The Computer Graveyard - Computer History

Image Courtesy Michael Steinberg Jamis MacNiven at Bucks Diner, Woodside

Another historical location is Bucks. A cultural icon that thinks it's an American diner. It's a place which marks time in two ways. The historic high-tech deals done over breakfast, and the assemblage of things hanging from, attached to, gracing and playfully disgracing its walls. A pretend Russian cosmonaut dangles from the ceiling. A sign from a nuclear fall-out shelter is close by displays of pens, thermometers, silicon chips and wafers, ribbons and braids, swords, a flying fish, a broken John McEnroe tennis racquet. And that's just for starters. Follow that visual smorgasbord with titbits of fascinating conversation involving venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs.


As it is, the owner Jamis MacNiven, who runs Bucks with his wife, regards it as a museum of Jurassic Technology. Its diners number the great and the good of Silicon Valley, who take breakfast early and conclude their multi-million dollar deals over coffee and muffins. Netscape was founded here, Yahoo! Was turned down twice. The Bucks menu is a newsletter, the web page a gallery of fun and fame. James used to be an artist in New York City. When I moved in here, it was a white box, he says, casting around the walls. Now he maintains his creativity by dreaming up ideas for the walls, and writing a film-script about Silicon Valley.

If these walls could speak, this would be an oral history book of Silicon Valley…