Yahoo! tells the story:
“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 phonebook.”
The interview, recorded for an in-house video 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 the collection to the school’s Silicon Valley Archives.
Stanford curators were soon at Apple headquarters packing two moving trucks full of documents, books, software, videotapes and marketing materials. These materials now make up the core of Stanford’s Apple Collection.
This collection, which is the largest known assembly of Apple historical materials, can act as a resource to assist historians and entrepreneurs to understand how a little startup can become an industry leader. Stanford historian Leslie Berlin stated the following:
Through this one collection you can trace out the evolution of the personal computer. 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, which take up more than 600 feet of shelf space at Stanford’s climate-controlled off-campus storage facility.
“Apple as a company is in a very, very select group,” said Stanford curator Henry Lowood. “It survived through multiple generations of technology. To the credit of Steve Jobs, it meant reinventing the company at several points.”
After Stanford received the Apple donation, former company executives, early employees, business partners and Mac enthusiasts have come forward and added their own items to the archives.
Among the other items in the Apple Collection:
The archive shows just how far ahead of their time the Apple founders were.
“What they were doing was spectacularly new,” Lowood said. “The idea of building computers out of your garage and marketing them and thereby creating a successful business — it just didn’t compute for a lot of people.”