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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.
So what? We have the HP Calculator Museum online now! Screw those physical artifacts!
*obsessively fondles HP-11c* My Precious
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
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.
Language and communication for knowledge transfer is what that truly differentiates humans from animals; especially with writing and reading developed to save knowledge for future use. You should be fine with getting a lobotomy if you don't understand that, and otherwise you're a damn troll. Understanding how a major successful company forms and survives provides information that informs business research and management practice. That is the narrow application. Larger contexts apply for the now unknowable insights it contained. Loss of knowledge is a loss for humanity.
Are you fucking autistic or something? Historical communications between the founders of a major company are important for the information they contain. That is lost now.
No, "that" meaning this you fucking moron. I imagine you're up for an election somewhere stupid soon, but for now you should fuck off!
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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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 .
ok you got my curiosity, maybe others too. Here's your chance to perhaps use the power of networking - opensource to start something.
Which one ? Standard or a steel? Now is the time, tomorrow might be too late.
The proverbial "day late and a dollar short"
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.
Wouldn't want anybody to figure out space is fake. Earth is flat.
And run by lizards. Or the stupid Illuminati. Or Illuminati lizards.
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?
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.
Your hostility is extremely off-putting. You have some issues to work through, but in the meantime, you should probably refrain from posting to Slashdot.
Wouldn't want anybody to figure out space is fake. Earth is flat.
Actually, the Earth is near-spherical, it's space that only has two dimensions.
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