 Mae'r gaeloedd y Prif Weinidog, ddwy'n gwisit i gael i gaeloedd i'n ddweud. Rwy'n gwybod y bydd y bwysig yn cael ei ffordd o'r adegwyr, ond rydyn ni'n gofyn i'n gweithio wedi gaelio'r wneud. Dwi'n gweithio'r cyfrifwyr nhw i'ch gaelio'r ysgrifennu i'ch gwybod. Rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu i'ch gaelio'r ysgrifennu i Wesley A Clark, y pethau cyfrifwyr amser yn ôl. died last week aged 88. He designed the first modern personal computer in the early 1960s working out of a lab on the East Coast. A colleague said, where's its saw the future 15 years before anyone else. That's a timely link into my talk, it's usually when I give a lecture on this subject that I begin by asking the ages of those present. I won't ask the same of this audience, but only ask you to bear in mind that such a detail the unique nature of computer archaeology. It is a field which is both modern and, in its way, pre-historical. The record is ambiguous, contingent on take-up and familiarity, travelling between innovation and obsolescence in a cycle based not on change of a time, or millennia, nor centuries, nor even now, decades, but years and months. The track from product to product is a very different area. It is a field which is a field yw'r colledau gwahanol yn y trofyn yn ymgyrch yn'r ardal, ond yn yr ardal cyfnod i ddweud y ddweud fawr yn rhanol y cyfnodol. Yn ymgyrch chi'n wneud yma, ydych chi'n gwirioneddol o'r branc o argynfod ar gyfer argyngyrheoli, y dyfodol ymgyrch yn ei ddweud yn cael ei dddangos y strym. Mae'r ddweud yw'r yn ymgyrch, ac mae'n cael y masinol, ychydig yn y ffyrdd yma, o'r awddiad Clarg, a'r cyfnodol, But also the more familiar hardware and motherboards and the rather dull looking grey computers with which we are familiar, and also the software, the non-tangible of the Internet age, a development which challenges our notions of classification and the memories of museums' storoes dusty with artefacts. The point I make to the students school in what we might call traditional archaeology is that the usual processes linking artefact to activity are overturned by human unpredictability and technological engagement. And that is determined by other factors from accessibility to knowledge to geography and the means to make the technology work. In a world where fast internet can be more easily obtainable in a developing country in South America than a village in the Welsh borders, the overtake of the artefacts, the material of the digital age, makes a strata of meaning complex to understand and unreliable to record. Dialogs attaching memory to artefacts, the grandparents recall of an object in a museum, here has evolved into parents remembering buying and using their first computer. And even more, given the accelerating change over time, siblings exchanging a plaintive, oh I remember when, a saver called an earlier MacBook. For the past decade I've given an annual lecture to Bristol students with a typical age range of 20 to 23 studying material culture at a university. Over the years the responses changed as the tech world has turned around them. I now hear gasps of recognition at mention of older models of machines which they now recognise as not technology used and discarded by my generation of baby boomers but have their own personal narratives. After years of lecturing about what they would see simply as old stuff, I'm suddenly preaching to born again students, or born digital students I should say, and born again. And they can see that the gadgets of earlier technology that they have rattling around in drawers are ancient in contemporary terms as they are artefacts of the digital age and epoch. I'll return to that class of 2016 later, but first I should lay out my field work and site of primary excavation. So this is a map of Silicon Valley or rather Northern California from California, not the San Francisco down. What we know today as Silicon Valley is part of the Bay Area of Northern California extending some 70 miles down the peninsula at south of San Francisco. It has no map coordinates as such being a loose accumulation of cities at areas which extend out from San Jose, a city known as the capital of Silicon Valley. I say accumulation as during the first dotcom boom, especially in the late 1990s, Silicon Valley was a name check of success, a place with which to be identified, to flock to. Workers travelled in from as far south as Gilroy, the garlic capital of America, and west Livermore with its major defence lab. The path to the south west is halted by the Santa Cruz mountains and the surfing beaches, reached by exhilarating but slow winding highways. Palo Alto has Stanford University and from this intellectual node it is an easy reach to Mountain View, Santa Clara, Menlo Park and Cupertina. Key cities in the story of computing, but between them the lesser known Saratoga, Sunnyvale, Campbelltown and Woodside, where the fruits of stock options can be seen in the homes and businesses. In the hills above Woodside live the pioneers of the pre dotcom boom, those who made their money in the earliest tech epoch. When it came, the technology industry was founded on convergence, as it was in the first wave on America's east coast. There, IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation had similar innovation. The common factor was esteemed universities, Stanford and UC Berkeley on the west, and MIT, Harvard, Yale, NYU, Princeton, down Route 128 on the east coast. Plus a significant driving factor, not pure commerce in the early days but defence innovation. But why Silicon Valley in the west and not Route 128 in the east? The geographer Annalise Saxanian established a key difference. In a prescient 1996 