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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.
Source: The Press Democrat
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:34PM (4 children)
I guess they didn't think to actually use company resources to document this for posterity?
boxes of paper like that seem to get lost in fires. the more important or interesting they are, the more likely they seem to get destroyed or go missing before anyone things to archive them.
hp of all companies should have known better, and even invented the technologies they could have used to preserve these for posterity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:58PM
HP didn't have the papers. Keysight had them.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:24PM
> the more important or interesting they are, the more likely they seem to get destroyed or go missing before anyone things to archive them
Your observation of the phenomenon is biased by the fact those were deemed important. Thousands of families have also lost thousands of piles of papers in that one fire, and nobody talks about those (besides the generic lachrymal "my baby pictures" reports, of course)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday October 31 2017, @06:14PM
Even a photo camera on a tripod doing time lapse can go a long way to preserve documents. I have one and I have no backups either.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday October 31 2017, @07:13PM
It's incredibly fucking ironic. My family used HP equipment, along with dedicated slide scanners, to digitize pretty much everything. Even kid's paintings, arts and crafts, were digitized and photographed.
All of our photographs and papers could burn up and we have multiple backup copies that are geographically redundant for safety. It turned into a major project for the grandparents that spiraled into digitizing multiple families at the same time. I have photographs now for distant cousins and relatives that I've never even met.
We didn't have the resources of HP either. Just time on some people's hands.
All that being said, there are fireproof safes around. I'm astonished that Keysight didn't take better care of the records, but not surprised that the current crop of executives don't give two shits about the past.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.