SiliconBase was founded in 1993 by Prof. Timothy Lenoir, Chair of Stanford's Program in History & Philosophy of Science, with seed money from the Stanford University Libraries, the Provost for Research, the Dean of Humanities & Sciences, and the Peter Bing Foundation. Working with graduate students and the Libraries' Academic Software Development group (ASD), Prof. Lenoir assembled an online archive comprising some 2,000 documents, including text, images, videos, and sound recordings.
Dr. Paul N. Edwards served as Director of SiliconBase from 1995 to 1998. Author of The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (1996), Edwards guided development of a state-of-the-art World Wide Web site to allow widespread, seamless access to SiliconBase materials. At the same time, SiliconBase began actively to solicit donations of individual and corporate archives, build research collaborations with groups outside Stanford, and develop courses drawing on the database.
In 1999 Alex Soojung-Kim Pang became Project Manager of SiliconBase. An historian of science by training, Pang had previously worked as Deputy Editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where he was in charge of content development for the encyclopedia, and worked on a variety of multimedia and electronic publishing projects.