
Unpublished Photos of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley’s Early Days - sidwyn
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos-of-steve-jobs-and-silicon-valleys-early-days/?pid=3625
======
Matti
The photos on a single page:
[http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos-
of-s...](http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/unpublished-photos-of-steve-
jobs-and-silicon-valleys-early-
days/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Ftechbiz+%28Wired%3A+%28Section%29+Tech+Biz%29&pid=3633&viewall=true)

~~~
state
Thank you. Their interface was awful.

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stcredzero
_> “Today there is no patient money in Silicon Valley,” he says. “And that
means that there isn’t enough time to make a similar kind of breakthrough.”_

Is this true? If this is indeed true, what are the underlying factors? What
does it mean "to change everything?"

One example: I suspect that lots of people fall into the trap of monetizing
businesses in ways that trap them into old ways of thinking. Advertising is a
prime example of this. I think advertising is obsolete. We should be using
social graphs to make people more efficient at correctly judging products and
extracting value from the transaction. (Amazon is doing some of this already,
but the groups engaging in this are at arbitrary social distances. Make it
easy for people of close social distance to collaborate, and you will have a
game changer.)

Much of the social fabric of North American society has fallen apart. The kind
of social capital that old communities had was powerful. Networks can be used
to build this kind of social capital to great effect. (Witness the Arab
Spring.) The emphasis should be on emergent trends, with some way of enabling
users to efficiently filter information without deluging them.

~~~
ChuckMcM
"Is this true?"

No. But in terms of deals done it makes a much smaller percentage than the
ones which expect a faster return. Any chip startup, and most hardware
startups, are 'patient' money as there is a lot of R&D to pay off.

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patdennis
I hardly think that 1987 counts as the early days of Silicon Valley.

~~~
georgemcbay
That was exactly my thought. Early days of Silicon Valley reaches as far back
as the 1930s.

Learn your history, whippersnappers, and get off my lawn.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Many (most?) people put the 'start' of the technology culture in Silicon
Valley around the same time that Stanford started the Applied Electronics Lab
[1]

[1] [http://steveblank.com/2009/08/17/stanford-crosses-the-
rubico...](http://steveblank.com/2009/08/17/stanford-crosses-the-rubicon/)

~~~
georgemcbay
YMMV I guess.

IMO, Silicon Valley's "early days" starts with the founding of HP.

In any case, I don't think 1986 can be considered "Early days" by any stretch
of the imagination. Even if you're just focused on the modern era of the
Valley, I don't think you can reasonably make a case for anything earlier than
the mid-1970s. To put the dates in some perspective (not for you but those who
think 1986 are the "early days"), Jobs had already been pushed out of Apple by
1986.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The founding of HP is an interesting place to start, most people put the
'Silicon' in Silicon Valley with the founding of Fairchild [1] in 1956, it was
the making of transistors, and later integrated circuits which really drove
investment. I didn't arrive until '84 nearly 30 years later and in what was
clearly the twilight of semiconductors as the driving force (also in a pretty
big recession). HP's founding in '47 pre-dates Shockley coming to the valley
but all of them were friends with Terman who created the Applied Electronics
lab.

Some people use 1971, the introduction of the Intel 4004 as the seminal
moment, but those folks are more 'computer' focused and less 'technology'
focused.

The bottom line is of course that was definitely wayyyy before '86 :-)

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor>

------
at-fates-hands
"For Menuez, so much of the current tech scene is preoccupied with profit,
whereas the digital word he documented, at least at the beginning, was less
interested in making tons of money and more interested in fundamentally
changing the world."

I haven't spent a lot of time in SV or around the people in that tech scene,
but this seems like accurate portrayal of the current situation.

Can anybody elaborate on his comment?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sure, the engineers here are interested in building cool stuff, sometimes it
becomes wildly profitable stuff, then a bunch of profit seeking types swarm in
and try to figure out how to get that wealth, the snap and fight, much like
piranhas stuck in an evaporating side pool, becoming increasingly unethical
until it blows up on them. Then they die off and the folks working on stuff
get to do so again with fewer interruptions.

Sadly they re-use the office buildings and so we lose the fossil record. It
would be a fabulous art installation to do something along the ruins of Pompei
but with places like Webvan, Pets.com, and Flooz.com.

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CurtHagenlocher
There's a picture entitled "Sunlight, NeXT. Sonoma, California, 1986." with
the text "At tech startups it was rare to get outside or even see the sun for
days at a time. A young NeXT employee working on an original Macintosh at a
company retreat focuses on the task at hand."

But to me, the device clearly looks like a Macintosh SE, which wasn't
manufactured until 1987.

~~~
hnriot
Also, the photo of "Steve Capps" looks a lot more like Woz to me...

~~~
philwelch
Steve Capps reportedly looked a lot like Woz:
[http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&...](http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1)

------
jpablo
Anybody can explain the background behind this one:
[http://www.wired.com/rawfile/wp-content/gallery/silicon-
vall...](http://www.wired.com/rawfile/wp-content/gallery/silicon-
valley/4_010_024563_19_sm_DSI.jpg) ?

~~~
joezydeco
Are you asking what is the background behind the caption?

 _"A Steve Jobs “to-do” list made at a company brainstorming session, with a
set of very difficult technical challenges remaining for his team to solve in
order to complete the NeXT Computer."_

~~~
jpablo
humm, somehow I missed the caption. Sorry about that.

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erichocean
_Menuez: "A couple of co-workers who were falling in love celebrating with
abandon at the Adobe annual holiday party of 1988. They were married shortly
after the party but divorced a few years later."_

The phrasing here bothers me. I'd rather it read: They were married shortly
after the party and divorced a few years later.

Using "but" is editorializing to me -- like saying they _shouldn't_ have
gotten married in the first place, since they later divorced.

------
larrys
"Silicon Valley's Early Days"?

"Finally Surface".

What an unimpressive group of photos.

In reverse order here are the dates. Only two of Steve I think there were more
of Adobe:

1998

1990

1997

1994

1988

1989

1987

1988

1993

1988

1991

1992

1986

1987

1986 s

1992

1986

1988 s

That title would make you think this is some significant find and centered
around Steve and the Valley.

~~~
incision
Honestly, I did expect a bit more, but damn...

You put just 23 lines and some amount of research into purely shitting on the
submitter's choice of title. Did that do anything to help your obvious
disappointment?

~~~
larrys
"purely shitting on the submitter's choice of title."

It's the title of the article. It could also have been re-written by the
admin's even if the submitter had chosen a different title (which no doubt
would have resulted in less points).

Your comment smacks of "look what you waste your time on" in a belittling way.
Perhaps I type fast, work fast and I'm not lazy and would prefer to back up
the point I am making if I decide to make a point about something.

~~~
incision
You don't have a point, just an opinion.

You're verbosely bitching that the article you got didn't live up to your
expectations salted with the inference that the submitter was somehow
whoringly complicit in your perceived deception.

~~~
larrys
"You're verbosely bitching"

<CR's> are not verbosity.

Re-read what I said because the submitter was not "whoringly complicit" (I
like your creative use of language by the way I'll give you an upvote for
that.)

------
redial
also relevant: [http://www.retronaut.co/2012/08/steve-jobs-unseen-images-
by-...](http://www.retronaut.co/2012/08/steve-jobs-unseen-images-by-norman-
seeff-1984/)

------
franze
the set of all sets that do not include itself a.k.a. unpublished pictures
published in a newspaper

------
nirvana
Wow, WIRED has really declined. It is nice to see these photos, but the text
is so often completely wrong, nonsenseical or misrepresentative that I'm just
astounded.

