[HN Gopher] How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford
___________________________________________________________________
How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford
Author : pupilus
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-11-10 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (annamancini.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (annamancini.substack.com)
| muh_gradle wrote:
| 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.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Christ, what an asshole.
| [deleted]
| hedgehog wrote:
| It's funny, Jobs talked a lot about being unsentimental but then
| he reached back to Beatles and Bob Dylan songs for quotes.
| foolproofplan wrote:
| was he going to pull quotes from the future?
| ggm wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > 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.
| andrehacker wrote:
| > 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...
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| Software "engineers" could use a lot of this professional and
| ethical responsibility too.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _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=...
| Aloha wrote:
| Do you have a link to that article?
| lifefeed wrote:
| https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol11/iss1/3/
| mewse-hn wrote:
| It's linked from the article under discussion:
|
| https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol11/iss1/3/
| msie wrote:
| 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.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| 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.
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| 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.
| ksec wrote:
| 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
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Corporate libraries are another thing that doesn't quite exist
| anymore. The Apple's of today will possibly have no archives at
| all.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| My wife is a corporate librarian for one of the older tech
| companies. You are correct.
| Eumenes wrote:
| how do you get that job?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Get an ML(I)S degree, do a relevant internship, then
| apply... 20 years ago.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, basically. (But she never had the internship -- and
| it was 25 years ago, ha ha.)
| kridsdale2 wrote:
| So is mine. Which company?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agilent (was HP).
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| Nah, I kept it all, moved it to a personal Dropbox folder.
| pinewurst wrote:
| Do a little research on the HP historical archives. Shudder...
| wl wrote:
| 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...
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| VonGuard wrote:
| They also host the world's largest curated videogame
| collection. Henry is a treasure.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Is it possible for non students or Stanford affiliates to get
| access to this stuff?
| nvrspyx wrote:
| 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=78
| 6581...
|
| 2: https://library.stanford.edu/spc/using-our-collections
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-10 23:00 UTC)