Making — and preserving — history

By Becky Monk

Dan’l Lewin spent 17 years at Microsoft witnessing and making history.

Today, as president and CEO of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, he’s taking what he gleaned while working at Microsoft — and with tech industry icons at Apple, NeXT, Sony, venture capital firms and startups in Silicon Valley — and preserving the history of the computing evolution. He’s also rebooting the museum to frame that evolution in a bigger context that examines how the human condition is shaped by computing.

“The question we'll answer is, what does it mean to be a human in a world of computing? Because life as we know it doesn't exist without computing.”
— Dan’l Lewin

		About CHM What: CHM Where: 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, California 94043 What: Learn about computer history´s game-changers through interactive and multi-media exhibits and more than 1,100 historic artifacts, including some of the very first computers from the 1940s and 1950s. Upcoming event: “Tools and Weapons: The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age” CHM along with the Churchill Club present an evening with Microsoft President Brad Smith at 5 p.m. on Sept. 16. Learn more. Want to learn more about the museum or donate? Go here.

“It's not without the networking extensions that we will succeed, so 3.1 is happening at the same time,” he said. “Just like Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1. I'm shoring up the kernel. We're building the technical infrastructure and re-doing all of our internal systems so that they talk among themselves, and they've got programming interfaces. We'll build a museum architecture with programming interfaces into it, so people can program to our content. So, I'm building a new museum in a modern world.”

The museum got its start in 1979 when another Microsoft alumnus, Gordon Bell, started the Digital Computer Museum inside Digital Equipment Corp.’s office near Boston, Massachusetts. The museum closed on the East Coast and a new iteration reopened in the heart of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s.

Today, CHM boasts that it has the largest collection of artifacts related to the history of computing. It hosts workshops, lectures, events, and tours. There are interactive displays and educational partnerships with schools. But Dan’l knows it can be so much more.

“The Computer History Museum has initials CHM, Computing Humanity and Meaning. And the question we'll answer is, what does it mean to be a human in a world of computing? Because life as we know it doesn't exist without computing,” he said. “We want to have relevant topics, where we can draw from the history of computing and our collection and archive of both artifacts and oral histories, with partner institutes and historians, and have relevant conversations about what matters to people today, and bring historical context to it, which is how people learn and can project forward. We want to decode technology under the brand promise of humanity forward.”
Dan’l has been viewing topics through a social lens since the early 1970s when he was earning his degrees on the Princeton campus. The son of a WWII veteran with an eighth-grade education, he landed at the Ivy League school because he was good at math. He soon learned he wasn’t mathematician material, but the campus air was charged with unrest and activism of major societal changes — from 18-year-olds getting to vote for the first time to the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

“I did a lot of study about these communities and the organizing principles for large groups of people to motivate them to do things differently,” he said. “I got a degree in politics, which is the name of the department, not political science but politics. I had that keen interest, I thought I was going to be a lawyer.”

Instead, after losing a bet with a family member over a few games of pool, Dan’l had to drive across country and deliver a stove to Northern California. He landed there at the start of the next computer revolution and went to work for Sony in Cupertino, California, selling business recording systems, which eventually included 3.5-inch floppy disc drives. That put him directly in the path of two guys who had an idea about personal computing.

“I met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The week that they moved out of the garage, they moved in next door to my office. So, I met the Apple people instantly in the Spring of 1977,” he recalled. “A few years after Steve Jobs recruited me to Apple, he asked me to be part of the Macintosh team in 1982, and that was two years before the launch of the product. His interest and my interest was in higher education, learning, and the amplification of human potential with computing. I became the default 'opportunist' within the Macintosh division, which is the group that invented the term, at least I believe invented the term, evangelism for tech-evangelism.”

Dan’l left Apple when Steve Jobs again recruited him. They went on to co-found NeXT — which would become the foundation for Apple’s current operating system.

After five years, Dan’l set out on his own to work with venture-backed startups and taking some time off to recharge.

“I sent Steve Ballmer an email, and I said, ‘If you're serious about XML and embedding that into the tooling,’ because Microsoft's tools were always the best in the business by far. I said, ‘And you want to engage the start-up and venture capital community, I'd be interested in talking,‘” he said, of the communication he sent right before the Christmas holidays in 2000. “He wrote me back later the same night, it was 10 at night or whatever. He said, "This could be interesting, I'll get back to you." He copied Debby and Dorothy. The next few days later, I got an email, and he said, "When can you come up?"

The meeting was set for the first Friday after New Year’s Day.  The next Tuesday, Steve sent him another email.

“(He) said, ‘We're going to make you an offer.’ And he faxed me an offer. I called him back, and I said, ‘Are you serious?’ He was classic Steve. He said, ‘You came up here, we talked, you said you were interested, and I just made you an offer."

The offer launched a 17-year career with Microsoft that started with Dan’l becoming essentially the COO of Microsoft’s Mountain View, California operations, pulling together the hodge-podge of companies Microsoft had acquired there, build positive community relations in the area, and build a trust with the venture capital and startup community there after the dot-com bubble burst.

Throughout his Microsoft career, he was able to use what he calls his vantage point from the “market end” of things to offer strategic leadership on major Microsoft initiatives.

“What I said to Steve when I came here is the market is a unit of one. And that's a person. They will be reached on the network. That was my fundamental belief system, that I'm a market-in marketer,” he said. “I get the products, I get the technology, I play the small-talk. I understand part of many development projects — the Lisa system, NeXT’s NeXTSTEP, Go's mobile operating system, etc.  — so I'm a part of these projects. But my value-add, because I'm not an engineer, is always marketing.”

Following the Department of Justice Anti-trust lawsuit, he put his market-in marketing chops to work helping smooth relationships with competitor companies and turn them into strong customers. Among other things, he also led Microsoft’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign technology strategy, accelerated the AI for Earth initiative, and the company’s overall approach to Technology and Civic Engagement.

“I was lucky, and I felt very fortunate to be able to look at large-scale problems on a global level.” — Dan’l Lewin

“I didn't want to do anything that I had done before,” he said. However, CHM's offer to run the museum was something he found incredibly intriguing and another way he could tap into his rich background and connections in the tech industry, examine the human condition and societal change, continue learning, and make a difference.

He hopes fellow alumni who had a part in changing the world will want to go along on that journey with him.

“I'd hope that they'd be wanting to contribute something to honor their past, and their history, and their contribution to the industry,” he said. “If they have any sense of purpose, of wanting to understand or wanting others to understand, and to take some responsibility for what we all participated in, I think paying attention to what we're aiming to do with this institution is important.”

Visiting the museum and, even becoming a member, is a good first step. But Dan’l is always looking for people who want to make a larger commitment.