Silicon Insider: Re-Connecting a TV Series
Nov. 13, 2003 -- 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.
A Potent Message, Perfectly Timed
It was called, of all things, Connections — an odd choice in that comparatively unconnected age — and the host was the last person you'd expect for a series dealing with everything from information processing to quantum mechanics. James Burke, wearing a leisure suit like a game show contestant, balding, with big heavy-framed glasses, was alternately erudite, sly, witty, and, quite often, just plain silly.
But, first of all, he was terrifying. The opening images of Connections are among the most unforgettable in television history. Burke asked a simple question: What if the structures of modern civilization — electricity, communications, specialization of work — were to suddenly disappear overnight. How would you survive?
In five minutes time, James Burke stripped away all of the comforting gloss of modern life and then, over the next five hours, put it all back — mixed with a lot more understanding on our part of how we came to be. We were, as Burke showed us with an unforgettable combination of wordplay, historical re-enactments, and breathtaking historical links between impossible diverse topics, merely the latest set of links in a great chain of connected inventions stretching back to prehistory.
It was a potent message, a perfectly timed. In 1979 we had just emerged, exhausted, from the 1960s culture war and the Vietnam shooting war, only to find ourselves in the inflationary gridlock and social malaise of the 1970s. The PC had just been introduced, and it was already apparent that we were on the threshold of a digital age.
In a world suddenly looking very scary and odd, Connections offered both context and direction to the changes taking place around us. Not surprisingly, it became the most popular PBS series to that time, and spun off a best-selling book.
Burke went on to create a second series (The Day the Universe Changed) and moved on to TLC to produce two follow-up Connections series. All were very successful, as were Burke's related books. But it is the original Connections that remains the landmark. It is still taught in thousands of classrooms throughout the world.
Vital Connections Still Remain
We now live in the world that Burke predicted then. And, a quarter century on, it is only now obvious that there was a second message in the series — the one we missed while being dazzled by the whole Jacquard loom-to-IBM mainframe computer narrative. It is that there are not only connections back to the past, but that these connections are also increasingly being forged across society. We live a connected world, a cliché now, but a revelation then. And it is that message that keeps Connections vital even now.
Which is why I'll be in that warehouse tomorrow. With Burke, I'm filming the 25th anniversary of Connections for broadcast on public television next spring. For an hour, we're going to sit in the middle of that century's worth of debris tossed off by the technology revolution, and collected in part because Burke taught us to, and bring those chains of invention forward into the new millennium.
As the show's title suggests, we are going to attempt a "Re-Connection," bringing the original episodes up-to-date for the world of nanotechnology, bioinformatics and terabytes.
And, like the original series, that's only half the story. There are those other linkages too: the world has only grown more interconnected, and more vulnerable and frightening, in the last quarter-century. And here, too, I suspect Burke will have answers. For the last decade, working with a team of dedicated volunteers, he has devoted time and money to a non-profit venture called the "Knowledge Web." K-Web is designed to bring the world of Connections into the Internet Age: a vast, interlinked data base that will enable students to forge their own "connections," following their own curiosity along an almost infinite number of trails from invention to invention, and inventor to inventor.
I've got my questions ready. The camera rolls at 1 p.m.
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” most recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised.