Stanford's slice of Apple history

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In the interview, Steve Wozniak and the late Steve Jobs recall a seminal moment in Silicon Valley history: how they named their upstart computer company some 35 years ago.

"I remember driving down Highway 85," Wozniak says. "We're on the freeway, and Steve mentions, 'I've got a name: Apple Computer.' We kept thinking of other alternatives to that name, and we couldn't think of anything better."

Adds Jobs: "And also remember that I worked at Atari, and it got us ahead of Atari in the phone book."

The interview, recorded for company employees in the mid-1980s, was among a storehouse of materials Apple had been collecting for a company museum. But in 1997, soon after Jobs returned to the company, Apple officials contacted Stanford University and offered to donate them to the school's Silicon Valley Archives.

Within a few days, Stanford curators were at Apple headquarters in nearby Cupertino, packing two moving trucks full of documents, books, software, videotapes and marketing materials that now make up the core of Stanford's Apple Collection.

The largest assembly of Apple historical materials, it can help historians, entrepreneurs and policymakers understand how a start-up launched in a Silicon Valley garage became a global technology giant.

"Through this one collection you can trace out the evolution of the personal computer," said Stanford historian Leslie Berlin. "These sorts of documents are as close as you get to the unmediated story of what really happened."

The collection is stored in hundreds of boxes at Stanford's off-campus storage facility.

Interest in Apple and its founder has grown dramatically since Jobs died in October at age 56, just weeks after he stepped down as chief executive and handed the reins to Tim Cook. Jobs' death sparked an international outpouring and marked the end of an era for Apple and Silicon Valley.

Apple scrapped its plans for a corporate museum after Jobs returned as CEO and began restructuring the struggling firm, said Stanford curator Henry Lowood. Jobs' return, more than a decade after he was forced out of the company he co-founded, marked the beginning of one of the great comebacks in business history. It led to the iPod, iPhone and iPad, which have made Apple one of the world's most profitable brands.