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Hewlett-Packard Historical Archive Destroyed In California Fires (pressdemocrat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Press Democrat:
When deadly flames incinerated hundreds of homes in Santa Rosa's Fountaingrove neighborhood earlier this month, they also destroyed irreplaceable papers and correspondence held nearby and once belonging to the founders of Silicon Valley's first technology company, Hewlett-Packard. The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash. More than 100 boxes of the two men's writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world's largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies -- itself an HP spinoff.
The Hewlett and Packard collections had been appraised in 2005 at nearly $2 million and were part of a wider company archive valued at $3.3 million. However, those acquainted with the archives and the pioneering company's impact on the technology world said the losses can't be represented by a dollar figure... Karen Lewis, the former HP staff archivist who first assembled the collections, called it irresponsible to put them in a building without proper protection. Both Hewlett-Packard and Agilent earlier had housed the archives within special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards, she said. "This could easily have been prevented, and it's a huge loss," Lewis said.
Lewis has described the collection as "the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry." Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber said the company "is saddened by the loss of documents that remind us of our visionary founders, rich history and lineage to the original Silicon Valley startup."
23 Californians were killed in the fires, which also destroyed 6,800 homes, and Weber says Keysight had taken "appropriate and responsible" steps to protect the archive, but "the most destructive firestorm in state history prevented efforts to protect portions of the collection."
The Hewlett and Packard collections had been appraised in 2005 at nearly $2 million and were part of a wider company archive valued at $3.3 million. However, those acquainted with the archives and the pioneering company's impact on the technology world said the losses can't be represented by a dollar figure... Karen Lewis, the former HP staff archivist who first assembled the collections, called it irresponsible to put them in a building without proper protection. Both Hewlett-Packard and Agilent earlier had housed the archives within special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards, she said. "This could easily have been prevented, and it's a huge loss," Lewis said.
Lewis has described the collection as "the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry." Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber said the company "is saddened by the loss of documents that remind us of our visionary founders, rich history and lineage to the original Silicon Valley startup."
23 Californians were killed in the fires, which also destroyed 6,800 homes, and Weber says Keysight had taken "appropriate and responsible" steps to protect the archive, but "the most destructive firestorm in state history prevented efforts to protect portions of the collection."
While these were locked up so that only a very small number of people could see them, their value was effectively zero.
Archives only have value when they can be studied. Lock them away and they are useless.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So important and valuable that nobody ever thought to scan them into Google Drive? And they weren't accessible either? These probably did contain interesting historical data, and it really sucks that they're gone, but what did we (the public) lose? We never had anything to begin with :/
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Boxes of unsorted papers piled into a bin at a storage facility don't have much value at all (other than as fire starter, which function they apparently did indeed fulfill.)
If they were real archives they would be kept somewhere that they could be indexed and studied. Papers would be scanned and put online for scholars to view.
Boxes in a garage (or garage equivalent)? Meh.
They suddenly become valuable to someone in hindsight. Sure it is. Just like the kids comic book collection that Mom threw out after telling him to clean up his room fifty times over the course of the previous week. If it's valuable, look after it. Otherwise, it ain't.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
That's all that grabbed my attention, and I saw as a loss.
The writings of two other dead men are pointless compared to those who died in that fire.
Anyway, if you didn't bother to make this stuff public it probably wasn't of much use or importance to anyone. Just secrets locked up until they could be redacted most likely.
But fuck them, the history of the electronics industry was lost?
So what? We have the HP Calculator Museum online now! Screw those physical artifacts!
*obsessively fondles HP-11c* My Precious
The vast majority of information in the world isn't accessible by internet access or database on a computer. Most real information requires physical access for investigation, and that is the case here. The information was cataloged but idiots who don't pay for things fantasize about immediate access. Do you all have some medical condition or something that makes you retarded? There is no excuse for people at all involved in information technology to not understand both. Idiots who hate history don't make it value-less, they just show off the limits of their overly-sheltered lives and stupidity.
So, it's 2017.
Previously valued at $2 million, but were apparently priceless artifacts related to a company known for making some of the best printers in the world.
Did anybody bother to fucking scan them?
If not, I assume it was a flood of irony that helped put out flames of raging stupidity.
She wasn't satisfied ruining everything great about the company's past, she wanted to wipe all record of it too.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
I once worked for a huge international corporation that existed for nearly a hundred years ago. It, too, had an archive, and I'm sure it was lost. This was not because of a fire, but because of multiple mergers and sales of buildings. I'm sure that at the end, there was no one employed there who was considered to be responsible for the archive's preservation. In short, "it's not my job."
still better uptime than your HP rig
Value is variable. That comic book collection might not have had value to the person who threw them out, or maybe not to the kid at the time. 50 years later, they could be valuable to many people.
The folks at archive.org are probably facepalming right now, they would have loved to digitize all of that I'm sure.
How convenient!
Twinstiq, game news
With incompetence this bad, does it really need a Carly to finish it off? Any run of the mill CEO could have run it to ground, you don't need the extra stupid.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
and now it's history has, too.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Keysight was planning to have the papers scanned, that project was given the green light and would've started right after Thanksgiving.
HP had an entire Printer test division. I assume at least some of that involved flatbed scanner checks as well (once they started doing the combo printers which should have been the early '00s.)
Meaning they could have been doing this before all the spinoffs as a fucking *SCANNER TEST PROJECT* in between calibration scan pages.
But instead we lost what might or might not have been an important part of Silicon Valley history because people couldn't be arsed to scan it in while it was still corporeal!
