Disappearing tech history

The news that Intel has awarded a British man $10,000 for his copy of a 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine -- the one that contained Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's musings that later became known as Moore's Law -- brings to the fore a great fallacy of the Internet age. It's one that I frequently hear espoused by younger colleagues and, occasionally, those my age or older.

The Great Fallacy: That because of the digital Library at Alexandria that the Internet represents, there's no longer a need to keep an extensive archive of one's own.

However, as any observer of the Web can tell you, the shelves of the Internet are constantly morphing. Web sites with valuable reference material for a niche audience may, at some point, take down those archival pages in a re-design, or put them behind a password-protected wall. Security or confidentiality fears (such as those that occurred after the 9/11 attacks) have led to the removal of academic and scientific treatises.

And many documents have yet to make it to the Web. Cleaning out some early consulting files from my garage a few weekends ago, I came across a Broderbund Software catalog from 1992, marketing collateral for the original Myst, and marketing plans for companies ranging from Taligent to Apple's Software Dispatch. (Packrat? Guilty. I even have a shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Bob.)

I doubt you'll find any of those documents on the Internet. Which, combined with a perception that everything worth saving may already be available online (so why not throw it out?), could make it difficult for future Intels -- or academics -- to fully trace the remarkable development of an industry that has changed the way we work and live. These aren't earth-shattering collectibles, but they do mark some important ups and downs.

Microsoft has a museum. And there are initiatives to start grand, general tech industry history showplaces.

But for those who would understand the history of an entire industry -- and the large number of companies that did not survive, but made a huge impact -- perhaps the most important artifacts aren't online or already in a museum. They are housed, like some of the earliest computer startups, in someone's garage.