germany to buy a 300SL Mercedes Gullwing.
But, of course, there is a corollary to that: if everyone hoarded every bit of ephemera they came across in the course of a lifetime, and always made wise investments, there would be no rarities and no market for antiques.
And, for all that he missed, my old man did get it right: on his last mission in WWII, he unscrewed and pocketed the air temp gauge from the Plexiglas nose of his B-17. It's here on my desk in front of me as I type, one of a handful of survivors in the whole world, the very embodiment of analog world of mid-century America.
The challenge becomes infinitely greater when you're trying to collect items not for their future market price, but for their value to history. Now you run into a whole host of new problems: in particular, time, context and perceived value. Now it's no longer just a matter of finding collectable rarities. Instead, you have to answer the nearly impossible question: what will future generations want — and need — to know about us and our times?
And from that springs a whole host of secondary questions, such as: Will the future be able to decode the message we are trying to send them? [Think of all the medieval paintings whose once obvious symbolism is utterly lost on us.] And, will the future be so different from today that what it finds valuable and useful will be utterly different from what we do today? [Who would have thought a century ago that the Lumiere films of everyday life would be more compelling to 21st century audience than the popular movie melodramas of the time?]
Malone's List
Once you start down this path, you find yourself faced with some depressing paradoxes. For example, instead of saving every word of literature being written today, should we instead be collecting a lock of hair (for the DNA) from every single living person? Are Pokemon cards a more important representation of modern life than copies of the New Yorker? Should we be storing in lead vaults DVDs of World Wrestling Federation pay-per-views? Think about this stuff hard enough and your head starts to explode.
But short of that, it is an interesting thought problem to come up with a list of the most representative items — for the purposes of this column, let's make them only technology-related — of the last five years. What would you preserve for posterity?
Here's my list:
The Pets.com sock puppet
A complete dot-com start-up office (cubicles, folding tables, foosball, wires and circuits boards everywhere, gutted servers, critical path chart on the wall, Aeron chairs, microwave popcorn, etc.)
A collection of promotional tchochkes from eCommerce start-ups
The "fat" issues of Red Herring, Fast Company, Business 2.0 and Industry Standard
Enron annual report 2001
Photos: Pac Bell park 2001 showing advertising, same shot, Pac Bell park 2002
One day's download of Google queries, 2002
Photo: lunchtime, South Park, San Francisco 1999
Forbes ASAP Big Issue 1 1994, dot-com guillotine cover 2000
Video: 2000 Super Bowl (including ads)
Photo: NYC Flatiron district 2000
Program: Gilder Telecosm conference 2000
T-shirt: Siebel IPO team 1997
Apple iMac, first run
Powerpoint slide presentation on M&A strategy, Cisco Systems, circa 1998
Yahoo! logo painted Volkswagen Beetle 1999
Netscape offering prospectus 1996
Intel Pentium chip, AMD Athlon chip
Motorola StarTac, first generation
Pokemon first set
Silicon Alley Reporter, premier issue
Gameboy, version 1, with selection of games
Video: one 24 hour period of CNBC, circa 1999
One week's download of F*ed Company.com, circa 2001
First editions: The Nudist on the Late Shift, The New, New Thing, Who Moved My Cheese?, Crossing the Chasm, The Perfect Store, and Burn Rate
DVDs: Revenge of the Nerds, Pirates of Silicon Valley, Startup.com, 60 Days to Launch
Invitation, dot-com SOMA party, San Francisco — 1999
Launch party flyers, Silicon Alley 1999
Wired: Bill Joy manifesto issue, Apple Logo Sacred Heart issue
Video: ZDTV, one hour of Leo LaPorte as virtual character answering tech questions
One used WebVan food bin
One early model Palm Pilot containing one week's appointments, preferably with VCs
Single page business plan for a dot-com, with requested investment of more than $10 million
Sample Help Wanted pages, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury-News, Arizona Republic, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Oregonian, and Austin American-Statesman 1999 and 2003
Sample Walter Mossberg product review, WSJ, 1998-2003
Résumé portfolio, high-tech recruitment firm, 2003
Segway 2002
That's a start. Any items that you would add or subtract?
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.