While we're on the subject, go check out bitsavers.org and maybe send an email thanking them for all their service. They've been grabbing every copy of every tech manual they can salvage, scrounge, get donated, etc to make pdfs of almost every facet of (mostly american) computer technology from the univac up to the mid 90s. In 50 years this might be one of a half dozen electronic collections that actually preserved the majority of the tech side of things, and god only knows what will be left of the business/personal side.
The only thing regarded as sacred in the halls of what's left of "Hewlett Packard" are three numbers:
- earnings per share
- EBITDA
- stock price
Like NASA and their fake moon missions.
Wouldn't want anybody to figure out space is fake. Earth is flat.
More than 100 boxes of the two men's writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies.
What moron stores historical documents unprotected in what is essentially a mobile home? No fire suppression system, no insulated safe, just sitting there in the open in boxes. For Christ's sake they could have went to Target and bought some fire safes at least.
It is worth 2 million USD and nobody thought about making a digital copy? Or perhaps the 2 million figure is just for insurance company?
When, they cannot even protect their own?
Also destroyed was the home and museum of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schultz.
Backup is overrated.
There wouldn't even had been a loss if they had all at least been scanned, the first step to sharing...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
it would have been cool to have the items scanned and digitally stored somewhere. i hope someone finds the digital scans if they exist at all.
Or fuck up.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Suppose there actually WHERE copies or backups or whatever and Keysight Technologies simply want everyone to think the stuff is gone? And why would they do that?
Well, it depends on what kind of agreement they have with Agilent Technologies or HP about who gets paid what and owns what if Keysight finds anything interesting in those files.
And now who's to say now where Keysight got their ideas that fall into the areas of interest in Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard's personal notes and assorted ephemera, when there's no way to check the stuff that burned up with no backups?
Yes, of course no one made backups of material that was valuble enough to be negotiated for because of some perceived value of the content when Keysigh split off from Agilent... Of course not.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Honestly I cannot adequately convey how much I completely loathe HP as a company, but this is truly a tragedy to lose a huge part of human history to fire. As someone who had the first half of their life erased by fire I can sympathize greatly, but while my history mattered to no one, I have to wonder, why this was not better protected. I somewhat feel certain records should be retained indefinitely, and while the "personal papers" of these two individuals might drive me to vomit; the loss to the future cannot be measured in dollars when in time this media would have truly become priceless.
This is a shame.
This could easily have been prevented, and it's a huge loss.
Humanity and HP's founders are victims of the clueless megacorporate cultures. Not just Keysight but every HP successor CEO since Bill Hewitt died in 2001 should dinged in their biographies for failure to preserve and protect the founders' legacy. I'm thinking Wikipedia's hagiographies as an important endpoint .
You are the same shit-throwing monkey, doing it "over the Internet" hasn't made you stink any less.
Sometimes you wonder, are we getting smarter or dumber. You have archives worth millions but spend zero dollars protecting it. Besides the fact nothing appears to have been done to save any of it. Just incredible the stupidity that takes place with records these days. From the Equifax mess to poorly protecting history of HP. Have we handed the keys to the asylum to the patients?
I get that subsidiaries can be split off and end up with some of the assets of the parent company. But it seems odd the personal archives of the 2 founders would be among those assets. The parent company is the one with the history.
I'd ask Elliot, but he probably doesn't recall.
I don't understand... clearly if they were of any importance they would have been digitized by now... and probably stored in a fireproof vault.
Pretty much in line with HP's protracted death.
Having read some of Dave Packard's notes at his ranch home, I realize how significant these papers were. It's a massively tragic loss of records that would correct the currently published history of the company and much more besides.
Almost no one is aware of the true significance of these records.
I was promised a look at the entire collection. Now I'll never have the chance. The negligent handling and storage of these documents is inexcusable. Had the Federalist Papers been handled like this, the Constitution would have been a complete mystery now.
I LAC OF RAIN
Sad to hear. $1000 in h/w and one dedicated soul could have digitized it all. A reasonable insurance price for a $2M asset.
They could have gotten in touch with a company that makes scanners or something where they could have digitized all this... too bad.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Who the fuck modded this funny?
You are addressing the wrong problem. Storing the data is not the problem. Scanning it is. Loading thousands or millions of pages into a scanner is a mostly manual process. Who is going to pay for that? Not me.
If scanning a page takes a second, and you are paying $10/hr, then scanning a million pages would cost $2800.
If each page is a megabyte, then a million pages would be a terabyte, which costs less than $20.
Scanning is a hundred times as expensive as storing.
Shouldn't you also be considering the value of the data in there somewhere?
Who the fuck modded this funny?
Someone who got the joke.
Nope, no sig
HP has been cursed by the Electron Gods ever since they spun off their heart and called it Aglient.
And a locked archive can be... unlocked! See how that works?
Archives are easy to neglect. For all those saying that scanning was an obvious choice... well it is. Except it's one of those tasks that takes quite a bit of time and it needs someone to make it a priority. It's going to cost some money too.
As long as the archive is there, locked away, it looks pretty safe. Not to an archivist or a documentation preservation specialist, just to the managers at Agilent/Keysight who undoubtedly had operational control of the archive. "Why should I spend a half million to scan the archive, when we can just provide access to the archive? Whenever we need to? It's not like those boxes are going anywhere... And when was the last time we had an access request? It was 20 years ago!"
That is the thinking you are dealing with, I'll bet.
if you cant find their drivers in their site and that hasnt been a problem in decades this shouldnt be either
Carly Fiorina wanted for questioning.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Without backups all data is stored in /tmp
Watch this Heartland Institute video