book, Regional Advantage, she fleshed out the causal factor. It is one which traditional archaeologists can relate to in the establishment of urban centres, the climate. On the west coast this gave a significant social advantage. The great outdoors community reveled in sports and informal activities which provided a fertile ground for the sharing and proliferation of ideas. And open air labs compared with the cubicles of the east where people were hunkered against the seasons. In California, after all, the Bohemians had extended their easy living ethos in the 1960s hippie movement. Even as those on the east were clustering indoors just as intensive but engendering a less sharing philosophy. But Silicon Valley hasn't always been tech. Within our memory, what is known today as Silicon Valley was the valley of hearts delight. An extensive fruit growing area where apples were simply apples. And the smell of blossom in spring was a constant on the breeze. The orchards are long gone but their memory remains in their place names. Pruniad, Blossom Hill Road. It was unnerving carrying out early research in 2000 to hear the words, ah I remember the orchards, recalled with some nostalgia by teenagers. There's actually now an orchard museum. They saved an acre for that. The manufacture lines in the old era were not of product but produce. Into this barmy climate poured migrant workers from all over America. The image here is of prune packers. But by the end of the 20th century the production line was packing technology and bringing with it the workers' own cultural identities. This couple began their working lives in the area working on quality control of salads. Quickly moving to checking computer games. As the area and the trees grew, new communities evolved. San Jose has Japantown and by the late 1990s the areas Hispanic and Vietnamese communities were large enough to warrant their own language version of the Silicon Valley newspaper, San Jose Mercury News. And this of course is interesting and important in terms of material culture and context. Those who came to pack technology also unpicked it. Along with the assembly line came the dissemblers who protected the commercial interests of Silicon Valley's innovators, and still do, by stripping old technology, dead tech, at specialist recycling companies. The baskets of precious metals and reformulated materials at last resemble something we might recognise from an archaeological hoard. The value of one over another in a tech table of precious inclusions reminds of classical writers describing the allure not of gold, for example, but silver in some context. There's a further classical analogy. At these tech centres, these recyclers, the requirement to destroy motherboards literally deliver them to fragments rather than let a rival company pounce reminds of the deliberate destruction of weapons in the Iron Age, and the action rendering them powerless while appeasing some deity. Crucial to the growth of the technology sector in its early days on the west coast was the working together, not of scientists in closeted labs, as I mentioned, but hobbyists building computers and finding a need to share knowledge and those hard to acquire resources. The car park of Stanford's Linear Accelerator Centre, or Slack, became a regional powerhouse in the unlikely swap meet and they were happy to be called nerds and geeks and they do wear that with pride. I have a t-shirt. The homebrew computer club, taking its aesthetic from the whole earth catalogue and other craft identities coming again out of the 1960s, opened their car boots or more properly their trunks over in America to swap. Steve Wozniag, co-founder of Apple and a real tech, retro tech person himself, was one of them trading or simply exchanging not just the physical bits and pieces of early technology, the motherboards, the components, but the stuff which drove the valley into the 1980s, ideas. In this fertile but sharing environment, companies grew out from the defence industry technology, spurred by the idea that one day the computer would be personal and made at home. In the way we collect stories of famous archaeologists, the history of technology is as important for documenting the people who made these finds happen as much as the finds themselves. A store called Weird Stuff was an extension of that idea of cooperative innovation. In January 2000, I photographed the floor with its random array and mapped it like a fine sight. I used a disposable camera, another now redundant technology. This is the type of place in which the weird stuff is discard, then desirable in a matter of years. But other factors give relevance to how weird it actually is. This is tech trash and treasure in a single context. So in the first week of the 21st century, I visited Intel's in-house museum in Santa Clara. Tech companies branched like a family tree or biblical begetting. The defence giant Fairchild, for example, spawned a silicon chip manufacturer, Intel, as workers broke away to innovate. The company was not only a part of computer history, but a pioneer of documenting computer history. By the end of the 20th century, it initiated an awareness of its own past by inviting employees to donate something from their work, their everyday. Rooting around in the carefully classified drawers, I found something with a written account and so traced it back to the employee, George Chew, who'd started at Intel. He was employee number seven. George worked in packaging, you can just see his note there, right at the very front. Not the cardboard kind, but the core dynamic in silicon chip manufacture. That echoing Intel found a Gordon Moore's ethos of smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful. Chew worked to shrink the package of components. The power of this unremarkable-looking artifact laid deep inside it. How would we determine that, archaeologically? It is clear the interpretation relies not simply on historical account, but personal recollection and the media used, the last being crucial to not only understanding and accessing the data in the future. I'll return to that. Computer history enforces a need to look forward as well as back. Even before the sudden deceleration of the dot-com crash in the spring of 2000, Silicon Valley's paper of record, the Mercury News, was sounding a warning which, viewed today, was prophetic. It will have fallen on deaf ears largely outside the industry as Silicon Valley was driven by consumers comfortable with the redundancy of technology. This is a rather pointed poster that was put up around Silicon Valley and the redundancy, of course, of artifacts and of technology didn't really compute, as it were, to the actual redundancy of people until the crash happened very quickly. The Nasdaq peaked and then dropped in April 2000. And, of course, this dot-com industry was based not on objects, but ideas and USPs, unique selling points. So when the crash happened, the old-timers, those who built their fortunes in the defence industries in the early Intel days, were not surprised that it happened so much as the speed of the crash. Venture Capital is heady from handing out funding to companies with only spin for product, retreated, leaving the start-ups to vanish into the same hot air from which they had appeared. Now, material culture map this change. The for sale columns of the Mercury News, and how quaint print advertising sounds these days, were filled with new Porsches and other high-end material culture. Those renting were suddenly offered a premium to find new tenants and housing prices plummeted relatively. Those houses, such as this one, which the Mercury News used for a reality check during the boom, had provided me with another archaeological entree. I called it the Pompeii effect. What would we surmise from excavating a ten-bedroomed house? The figures we come to were looking at foundations in traditional context becomes problematic when luxury homes often had a single occupant cashed in his stock options that tended to be him. From post-crash we could even revert to our more traditional pattern or the formula with some care. If such homes were somehow more affordable to a different category of worker, the cultural mix was complicated. Workers without work in the tech industry and priced out by inflated factors elsewhere often gravitated back to their home states, sometimes back home with their parents, having left a hostel as I witnessed once at the age of 19, got a job at Apple and then suddenly had to go back home. The car parks emptied, the businesses shutted, and the lost orchards had a currency of last, but they were still under tarmac. Nostalgia and a hankering for the past became something which people were open to discuss. History's time had come and I could get a proper handle on the archaeology. By great good fortune my fieldwork, which started on a hunch, straddled this dot com divide, the end of the boom time and the start of the crash. Late in 1999 I'd become acquainted with a trio of coders, or programmers, through a chance meeting on a flight to San Jose. Through them I began to understand how the material culture, the artefacts of this early digital age, meshed with the human story. Of this trio, Tom Jacobits, on the right as you're looking, had three companies by the time of the age of 26. His friend Adam, in the middle, was a problem solver for a new company called eBay and gained me access to look at its modest server, the loadstone for its computations. House in a cage with an armed guard. Another programmer, also Tom on the left there, had crossed from Florida to be part of the tech story. They took me out to see how coders lived. It was as anthropological as archaeological. The predominantly male workforce took their laptops to nightclubs, evidencing the uneasy mix of work and leisure in the pressurised cubicles of the late 90s Silicon Valley, when there was no time for rest, far less play. Social observation was one thing, but I needed to rest my case on what might be artefacts of the future archaeology, the material culture. The mantelpiece in Tom's apartment gave me an array through which I could articulate this. The random collection is an accumulation over a short time and speaks a language of the dot com era. Brands and signifiers, markers of exclusion and hierarchy, presented with humour and forgivable swagger. I listed the objects as I would in archaeological assemblage. The pest dispenser signalled one means the coders kept going. High energy drinks, sweets and other performance-enabling intoxicants were necessary. The writer Douglas Coupland, in his novel about the early tech wave, described the popularity of certain flat foods which could be slid under the door of a programmer locked in the dark for days. The novelties with computer names signalled attendance at one of the prestigious parties or launches which were a signal of performance. The inclusion of a penguin is an immediate marker for Linux, the open source programme favoured by most coders at that time, being in Westco's style being unshackled to corporates. The early promotion for Apple signalled it as different from IBM, the suits versus the t-shirts and jeans, the closed thinking versus creative freedom, but Linux was a symbol further out the box. Aside from the artefacts given out by companies, the pest dispensers and other novelties were acquired