Silicon Insider: Re-Connecting a TV Series
Nov. 13 -- Tomorrow afternoon we move the chains downfield.
In an old corner of San Jose, next door to the cement, WPA-built Municipal Stadium (home to the AA San Jose Giants) and across from Kelley Park and its score of transplanted historic homes, and cheek-to-jowl with a rusty old railroad spur line, is an abandoned factory that used to manufacture Beech-Nut baby food.
These days, the art deco headquarters building and its attached phalanx of hangar-sized warehouses, is the home of the San Jose City transit yard and the San Jose Historic Museum. The museum visible to visitors is the recreated turn-of-the-century town across the street; the baby food factory is for storage.
It is no small task: History San Jose already had thousands of maps, Victoriana, paintings and other artifacts of the Valley's agricultural age, when last year it gained the Perham Collection, perhaps the world's greatest trove of items from the early years of radio and electronics.
Only a fraction of this bonanza has been catalogued and restored. The rest — thousands of items ranging from Doc Herrold's studio (the first commercial radio station) to a giant robotic Chuck E. Cheese to a complete PDP-8 minicomputer — fill one of the warehouses not unlike the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It is in this cavernous hall, surrounded by coils and insulators that look like props from the Bride of Frankenstein, WWI era Harleys, old tractors and a small army of Victrolas, that I will spend my day tomorrow. As I write this, a crew manning forklifts is moving items about, setting up light racks and running in power cables and cameras from a control truck parked outside.
The occasion is a grand re-connection. Twenty five years ago this autumn, a remarkable television series appeared on public television. It was a mini-series about ideas. There had been predecessors — notably Civilization — but nothing quite like this.
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