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."

Comments

Priceless Irony.

[geekmux]

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.

Re:Real value: $0.

[GrumpySteen]

Ah, but you're forgetting that they have whatever value they can convince the insurance company that they had. Admitting that the archives were useful only for seriously obsessed historians would lead to a payout of much less than $3.3 million.

Forget DECENT...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[Mashiki]

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.

Scanning isn't a problem, not a problem at all. When I was out in AB a few years ago on vacation I got bored and digitized a towns historical records, council meetings, town liens, etc. There was around 80 years worth of the stuff, upwards of 140k pages worth of documents. With the in-office photocopier, I got all that done in around 2 weeks. Most of the pages were in a non-standard format as well usually 9x14" or 8.5x20" sheets. The only real problems were with odd-ball sized stuff like 2.5x11" stuff which had to be manually scanned otherwise it would jam the machine. Final payout was just under $7k for my time and effort. Even at that, everything could be stored on a single 60GB flash drive.

There was a big push out in western canada to do this a few years ago after the wildfires that wiped out several towns and cities. It's absolutely doable and has been for years. They just didn't want to layout the money to do it and now they can enjoy the fruits of their inaction.

No backups, why would there be?

[Frosty Piss]

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.