SiliconBase is devoted to documenting the history of a high-tech region and its work. Its mission and approach are designed in response to challenges posed by the subject; historiographic assumptions; and the limitations and opportunities posed by materials and standard archival collecting practices.
Silicon Valley is one of the world's most active and vibrant centers of technological innovation. The volume of entrepreneurial and inventive activity and pace of change creates tremendous challenges for historians. Companies that develop cutting-edge technologies or create new markets grow rapidly, merge, or are bought out; the paper trails documenting their achievements disappear to make room for the next round of employees. Electronic records such as e-mail, presentations, and agendas are routinely purged, or become unreadable as their underlying media decay. And much of the history is never recorded: it happens around conference tables, in seminar rooms, in front of workstations and PCs, or in restaurants.
In short, the history of Silicon Valley is destroyed as quickly as it is made. In the long run, we run the risk of knowing less about its history than we do about the invention of the printing press or the Industrial Revolution.
SiliconBase's collection efforts are informed by two historiographic assumptions.
The first contends that the history Silicon Valley's most famous inventions-- the semiconductor, microprocessor, personal computer, graphical user interface, etc.-- cannot be understood apart from their institutional, cultural, and business contexts. Technologies do not compete in a simple, laboratory-like environment; their fates are cast in a matrix of business strategy, technical standards, finance, product design, marketing, entrepreneurial passion, and public adaptation and use. The history of technology is really the history of many things.
The second holds that despite (or because of) the challenges the subject presents, Silicon Valley itself has a history that is worth preserving and studying. Especially since World War II, there has emerged here a kind of technological ecology in which institutions, professional identities, and careers have developed and coevolved. Manufacturing, capital, R&D, and educational institutions form a complex, intertwined network. The permeability of boundaries between these sectors has made possible the development of unusual career trajectories: engineers migrate into venture capital, while professors become entrepreneurs. The cycle repeats itself as high-tech products alter the rules of economics and business, and encourage the development of new linkages between sectors and institutions.
A complete history of Silicon Valley is much more than the history of its individual inventions. It must have room for law firms as well as manufacturers, marketers as well as engineers, think-tanks as well as startups. It must pay attention to the intricacies of venture capital and circuit design, IPOs and Internet protocols. And it must be attentive to the interesting failures as well as stunning successes, and the individuals who have escaped public notice but should not be lost to historical memory.
As a result, it will be necessary to preserve a variety of materials: company papers; the personal papers and other materials on individual engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers, attorneys, and financiers.
Conventional archival development strategies are inadequate to the task of recording the history of Silicon Valley, for several reasons.
Corporate archives have evolved to preserve the history of mature companies working in stable industries. They can't keep up with the complex, shifting environment of Silicon Valley, much less match its dynamism and energy.
Science and technology archives traditionally have been organized around disciplines or technologies. Implicit in this organizational structure is an assumption that the history of science and technology can be understood largely in terms of the internal dynamics of each field, independent of place and local culture. However, in the last three decades a number of historians have argued that the development of scientific and technological institutions, ideas, discoveries, and practices are deeply influenced by social and cultural milleux. This is especially clear in Silicon Valley, where scientific research, technological innovation, business strategy, and local culture all intertwine. An archive of a scientific or technological field must therefore collect a wide range of materials to do justice to its subject.
What's needed is an institution that can develop and use cutting-edge archival practices, searching tools, and storage technologies; gather the papers of companies, inventors, and entrepreneurs; and serve as a repository for scholars to both draw upon and build.
The mission of SiliconBase is to preserve the history of Silicon Valley for future generations of scholars and thinkers; to encourage contemporary research on the history of the region, its technologies, and people; and to provide resources for teachers and students. It is doing this through efforts on several fronts: