Hewlett-Packard Historical Archive Destroyed In California Fires (pressdemocrat.com) 124
An anonymous reader quotes the Press Democrat:
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.
The Hewlett and Packard collections had been appraised in 2005 at nearly $2 million and were part of a wider company archive valued at $3.3 million. However, those acquainted with the archives and the pioneering company's impact on the technology world said the losses can't be represented by a dollar figure... Karen Lewis, the former HP staff archivist who first assembled the collections, called it irresponsible to put them in a building without proper protection. Both Hewlett-Packard and Agilent earlier had housed the archives within special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards, she said. "This could easily have been prevented, and it's a huge loss," Lewis said.
Lewis has described the collection as "the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry." Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber said the company "is saddened by the loss of documents that remind us of our visionary founders, rich history and lineage to the original Silicon Valley startup."
23 Californians were killed in the fires, which also destroyed 6,800 homes, and Weber says Keysight had taken "appropriate and responsible" steps to protect the archive, but "the most destructive firestorm in state history prevented efforts to protect portions of the collection."
The Hewlett and Packard collections had been appraised in 2005 at nearly $2 million and were part of a wider company archive valued at $3.3 million. However, those acquainted with the archives and the pioneering company's impact on the technology world said the losses can't be represented by a dollar figure... Karen Lewis, the former HP staff archivist who first assembled the collections, called it irresponsible to put them in a building without proper protection. Both Hewlett-Packard and Agilent earlier had housed the archives within special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards, she said. "This could easily have been prevented, and it's a huge loss," Lewis said.
Lewis has described the collection as "the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry." Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber said the company "is saddened by the loss of documents that remind us of our visionary founders, rich history and lineage to the original Silicon Valley startup."
23 Californians were killed in the fires, which also destroyed 6,800 homes, and Weber says Keysight had taken "appropriate and responsible" steps to protect the archive, but "the most destructive firestorm in state history prevented efforts to protect portions of the collection."
Real value: $0. (Score:5, Insightful)
While these were locked up so that only a very small number of people could see them, their value was effectively zero.
Archives only have value when they can be studied. Lock them away and they are useless.
Re:Real value: $0. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah, but you're forgetting that they have whatever value they can convince the insurance company that they had. Admitting that the archives were useful only for seriously obsessed historians would lead to a payout of much less than $3.3 million.
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If they where of serious value, they would have to be stored properly.
Not somewhere that would burn down to a wild wildfire.
Or, at the least thats the case if this even resembles what happens to insurance of personal property.
Re:Real value: $0. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they where of serious value, they would have to be stored properly.
...or already digitized.
Re:Real value: $0. (Score:5, Funny)
If they where of serious value, they would have to be stored properly.
...or already digitized.
Yes, that. Could no one at HP put their hands on a decent flatbed scanner?
Re: Real value: $0. (Score:2, Funny)
HP employees are probably not allowed to buy Epson or Cannon scanners.
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My HP was flip a coin and maybe it'll print without having to reinstall the drivers. My Brother printer has gone 100 pages and counting, printing every couple days, and I only had to install drivers. My friend has the last generation one and has gone through 3 or 4 toner cartridges which would be somewhere around 6-10,000 pages, and has never had an issue.
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I've had really good luck with Brother. I just bought a new with a duplexer to replace the old one that is still going, but I did notice the new one does not print as well as the old one.
Forget DECENT... (Score:2, Interesting)
HP had an entire Printer test division. I assume at least some of that involved flatbed scanner checks as well (once they started doing the combo printers which should have been the early '00s.)
Meaning they could have been doing this before all the spinoffs as a fucking *SCANNER TEST PROJECT* in between calibration scan pages.
But instead we lost what might or might not have been an important part of Silicon Valley history because people couldn't be arsed to scan it in while it was still corporeal!
While we'r
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Unless Bitsavers finish their work, there is a change in digital formats in 5 years, and this archive isn't rediscovered until 10 years later when there is no machinery available to read the hard disk or usb thumb drive it is encoded on.
Unfortunately, digital storage is the most ephemeral means of storing information man has ever created. If they wanted the manuals to be available for a reasonably long time, they'd copy it to papyrus.
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Re:Real value: $0. (Score:5, Funny)
The problem was they they couldn't afford the ink.
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You don't need ink for a flatbed scanner.
It. Was. A. Joke.
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Who the fuck modded this funny?
Someone who got the joke.
the HP Way went up in smoke long ago (Score:3)
and now it's history has, too.
Real value: still $0. (Score:2)
To add to that (Score:2)
There wouldn't even had been a loss if they had all at least been scanned, the first step to sharing...
