Cassidy: Jobs, Wozniak among stars in Silicon Valley history video

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Silicon Valley historian John McLaughlin has just released a five-part video series that looks at the history and culture of Silicon Valley.

John McLaughlin has just released a five-part video series on the history and culture of Silicon Valley, and you've got to give the guy points for perseverance.

"I've been working on it for 20 years," McLaughlin says. "The first interview I did was with Linus Pauling back in 1992." And that interview with the Nobel laureate and Stanford professor didn't even make the final cut.

But it's not like McLaughlin hasn't found an outlet for any of the work until now. The former Palo Alto resident has published two books of corporate histories of Silicon Valley companies and he's released two earlier videos, one that appeared on PBS in the late 1990s. But these five, peppered with interviews of valley legends, is something of a capstone on a project that McLaughlin undertook with his gaze firmly fixed on the future.

"The theme was we wanted to be able to interview people that could be seen 500 years from now as groundbreaking personalities," he says. Silicon Valley in the early 1990s was said to be the center of a new Renaissance and McLaughlin was keen to find its Leonardo da Vincis and Michelangelos. He bought a video camera and went to work.

"Hewlett and Packard agreed to an interview early on," he says. "I was nervous the whole time."

And then he moved on to Intel's (INTC) Andy

Grove and AMD's Jerry Sanders. He met with Oracle's (ORCL) Larry Ellison. He talked to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs; Adobe (ADBE) founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock; eBay's (EBAY) Meg Whitman; Carol Bartz, recently of Yahoo (YHOO). He recorded Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame and the valley's pre-eminent lawyer, Larry Sonsini. The list goes on.

"It was an incredible experience interviewing these guys," McLaughlin says.

The result is an interesting two-hour journey into the valley's past. Many of the interviews are from McLaughlin's archives and so they show much younger versions of luminaries who've come to be household names and visages in Silicon Valley. But in some ways, that's part of the series' charm.

Here's Jobs, before the turtleneck years, wearing a work shirt at NeXT headquarters and talking about how there never would have been an Apple (AAPL) without the inspiration provided by the electronic blue box that he and Wozniak built as kids to fool the phone company and make free long-distance calls.

"And these were illegal, by the way," Jobs says in the interview. "But it was the magic of the fact that two teenagers could build this box for $100 worth of parts and control hundreds of billions of infrastructure in the entire phone network, in the entire world, from Los Altos, California. An experience like that taught us the power of ideas."

And Ellison talking about how venture capitalists had no interest in his idea for a startup.

"So, I put in $1,200 and the other two guys put in $400 each and with that $2,000 we started Oracle."

And Atari founder Bushnell on the perceived prospects for computer gaming in the early '70s.

"People thought the idea of playing games on a television set was the stupidest idea they'd ever heard of."

For McLaughlin, collecting the stories fed his passion and allowed him to experience the thrill of the hunt. Like the months he spent trying to get Jobs to agree to an interview.

"I called his office probably 20 times," says McLaughlin, 63, "and Jobs' secretary, her name was Roxanne, and she would say, 'Steve is too busy this year.'" Finally, he says, Jobs' good friend Ellison intervened and Jobs agreed. "He was the best interview we did, by far," McLaughlin says.

McLaughlin, who lives in Tucson now, has had his hand in a number of enterprises over the years -- magazine and book publishing, a coffee cart business, making and distributing video productions. But valley history is the thing that he's loved.

"There is no question that he puts his heart and soul into this thing," says Gina Woolf, who in the early days solicited sponsorships from valley companies featured in McLaughlin's books. "He lives and breathes Silicon Valley history."

For now he is selling the video series on his siliconvalleyhistorical.org website. He and Woolf also hope to persuade broadcast outlets in the United States and overseas to air the programs.

That, of course, will take some doing. Then again, McLaughlin is nothing if not persistent.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.

Source: http://www.siliconvalley.com/ci_21020851/cassidy-jobs-wozniak-among-stars-silicon-valley-history?source=rss_viewed

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