Capturing History

We've posted before in this blog about the importance of "Capturing History" for our High-Tech community.  See, for example, "An Added Focus for InnovaScapes Institute" posted 1/7/14, followed by "What have we learned via Oral and Video Histories" posted 7/19/14, and the sequel ""Why Collect Oral and Video Histories?"" on the same day.

Two recent events are worth noting in this regard:

First, the annual SHOT and SIG/CIS meeting in Dearborn, MI the second week in November

Then, the IEEE Silicon Valley chapter December 2014 meeting at the Texas Inst HQ in Sunnyvale.

The next two posts will report briefly on these events.  What this post does is introduce the topic that they have stimulated for me:

"History is too important to leave up to historians."

Seriously, we have a huge problem in this regard, and almost no one is aware of it, or more importantly, how they can help influence it.

For example, Christophe Lecuyer, an energetic, focused historical researcher long associated with Silicon Valley history recently was able to publish a small volume of "the Fairchild papers."  These are key notebook entries from the folk who famously bolted from Shockley Labs, pioneered almost all of the key technologies for silicon chip manufacture, and then created Intel Corporation.  It is a wonderful glimpse at "How it Happened"--where "It" is the crux of the digital revolution that will go down in history as probably THE epochal event for civilization's knowledge management.

The story, though, worth reporting is how closely we came to losing all of this historical record.

Fairchild Semiconductor eventually had more folk leave to start new companies than anything experienced at Shockley.  Intel, AMD, and National all spun directly out; Zilog was part of the second wave, etc.  Within a decade, more than 40 semiconductor companies were competing in what was just being termed "Silicon Valley."  Another decade, and most of them had disappeared, merged, or struggled against the Japanese 'onslaught.'  In fact, the irony is that Silicon Valley was no longer the home of much silicon by the time (1982) that National Geographic did its spotlight article re SV, and the Japanese had decimated the local firms by producing much higher-quality parts (as opposed to the dumping charges that U.S. manufacturers "manufactured").

Fairchild itself struggled, then was sold, first to Schlumberger, and then to National, its historical records boxed up and retained, but not examined at all.  Then National, years later, got sold to Texas Instruments, which had someone discover the historical records, start to dispose of them, and then thought to call the Computer History Museum to ask if they'd be interested in the corpus.

Wow!  What if they hadn't called, but instead dumped the records?  It urns out that we know most of the records of most of the companies in Silicon Valley history have been discarded, shredded, lost.  Irretrievably.

And we are losing the pioneers.  People are mortal, and our heroes are no exception.  So the leaders, the inventors, the creators--never mind the legions of helpers--are seldom recorded for their history, their experience, their perspective.

Does it matter?  We think so.  Can we got a grip on this?  How?  There are only an estimated 400 professional computer historians in the world--see the next post--hardly enough to do justice to the field reworking all of the world's societal infrastructure.  Moreover, most of those 400 are focused on the minutiae of a few people or companies, or even one or two specific machines (e.g. IBM 1401).

So--tell your friends, tell a CEO, tell your neighbors--SAVE THOSE RECORDS.  Preserving is the first step toward later interpretation.  Without it, nothing can easily be done later.