by coders from a marketplace which fused the regular shoppers for electrical wires with the coders who were innovating such goods. A wonderful place called Fries, which exists I think only on the west coast of America, has a different theme for each of its stores, and the one that was closest to Silicon Valley's mother, mother heart, mother load, is in the style of ancient Egypt. And I wasn't allowed to take any photos, but I was amazed to find there was one online, ironically, isn't it? And it shows how the products are displayed inside, and when I was there, again in 2000, you'd find computers inside sarcophagi and mummies holding old or new, I should say, products. The outside of the building as well resembled an Egyptian temple. So the gilded mummies opening to reveal displays of the latest thing, but this fries, like others at this time, would be home from home for clusters of geeks sitting cross-legged on the floor, pouring over an array of computer components. Around them, the casual shoppers spending their inflated tech salaries on technology, which, by being in production and on sale, was already out of date. Just down the road from the fries that I've just shown you is the Rosa Crucian Museum, which has a proper Egyptian collection of archaeology, and I was amused to find its collection, also includes a cystrum, which, given the evolving uncertainties of the area's economy, proved to be something of a gadget of portent. The whole economy was about to change, and values were shaken and stirred so that the past suddenly had a value, as an image of one being held and in use. In Silicon Valley, what was important in the dot-com age and remains so now is accelerating change over time, and just when an individual became an earlier doctor, not simply of computers, but ahead of the curve. The reason for being in Silicon Valley in the first place, aside from being bumped off a flight to Oakland, and having to opt for a place I only knew from a song title, was curiosity. The conversation I had with Tom, mentioned before, who had been seated next to me on a plane to San Jose, began with my comment about his PDA, the old name for a smart gadget. That's cute how long's that been out, I remarked, as he closed it down for take-off. It comes out tomorrow, he said. I designed the email for it. During the flight I began to ask if there was still a place for the past in this thrusting valley, with its dynamic, as Michael Lewis observed, of the new, new thing. In 1999 the answer was not much, or rather there was a lot of history, but there was a place for it as part of the ongoing story. And local museums charted the agriculture. The tech museum in San Jose was more of a family-orientated innovation centre and hosted events. Apart from intels in-house collection, there was a fledgling computer history museum housed in portacabins on the NASA Ames Defence Base in Mountain View. Around this time I proposed giving a paper at the CAA conference, the Computer and Archaeology Conference, on computers and, but not as, history. Titling it bits and pieces, and nod to both techie-speak, but also that I was working with fragments. Meanwhile, MIT Press contracted me to write a book with the outlandish title at the time, Artifacts and Archaeologists Year in Silicon Valley. The book, when it was published, features fragments on the cover, pieces of chopped-up motherboard from the recyclers. On a tip from my editor at MIT Press, on April 1, 2000, and this is no joke, I attended a unique auction near Boston, Massachusetts. By now, I've made a case for an archaeology of Silicon Valley. I had the leads to West Coast material, now I needed to show what survived out east. This proved a unique sale and a marker for the development of the computer-collecting field. This poster was one of the lots, and the rest of the artefacts seemed homespun focarte, or rather familiar old technology, like automata, lantern slides, slide rules. The venue was an auction house in the country, and as the lots were sold and bidders fell away, I was left in a cluster of people interested in what was the start of a rather different set of values, inspired by what was happening on the West Coast. The prize towards the end of the sale were artefacts on the attic of a technologist, John Presper Eckert, who's on the right as you're looking. His widow had come across a series of artefacts in the attic after his death, it's one of those classic stories, and asked a local auctioneer if he thought they had any value. He decided to list them in an auction. They included the scientist's slide rule of interests given the provenance. But another lot was a remarkable piece of computer history. Presper Eckert was his co-designer, John Mulchley, developed a piece of Second World War technology called the ENIAM, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first general purpose computer. The bidding for one of the vacuum tubes used in the machine rose steadily upwards. The eventual price was far in expectation of the estimate, and when I approached the bidder I was surprised to be told that he was acting on behalf of the buyer, not surprised though, who wished to remain anonymous. Several emails a month later I did meet the buyer and saw the artefact in his own museum collection. The buyer was himself a part of the computer history, a technologist by the name of Nathan Mivald, who with Bill Gates and Paul Allen had founded Microsoft. I was invited to see his personal museum in Seattle, and there found another type of computer excavator. Mivald now had the means to buy extensively on eBay and scout for artefacts, not acquiring for resale value, but because of an obvious connection with the