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The difficult search for Silicon Valley''s history

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CIOL Bureau
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By Adam Tanner

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CALIFORNIA: Google and Apple have had a profound impact on contemporary history but there are few obvious landmarks in Silicon Valley celebrating the milestones in their development.

Built on the former orchards along the bay south of San Francisco, Silicon Valley gave birth to firms ranging from Hewlett-Packard, the area's first great electronics company, to Netscape and Yahoo, which first ushered in the Internet era.

One of the best and oldest collections open to the public, the Intel Museum, located in the company's corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, 72.42 km southeast of San Francisco, was born out of frustration about a newspaper account of the computer chip maker's history.

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"The history of the formation of the company was just out and out wrong," said Jean Jones, 79, former executive assistant to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

"I turned to Gordon and said, 'you know, if we want to preserve our history we are going to have to do it ourselves because apparently the journalistic world is not going to pay enough attention.'"

Jones started collecting for the museum in the early 1980s. By 1992, a year after its very successful "Intel Inside" marketing campaign, the company opened it to the public. Jones said she had to fight for funding over the years as some questioned the value of a museum that does not charge admission.

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Last year the Intel Museum, which explains how chips are made and what they do, attracted a modest 136,000 visitors.

Few of Silicon Valley's companies go to such lengths to explain their history. Some do not provide even cursory information about their history on company Web sites.

"It's not a culture that preserves its past; it never has been," said Henry Lowood, curator for the Stanford University Libraries History of Science & Technology Collections.

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"The sites that people remember we mostly have through their recollections. Very few of them still are places you can go and touch or that have museums associated with them."

Lowood's library houses archives donated by Cupertino-based Apple, but those items are only open to researchers.

TECH WONDERS IN OFFICE PARKS

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Silicon Valley's famed companies are typically housed in dull office parks with little sense of technological wonder.

Even at the Googleplex, reputed to be one of the quirkier workplaces in the region, free cafeteria food, scooters and video games do little to offset the many rows of cubicles spread across low-rise buildings.

Yet Google, along with Yahoo, eBay, Adobe and Oracle do not accommodate tourist visits. Some have gift shops selling items such as T-shirts and cups with corporate logos.

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In 2005, Hewlett-Packard, now the world's largest computer maker, completed a restoration of the Palo Alto garage in which David Packard and William Hewlett launched the firm in 1939.

But HP does not offer tours of its headquarters or the HP Garage site to members of the general public or school groups and non-profit organizations.

One impressive sight open to the public is the Computer History Museum down the road from Google in Mountain View.

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"We probably have the largest collection of artifacts in the world," executive director John Toole said.

It includes early calculating machines, the first electronic computer (the 1946 ENIAC which sold for nearly half a million dollars) and a 1976 laser printer that cost $100,000.

Yet, with limited publicity and open just 15 hours a week, the museum attracted only 28,000 people last year. By contrast, the San Francisco Convention & Visitors bureau put the number of visitors to scenic San Francisco at 15.7 million in 2005.

"Our big splash is going to be in October 2009, when we really open as a full museum," Toole said. "We're trying to manage our money and our fiscal ability to perform."

Stanford University, which has played an important role in Silicon Valley's history and gave birth to Yahoo, Google and other companies, offers displays on computing history in some of its academic buildings. These include the original Google storage computer in the Gates Computer Science Building.

Perhaps the best-organized and advertised of Silicon Valley's technology offerings is downtown San Jose's Tech Museum of Innovation, the closest thing to conventional tourist attraction the area has to offer.

It embraces a wide swatch of subjects from space exploration to medical science and computing and itself offers interactive high-tech exhibits and an IMAX theater.

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