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While these were locked up so that only a very small number of people could see them, their value was effectively zero.
Archives only have value when they can be studied. Lock them away and they are useless.
Not to mention that if they hadn't been locked away, there likely would have been some digital copies of the material. It's truly a shame that the actual artifacts were lost, but the real crime is that the information they contained was also lost - especially when it could have been stored on a device that fits comfortably in one hand.
Hmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are addressing the wrong problem. Storing the data is not the problem. Scanning it is. Loading thousands or millions of pages into a scanner is a mostly manual process. Who is going to pay for that? Not me.
If scanning a page takes a second, and you are paying $10/hr, then scanning a million pages would cost $2800.
If each page is a megabyte, then a million pages would be a terabyte, which costs less than $20.
Scanning is a hundred times as expensive as storing.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
You are addressing the wrong problem. Storing the data is not the problem. Scanning it is. Loading thousands or millions of pages into a scanner is a mostly manual process. Who is going to pay for that? Not me.
Scanning isn't a problem, not a problem at all. When I was out in AB a few years ago on vacation I got bored and digitized a towns historical records, council meetings, town liens, etc. There was around 80 years worth of the stuff, upwards of 140k pages worth of documents. With the in-office photocopier, I got all that done in around 2 weeks. Most of the pages were in a non-standard format as well usually 9x14" or 8.5x20" sheets. The only real problems were with odd-ball sized stuff like 2.5x11" stuff which had to be manually scanned otherwise it would jam the machine. Final payout was just under $7k for my time and effort. Even at that, everything could be stored on a single 60GB flash drive.
There was a big push out in western canada to do this a few years ago after the wildfires that wiped out several towns and cities. It's absolutely doable and has been for years. They just didn't want to layout the money to do it and now they can enjoy the fruits of their inaction.
Re: Hmm... (Score:3)
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Was the published worth based on the content of the paper documents or on the physical documents themselves? I doubt digital copies of the documents have the same value as the originals. What they do have is the ability to be disseminated easily to those who do wish to study them and, presumably, with a longer lifetime. The originals, however, still have value as historical documents (at least to HP historians) and, thus, should have been better protected.
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I've seen BYTE magazines that were scanned into PDF's. One 400 page magazine was only 80 Megabytes.
But it's the time to do the scanning that's the problem. There are flat-bed scanners that can automatically cycle through a stack of loose leaf pages. The cost in time is 10 seconds/page. But books and bound documents are far harder, they may not be able to be folded flat, so the scanner has to take the best picture it can and then use software to automatically compensate for curvature and misalignment of the
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps someone has come up with a device that automates the whole process. Insert book into machine and it turns the pages and scans them all at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Oh look they have. So scanning a book is no more time consuming that scanning a stack of loose leaf pages then.
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
If scanning a page takes a second, and you are paying $10/hr, then scanning a million pages would cost $2800.
I think you overestimate the cost of automated bulk scanning.
Even so..... $2800 is miniscule compared to the cost to store and preserve a million physical pages indefinitely, which is approximately 10,000 pounds of paper. And ~30,000 cubic feet or 200 of those 10-ream boxes worth of paper to deal with, that has to be kept in a manner to safely preserve the content -- meaning moisture control, temperature control, and security.
This would more than fill an average sized office, or take out a good sized chunk of a warehouse or dedicated large-scale storage area, So
$2800 is probably a drop in the bucket compared to the rent for this much storage area.......
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Behold! The HP Scanjet Enterprise 9000 [hp.com]. 150 pages at a time and a duty cycle of 5000 pages a day. Pretty much fully automated.
Hold on a second while I get out my HP-28S...
100 Boxes is about 150,000 loose pages (assuming banker's boxes). At 5000 pages a day you've got 30 days or one month.
So, at your rate of pay they could have had it all digitized for about $2400. Not including the cost of the scanner (since they made it themselves).
Document storage (paper) is about $0.30/box/month. So assuming that w
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They might have had information things on things which hadn't been patented. Ideas for future projects that were never implemented. Yes, they should have scanned in all those documents, and put the backup hard disk drives in a fire safe. But it wasn't justified on cost probably. Not the first time that an research institution has lost original work:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk]
https://www.theguardian.com/uk... [theguardian.com]
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Apparently they didn't have much real value at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Boxes of unsorted papers piled into a bin at a storage facility don't have much value at all (other than as fire starter, which function they apparently did indeed fulfill.)
If they were real archives they would be kept somewhere that they could be indexed and studied. Papers would be scanned and put online for scholars to view.
Boxes in a garage (or garage equivalent)? Meh.