artefact in its functional state. This relationship between history and living memory continued to evolve back in Silicon Valley. Hewlett-Packard, as a company, bought the garage and wished their company started. Apple donated and of course they bought the house, because they wanted the garage. It reminds me of the V&A and the cafe and the museum store, if you remember that one. Apple donated much of their archive to Stanford. The history of technology as a discipline had now extended to computers with which students and faculty were familiar, as well as the products of the industrial revolution and the pioneers heading west. The paper I presented at Lubiana in the spring of 2000, in which with some trepidation I made the case for computers themselves, began to suggest a new midden to excavate for the emerging field of contemporary archaeology. The old computers and floppy disks, I argued, could be rescued from the spoil heap and used to evidence quick change over time. Meanwhile, in the manner of a local giving field walk as a tip about some old marbles being used as a cattle trough, I was given the email of my every man. Salam Ismail, a Californian and amateur historian, had more than 3,000 different models of computer, together with manuals, peripherals, advertisements and games. It started because of a regret at selling his first computer when he was a teenager and decided to start collecting and didn't quite know when to stop. He had founded the Vintage Computer Festival to celebrate the history of technology, a place where speakers would be insiders, those who not only had used the older machines but designed them. This came from all over America and further, including myself, to talk and to show their working models of resurrected technology. The main thing was that they were working models. The audience grew from die hard geeks and nerds to a new generation to embrace the relevance of seeing the old machines at work. Within a decade, retro tech became a trend. But earlier, the computer collectors began to be recognised as hobbyists with a valuable skill, excavating lost data. Salam rescued machines that filled rooms and travelled across America on a grand tour collecting not the beautiful, but what was redundant and a heritage at risk. More than just collect, he would mine that data. He was once asked to help a group of Florida archaeologists who could no longer access reports from a shipwreck of Florida. A woman wanted to retrieve her late father's novel. Lawyers needed evidence for prior patent suits. The prescient of Salam and other expert hobbyists because there's a huge network of them, was astonishing because they had no university degrees and it was increasingly apparent that they'd been overlooked. The tech industry, though, started to pay attention to these collectors who redefined the term hobbyist given their fund of specialist detail. Their favouring of the old old and their painstaking attention to gathering not just well known models such as this, the iconic Apple One, but the ordinary models, long forgotten, ones which everyday Americans had churned out on which they'd churned out schoolwork accounts, letters. The collector's ethics code insisted that data found on machines was deleted to the point where it was no longer identifiable. On a visit to Oxford where he spoke about his collection at the Institute of Archaeology, Salam delighted in buying up old manuals from the Oxfam bookstore. Things they'd probably never thought they would sell. The vestiges of the British computer era representing the tech past of a foreign country, so to him incredibly interesting and important. So they went back west. Under his influence, vintage computer festivals began in Europe as well. I was doing my own excavating around Oxford and when I went to the computer services department towards North Oxford, I asked if they had anything that was collectible and they just gave me a box to rival through and I found this rather antiquated looking piece of paper talking about the first foreign user that they were connecting through back system which was part of the internet, early internet used in university computers. University computing. And you can see first reply from foreign user, Hooray, 15th of February 1988. 1988 seems incredibly recent to me. I don't know how you will feel about it. So back in Northern California, the Computer History Museum on course to build a multi-million dollar purpose built museum during the boom days did that plan when the philanthropy fell away. Instead and rather more interestingly I feel it inherited an artifact. A company called Silicon Graphics downsized from their headquarters in Mountain View and the computer museum moved in. Today it hosts the Vintage Computer Festival but this in rooms where the archaeology trace includes the old SGI logo on some of the chairs. At the Vintage Computer Festival West such is the passage of time that born digital now go up at the relics of the old days of green screens and listen to the rhythm of Doc Matrix Printers. And what's also crucial here is the museum has made a big thing of getting stories of people who are working incrementally. So it wasn't so interested in the big players who have the money and the resources to get their stories out like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Paul Ann and Bill Gates but the people who are working rather like George Chew on making things happen but their names aren't known. So nostalgia is still a driving force for the celebration of computer history but now the archaeological component is more understandable in the experience. Not just an awareness of the fragility and temporary nature of data but its