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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2017, @08:22PM
Obviously, we can do this, and it doesn't even require living in a Space Shuttle.
Let's start with the inside. That should, mostly, be fire-proof. Consider a 5-gallon turkey fryer full of hot oil that ignites and maybe tips over. The damage should be limited to minor cosmetic issues. You should be using tile floors, steel studs (as required for commercial construction), cementboard, metal cabinets, metal shelves, metal chairs, metal bedframes, granite countertops, etc.
Now for the outside. You need insulation anyway, for winter "cold" (this is California) and summer heat. Do a good job. Choose glass fiber, basalt fiber, vermiculite, loose pearlite, concrete with pearlite, and concrete with air. Cover this with at minimum a thick layer of stucco containing chainlink-fencing as reinforcement. For crazy situations, such as when you insist on a yard full of eucalyptus trees, add a layer of fire brick.
Don't forget windows, doors, and vents. You should have impact-resistant multi-pane windows with Xenon filling and an IR-reflective coating. Watch out for the window frame and how it is mounted. Be sure your door is insulated steel. Pay attention to door gaskets, doorknobs, locks, and peepholes. Outdoor faucets may conduct heat; you can avoid the problem by having them stick out of the ground instead of out of the wall. Outdoor outlets should also stick out of the ground, or at least be on conduit that runs up the wall from the ground. Service connections, such as cable TV and phone, should also be buried.
Not liking the cost? Ah, well, it's California and this is a small portion of the total. Mostly you're paying for land. The cost of losing your stuff is what you should be thinking about.