Silicon Valley Talks is an ongoing series of conversations with both academic researchers and technology innovators about all things pertaining to Silicon Valley. Sponsored by Stanford Libraries and hosted by the Silicon Valley Archives, the currently scheduled talks take place at noon in Hohbach Hall, Green Library East.
Henry Lowood, the Harold C. Hohbach Curator for the History of Science and Technology Collections, said about the wide range and purpose of the series: “Silicon Valley Talks is about people from in and around this region talking about what they are doing, writing, and thinking about. We offer panels, book talks, lectures, and other ways of talking about the histories of technologies, businesses, communities, and lives in Silicon Valley, almost always with a connection to the Silicon Valley Archives’ collections ‘for further reading.’”
Registration is free and open to the public for these two upcoming talks:
 Atari Design
Tuesday, May 2, 2023
12pm to 1pm PT
Raiford Guins, Chair and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington, will discuss his latest book, Atari Design: Impressions on Coin-Operated Video Game Machines (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Drawing from deep archival research and extensive interviews, Atari Design is a rich, historical study of how Atari's industrial and graphic designers contributed to the development of the video game machine.
Joining the conversation will be Henry Lowood, the Harold C. Hohbach Curator for the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford Libraries. Guins and Lowood are co-editors of MIT Press's Game Histories Book Series.
 John Tinnell
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
12pm to 1pm PT
Author John Tinnell will discuss his book, The Philosopher of Palo Alto: Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC, and the Original Internet of Things (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
The Philosopher of Palo Alto chronicles the grand experiment of Weiser and his collaborators at the Xerox PARC headquarters to embed software into all sorts of objects—coffeepots, pens, energy systems, ID badges—imbuing them with interactive features. When developers and critics trace the roots of today’s Internet of Things—our smart gadgets and smart cities—they may single out the same creative source: Mark Weiser, the first chief technology officer at Xerox PARC and the so-called “father of ubiquitous computing.”
Yet, as more tech leaders warmed to his vision (and as Tinnell demonstrates in his book), Weiser grew alarmed about where they wished to take it. He remained an outlier in Silicon Valley and died young at age 46 in 1999. A computer scientist whose first love was philosophy, he relished debates about the machine’s ultimate purpose.
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For invitations to future Silicon Valley Talks, please subscribe to the Silicon Valley Archives’ quarterly e-newsletter.
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