durability when put to the test. Solomon and his colleagues can take years to unlock material but their extensive gathering not for monetary value but to make each machine make sense again includes the manuals to unlock the code. Comparing this to the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone sounds a long stretch but as we turn our minds to the internet of things the artefacts of the next generation of archaeologists the ability to read lost data becomes even more relevant. We are aware I'm sure of excavations which have yielded boxes of material without context where the archaeologists has died without writing up and there is a sense of the past being robbed. There is a similar unease about the amount of data rendered to digital which without the key to unlock it will be immortalised only as far as the available knowledge is there to resurrect it and the machine. Retro tech introduces the nostalgia notion the respect for discarded and defunct technologies which goes beyond the traditional confines of collecting as I said earlier but also here we have machines which never made it to reduction as well as those never used and they offer different strands of artefact value. There is a vogue for retro computing as a means of accessing cool artefacts particularly those from the 1970s a reference here to the computer I showed early on the wooden apple. These have an appeal quite different to those expressed by people who grew up with these technologies who used and discarded them as out of date. The culture of collecting computer material is dynamic both as a field of study and dissemination it's contingent on the experience of the viewer. This might be argued for traditional fuel survey someone used to picking out work flint from stone chipped by tractors will have a higher hit rate because of knowledge accrued over time and experience but here we're not dealing with a relative slow speed of prehistoric artefacts. The computer technology artefacts instead demonstrate an exponential rate of change over time which means a tech museum would have to put boxed computers straight from launch into storage then bring them out as soon as they've gone through the cycle from cutting edge production to mass consumer to obsolete to discard to collection. The computer history museum evokes a mixture of curiosity and nostalgia enhanced by narrative storytelling and traditionally curated objects. This is evidenced by a procedure devised for the collection posted on the website. It reads the computer history museum is continually growing as its collections of computing history materials. In particular we seek items that engage our various audiences and can be used for interpretation, discussion or research. While it has an extensive wish list of collectibles the museum's curators must be selective. They say collecting must be deliberate and sustainable. Thus new artefacts are accepted into the collection after careful consideration by team of curators. As you might imagine in the early days they did have an awful lot of stuff left on their doorstep by people who had great intention but they just couldn't take multiple copies of things that they just needed one of. That was the computer history museum as it was and there was a couple of cray machines in there. Cray being a very early East Coast machine which is interesting because it was the first supercomputer and the wiring of it was done and this is an apocryphal tale possibly but I'm trying to test it out by Scandinavian migrant workers who were very adept at needlework and they were able to get in and wire the machines and get back to using the smallest space to put in the most content. But it's now since 2011 the museum interior has changed quite markedly. So it was officially relaunched with the completion of its revolution exhibit charting the development of computer history. Visitor numbers suggest a growing interest which I would argue comes not simply from the objects becoming more valuable per se but because the value of the now has grown appreciative of its history especially since the dot-com crash. While there is perhaps no need to state what computer history stands for in Silicon Valley even a new generation of Web 2.0 workers either remembers the golden days of the dot-com boom as a tech worker, grew up with a crash or is part of the booming social networking economy now. The passing of Steve Jobs prompted global discussion about the Apple legacy and suggested a greater understanding of how material culture impacts on the present and potentially offers lessons for the future. The importance of Silicon Valley's heritage is marked in other ways too. Was Way references Jobs Apple co-found as Steve Wozniak we saw earlier. Elsewhere the names of other innovators such as Hewlett and Packard live on in the buildings. It's also a ritual space when Steve Jobs died to shines were made outside the company's Cupertino headquarters and at Apple stores worldwide. In this way heritage is literally mapped onto the spaces of Silicon Valley despite its non-existence as a formalised entity. Therefore beyond civic and commercial references to an archaeologically informed past Silicon Valley hosts other more traditional forms of heritage that seek to construct an archaeology of computing for the area. It will come as little surprise that the artefacts of retro technology are now being collected just as the treasures of the classical world bypass museums and decorated homes. This is an archive photo I took it in 2000 at the Hollywood Hills home of a collector of deck computers as I said before the digital equipment corporation and also his manuals. This was a home in the most beautiful location