A spotlight has recently been directed at a little-known archive of documents from Apple, Inc. The collection rests in an undisclosed location, guarded tightly by Stanford University librarians as part of the special collections section.
In 1997, Apple donated many of its founding documents, company records and prototypes to Stanford University after Steve Jobs returned to the company. The collection has remained largely private, though interest in the archive has risen since the death of Jobs in October of last year.
Parts of the collection have recently been opened to exclusive groups such as the Associated Press, under the condition that they not reveal the location. While the collection is not open to the public, a majority of it has been available to Stanford students for years.
“We welcome students, faculty, any qualified researcher to use these materials,” said Leslie Berlin, a project historian at the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives.
The Apple collection, which occupies 600 feet of shelf space, is considered a valuable resource for researchers interested in engineering, marketing or those who wish to track how such a powerful corporation came into being.
“I really feel like a documentary record is as close as you can get to a time machine,” Berlin said. “Having documents that come from the very time that a historian would write about in the future, those are very special.”
The collection has a wide range of documents. One is a detailed interview with Jobs and his business partner, Steve Wozniak. This interview reveals the reason Jobs and Wozniak chose the now-famous Apple name and logo – because Apple would come before Atari alphabetically in the phone book.
Other parts of the collection offer a more personal peek into the culture of Apple in its early days. For example, a video called “Bluebusters” spoofs the popular “Ghostbusters” movie by having company executives pose as “Bluebusters,” who replace PCs produced by then-rival IBM with Apple’s own Macintoshes.
The only part of the Apple collection still unavailable to researchers is its hardware series. According to the Online Archive of California, that part of the collection will be “closed until it can be fully arranged and described.”
“We do not have a specific date set for completing processing of the hardware segment of the collection,” Berlin said.
With many researchers and historians, not to mention tech enthusiasts, itching to get a peek at the display, many are wondering whether Stanford will open up the archive to the public. Several media organizations have speculated that the collection would attract the attention of thieves, thus the enhanced security and restrictive access.
Henry Lowood, curator for History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford, was not available to comment for this story.
When asked if any of the other holdings in the Stanford Silicon Valley Archives could match Apple’s collection in terms of size, Berlin knew of a few.
“In terms of the Apple collection relative to others in our archives, we have several comparable collections in terms of research value, including Fairchild, Ampex and Varian Associates,” Berlin said, listing several powerful tech companies founded in the region. The Silicon Valley Archives also feature a collection belonging to Hewlett-Packard.
“I think that all of our collections have something to offer different researchers,” Berlin said.
Any researcher can view materials from the Apple collection in Green Library’s Special Collections Reading Room, located in the Bing Wing, by requesting them through a paging process, which can be completed in person, by email or online and allows up to a maximum of five items per day.