They suddenly become valuable to someone in hindsight. Sure it is. Just like the kids comic book collection that Mom threw out after telling him to clean up his room fifty times over the course of the previous week. If it's valuable, look after it. Otherwise, it ain't.
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Value is variable. That comic book collection might not have had value to the person who threw them out, or maybe not to the kid at the time. 50 years later, they could be valuable to many people.
Does the missing $538 mean more a bad thing? (Score:2)
That's all that grabbed my attention, and I saw as a loss.
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While still not a fortune, $538 was worth more in 1938 than we might initially think - roughly half a year’s income [slashdot.org].
HP Calculator Museum (Score:2)
*obsessively fondles HP-11c* My Precious
So many stupid posts here (Score:1, Flamebait)
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Your hostility is extremely off-putting. You have some issues to work through, but in the meantime, you should probably refrain from posting to Slashdot.
publicly ding CEOs (Score:2)
Priceless Irony. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, it's 2017.
Previously valued at $2 million, but were apparently priceless artifacts related to a company known for making some of the best printers in the world.
Did anybody bother to fucking scan them?
If not, I assume it was a flood of irony that helped put out flames of raging stupidity.
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they had value because they were not scanned and distributed freely. if someone wanted to make a book of the two fellows for example, this could have had much more value as it was...
however, since they weren't put in a fireproof housing, I kinda doubt the insurer is willing to pay 2 mil for them - that and the company really didn't give a rats ass about them apparently.
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I blame Carly Fiorina (Score:5, Funny)
She wasn't satisfied ruining everything great about the company's past, she wanted to wipe all record of it too.
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The Agilent spinoff was slightly before Ms. Fiorina was CEO of HP. And in any case that was years ago (1999). Agilent, and now Keysight, has had plenty of time to come up with a secure storage location if they wanted to.
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That was actually the first thing I thought. But I checked, and she wouldn't have been the one responsible. This is one thing she didn't do.
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Which one ? Standard or a steel? Now is the time, tomorrow might be too late.
And with it, all evidence. (Score:2)
How convenient!
Not scanned, not backed up? (Score:2)
With incompetence this bad, does it really need a Carly to finish it off? Any run of the mill CEO could have run it to ground, you don't need the extra stupid.
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Wouldn't want anybody to figure out space is fake. Earth is flat.
And run by lizards. Or the stupid Illuminati. Or Illuminati lizards.
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Wouldn't want anybody to figure out space is fake. Earth is flat.
Actually, the Earth is near-spherical, it's space that only has two dimensions.
No digital copy (Score:4, Insightful)
Another Priceless Treasure (Score:3)
Also destroyed was the home and museum of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schultz.
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Good to hear. That's what I get for relying on newspaper reports.
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Our porn history suffered a great loss this month, but I'm sure if you google it, you'll find something like that anyway.
Back up (Score:2)
Or fuck up.
No backups, why would there be? (Score:4, Interesting)
Suppose there actually WHERE copies or backups or whatever and Keysight Technologies simply want everyone to think the stuff is gone? And why would they do that?
Well, it depends on what kind of agreement they have with Agilent Technologies or HP about who gets paid what and owns what if Keysight finds anything interesting in those files.
And now who's to say now where Keysight got their ideas that fall into the areas of interest in Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard's personal notes and assorted ephemera, when there's no way to check the stuff that burned up with no backups?
Yes, of course no one made backups of material that was valuble enough to be negotiated for because of some perceived value of the content when Keysigh split off from Agilent... Of course not.
Wow (Score:1)
Honestly I cannot adequately convey how much I completely loathe HP as a company, but this is truly a tragedy to lose a huge part of human history to fire. As someone who had the first half of their life erased by fire I can sympathize greatly, but while my history mattered to no one, I have to wonder, why this was not better protected. I somewhat feel certain records should be retained indefinitely, and while the "personal papers" of these two individuals might drive me to vomit; the loss to the future can
How did the HP archive end up there? (Score:2)
I get that subsidiaries can be split off and end up with some of the assets of the parent company. But it seems odd the personal archives of the 2 founders would be among those assets. The parent company is the one with the history.
So fsociety started the Califirnia fire? (Score:2)
Why weren't they digitized? (Score:2)
Very allegoric (Score:4, Insightful)
CALIFORNIA (Score:1)
I LAC OF RAIN
Sad to hear. $1000 in h/w and one dedicated soul could have digitized it all. A reasonable insurance price for a $2M asset.
If only... (Score:2)
HP cursed (Score:2)
HP archives destroyed (Score:2)
Data without backups (Score:1)
Without backups all data is stored in /tmp