overlooking LA and it was a cabin absolutely full of computers. Now deck no longer exists as a name and this collection East Coast machines gathered on the west coast by a man who was moving to Bollywood to work in the film industry there. It's now in Germany at a major tech museum. He donated it. I wondered how the container had been lost at sea. It would have become a more difficult piece of maritime archaeology to decipher than the Uloomber and Shipwreck famous for the mapping of its cargo around the Mediterranean. Not just the computers and the manuals but as I mentioned earlier the peripherals and particularly advertising is absolutely fascinating. If you go online to the computer history museum site you can see the ways in which machines were marketed particularly marketed to men because it was presumed in the 1960s and 70s that the secretaries would welcome a computer at the office and here it's a lovely machine very sleek and stylish and it inspired Wired magazine which some of you might know of to devote several pages of colour images. They went to the computer history museum intending to do one photograph of a 12-page spread because they got so excited by the look of this old technology. It seems a bit strange to think about it now when we look at what we live with in terms of tech but there are some rather lovely looking old machines. This one unfortunately they didn't sell a single one. They presumed that it would be snapped up by rather wealthy housewives couples I should say to programme anything for the meal and a mix of nostalgia illustration because you've got the homespun basket with the produce as they say in America and yet you've got this technology that will make it all come together. Computer collectors who save for historical reasons have been battling on eBay against those acquiring for investment. In 2002 Salamis Mail auctioned Apple One as a unique event in the nascent vintage computer festival and it fetched $14,000. In 2012, 10 years later, I interviewed an Italian Apple enthusiast who paid more than £200,000 for a similar model and we're talking here basically the motherboard and that became headline news. He intended though to keep it on display as an educational resource and indeed it's in his he's got a run of clothing companies in Italy and a factory on display as part of a big educational tool about the origins of Apple. He's done it very well. But luckily for genuine technology collectors the items still represent a more risky investment by dint of being too familiar and untested. It's still early days but without an obvious aesthetic allure it seems that there's more interest in Madonna's than motherboards. But back to the Bristol students who I'm sure would not be able to comprehend how one could be excited by your own computer in this day and age and this is an old game from 1970s again part of Salamis Mail's collection and 100 safe exciting experiments in computer making because we forget that computers were just arrived as kits and you had to put them all together. I just think it's the wonderful piece of nostalgia. So back to those students conversant with a generation of archaeologists which digs up memory sticks and bags up data cards as small finds. I do know someone who dug something up from the 10s and was terribly excited at getting a memory stick and put it in a plastic bag as well that's the new technology archaeology. So while I've argued the case for retro technology as a window into the future I'm now curious to see how the born digital generation values its personal technology past. After age what I mentioned earlier on the second question I asked comes from my own experience of writing my doctoral thesis on a second hand Apple LC3 bought from a previous doctoral student who had written her own on it. She expressed to me that she was sad to see it go she would possibly be surprised perhaps touched that I still have that computer redundant to me after 20 years and so it contains somewhere in its workings both our thesis on a redundant machine I cannot yet discard in America collectors who cannot discard spread their collection out from their homes into cars and other vehicles rather than throw it away so the question I was asking in Bristol just a couple of weeks ago was has anyone kept items of technology that they no longer use or is now redundant but they cannot for some reason throw it away and my later students did not disappoint every single one had their own old tech collection but did not know it laptops, iPods, iPhones unplayable computer games cables usurped blackberry phones on which they started to be smart in attics, cupboards and drawers gasps a recognition at modern artefacts which switched on a type of shared memory it was quite extraordinary to hear the little micro conversations going on in the room as names were mentioned the people, reminisced people of 1920, 21 so who could laugh now at the computer collectors who stored what they could in their cars and in their homes in the Hollywood Hills so like those who follow Schleeman and I'm only showing this not necessarily to plug the book it's 15 years old now since that came up but that shows the discards that I was talking about which gives the title to my talk about the motherboards and this is tiny bits of computer motherboards scrap so like those who follow Schleeman and prize not the gold but the prehistoric artefacts for the geeks and the nerds and the archaeologists tracing the rich and unexpected material legacy of our now common technology they have had more than a day in the sun in California there's even now a museum of Jurassic technology the dead tech is rebooting its age has finally come thank you