The Golden Age of Silicon Valley

American photographer Doug Menuez has been capturing the so-called "golden age" of Silicon Valley in photographs for 15 years. From 1985 to 2000, he had unlimited access to the leaders of the world's major IT companies, including Steve Jobs. His archive has become one of the most comprehensive records of that period of American and technological history. TJournal publishes a selection of the most interesting photos of Menuz.

Programmer Peter Alley is resting after intensive work before the CES show in Chicago, where John Scully will present the Apple Newton, one of the first personal digital assistants.

Despite such high value, the Menus negatives remained unpublished for many years, in no small part because of a quarrel with Jobs. However, in June 2014, they came out with the book Fearless Genius.

Seattle, Washington, 1999. Microsoft Senior Vice President Steve Ballmer talks to a group of programmers at the company's headquarters.

Menuz travels the world and talks about what it was like to witness the dawn of the digital age. According to him, even workers in the IT industry know little about its development: “The number of people who do not know their history is simply shocking,” Menuz is surprised.

Highway to Santa Cruz, California, 1987. Steve Jobs returns from a picnic for employees on a rented school bus.

Menus hopes to change that: he believes the people in the photo created a rich and important culture that no trace can be found today. According to him, in those years, Silicon Valley was focused on building technologies that would fundamentally change the approach to education.

Fremont, California, 1990. John Scully struggles with his shyness before a press conference.

“People fucking [hell] died, ended up in psychiatric hospitals, marriages broke up, because people were striving to achieve new things, which in itself was incredibly difficult.” - Doug Menus, American photographer.

Mountain View, California, 1995. President Bill Clinton attended a fundraising evening hosted by Silicon Valley executives.

Cupertino, California, 1993. Programmer Sarah Clark kept her child at work, barely leaving the building for two years as the team raced to finish the software. She would draw the curtains in her office - and then colleagues would know that it was a quiet hour or that she was breastfeeding.

Laguna Niguel, California, 1992. Bill Gates advises that no one should pay a photographer more than $50.

Steve Jobs was a big fan of walking barefoot, once he threw his bare feet right on the table of Atari director Joe Keenan.

Aspen, Colorado, 1998. Billy Joy, the legendary programmer who wrote the Berkeley Unix operating system and then helped the US Department of Defense with a TCP/IP stack that made it easy to send and receive e-mail in the event of a nuclear war.

Menlo Park, California, 1987. Steve Jobs pretends to be a normal person. “Jobs was rarely seen relaxed, he was always focused on a specific task,” Menus says.

Sunnyvale, California, 1990. A Lam Research engineer works to solve an electrical connection problem in a plasma etching machine assembly.

Silicon Valley, California. Finding a tidy workplace is not an easy task.