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: 4, Informative) by Uncle_Al on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:05PM (1 child)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/silicon-revolution/loss-of-hewlettpackard-archive-a-wakeup-call-for-computer-historians [ieee.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @11:31AM
The piece of equipment in the foreground of the photo, on the roller conveyor, is a digital voltmeter (I used to have one). The front of it would have had nixie tubes.