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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: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:16PM
Yeah I know you were joking but for the members of the audience that don't "know" HP...
The archives are all from when HP made "EE Stuff" decades before they pivoted into crappy consumer products and overpriced ink. They kicked all the EE stuff out into one company which kicked all the EE stuff out to a third company some years back.
There's really two levels of loss
1) Artifacts were destroyed. Yes there's a lot of photos and copies of "The Mona Lisa" painting, so if it goes up in a fire its not like we lost what it looked like. When the invaders crash a truck thru it and burn it like a flag, we won't lose what The Mona Lisa used to look like. We have cool scanning and computer reconstruction cleaning filters and stuff such that the digital model of "The Mona Lisa" likely looks better and more like it was freshly painted than the real thing. None the less the loss of the artifact is quite sad.
If you'd like to see a lot of HP EE stuff check out:
https://history.keysight.com/ [keysight.com]
Also bitsavers has tons of manuals for HP EE stuff although not so much business archives.
The HP archive that was destroyed was the company that gave us stuff like the 8640 benchtop signal generator or the HP 2116 minicomputer from '65, not shit like $49 windows only inkjet printers that require DRMed $99 ink cartridges every three months or scanners designed to jam after 100 pages to increase re-sales. Which is too bad.
HP was an innovative EE company up till the 90s roughly when they pivoted hard into consumer PC garbage. Up until perhaps 1980 HP meant something else, it meant benchtop instruments that performed technological miracles with aerospace quality, unfortunately costing more than your house new or 30 years later at the hamfest maybe $50. Now in 2017 it means overpriced underperforming consumer grade (at best) garbage.
2) Some stuff was never scanned because it was obscure or uninteresting or hard technologically. Oh Well. We'll never have a copy of some speech Packard gave to some rotary club back in '61 ... well actually there's detailed notes and commentary on exactly that kind of stuff, but no more originals. But there is obscure stuff that is now absolutely lost forever.
A "fun" conspiracy theory should be spawned about the 8970 amplifier noise figure meter having been possible solely via space alien technology from area 51 and they were worried scans of product development docs from 1970 would make it out on the internet and 4chan /diy/ would put two and two together (and get five?) providing impeachable proof of space alien technology. That would make a good sci fi movie / book, better than the usual trash being pushed.