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, 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.