29 Oct
2017
29 Oct
'17
2:43 p.m.
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.
http://bit.ly/2yd6Z2G
(My added note) And.... this is why I continue to stress multiple
caches of copies/scans of historical material... and sad... as in this case
here is someone that could have footed the bill and not missed the money to
do it.
Ed# Archivist for SMECC
29 Oct
29 Oct
4:48 p.m.
Completely agree. I?m in the process of scanning additional product manuals that haven?t
made it into the HP Computer Museum?s site yet.
Any of us with websites could have some reason to stop doing this good work at any time so
duplicated info across a few sites is an important risk reduction item!
David Collins
HP Computer Museum
On 30 Oct 2017, at 8:43 am, Ed via cctalk <cctalk
at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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.
http://bit.ly/2yd6Z2G
(My added note) And.... this is why I continue to stress multiple
caches of copies/scans of historical material... and sad... as in this case
here is someone that could have footed the bill and not missed the money to
do it.
Ed# Archivist for SMECC
5:08 p.m.
New subject: Post scanned documents to multiple sites - Re: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard
On 2017-10-29 7:48 PM, David Collins via cctalk wrote:
Completely agree. I?m in the process of scanning
additional product manuals that haven?t made it into the HP Computer Museum?s site yet.
Any of us with websites could have some reason to stop doing this good work at any time
so duplicated info across a few sites is an important risk reduction item!
+100
However I'm only aware of one site that currently accepts scanned
submissions: Internet Archive.
If there are any others please mention.
--Toby
David Collins
HP Computer Museum
On 30 Oct 2017, at 8:43 am, Ed via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
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.
http://bit.ly/2yd6Z2G
(My added note) And.... this is why I continue to stress multiple
caches of copies/scans of historical material... and sad... as in this case
here is someone that could have footed the bill and not missed the money to
do it.
Ed# Archivist for SMECC
5:26 p.m.
New subject: Post scanned documents to multiple sites - Re: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard
I suggest creating a free github.com account with a public repository. This way whenever
someone forks or clones the repo they get a full local copy with one command...?git
clone?.
Get enough people and you?ll never worry about losing the archive and it?s all for free.
If github goes away everyone still has a complete copy which can be uploaded to the next
great service that comes along. It?s a semi-decentralized and distributed archive.
We are doing this with the Model II archive at https://github.com/pski/model2archive
5:30 p.m.
New subject: Post scanned documents to multiple sites - Re: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard
On 2017-10-29 8:26 PM, Peter Cetinski wrote:
I suggest creating a free github.com
<http://github.com> account with a
public repository. ?This way whenever someone forks or clones the repo
they get a full local copy with one command...?git clone?. ?
Get enough people and you?ll never worry about losing the archive and
it?s all for free. ?If github goes away everyone still has a complete
copy which ?can be uploaded to the next great service that comes along.
Only if they had the foresight both to clone it, and keep it up to date,
meaning they need all the resources/space/bandwidth to do so (and then
it would STILL be a private, disconnected copy; so no use to anyone ELSE).
--Toby
?It?s a semi-decentralized and distributed archive.
We are doing this with the Model II archive
at?https://github.com/pski/model2archive
4:59 p.m.
Very sad when I hear stories like this and I'm not precluding the people who were
directly affected by this - I'm located in Australia and while bushfires are a fact of
life here, they're still devastating.
Just going to toss an idea out there - have no idea how this might work but thought
I'd toss it out there.
It seems with the internet that crowd-sourcing is way of resourcing things. Maybe we
(that's us on this list) need to apply this concept to the scanning and archiving and
retention of any paper based repositories that still exist. I'll call it
crowd-scanning for the time being.
Kevin Parker
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Ed via cctalk
Sent: Monday, 30 October 2017 08:44
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David 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.
http://bit.ly/2yd6Z2G
(My added note) And.... this is why I continue to stress multiple
caches of copies/scans of historical material... and sad... as in this case here is
someone that could have footed the bill and not missed the money to do it.
Ed# Archivist for SMECC
6:18 p.m.
Sorry wasn't aware of the operational aspects of bitsavers or how stuff finds it's
a way in there (although I just had a good read of it all).
But having said that, it looks like this collection perished without finding its way to
bitsavers so it?s not so much where its stored - it?s the act of collecting the paper and
scanning it in.
If I scan stuff can I add it or get it added to BitSavers - I'm not sure because
there's a notice on their web site (and I'm certainly not decrying their efforts -
its highly valued resource intensive work):
"Due to the current several year backlog of documents to process, we are not actively
soliciting additional paper or scans to add to the collection"
(Not sure if I can do anything but I might send them an offer of help.)
Kevin Parker
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Al Kossow via cctalk
Sent: Monday, 30 October 2017 11:14
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David
Packard
On 10/29/17 4:59 PM, Kevin Parker via cctalk wrote:
Maybe we (that's us on this list) need to apply
this concept to the scanning and archiving and retention of any paper based repositories
that still exist.
What a brilliant idea. We could call it "bitsavers"!
30 Oct
30 Oct
12:44 p.m.
It seems with the internet that crowd-sourcing is way
of resourcing things. Maybe we (that's us on this list) need to apply this concept to
the scanning and archiving and retention of any paper based repositories that still exist.
I'll call it crowd-scanning for the time being.
Unfortunately, it sounds like much of what was lost is internal HP
documentation, no way to replace that.
11:21 p.m.
This article has more details about the archive situation and, more
important, it has a comment from HP at the end.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/tech-history/silicon-revolut…
29 Oct
29 Oct
7:41 p.m.
General comment to several earlier replies re: Bitsavers-type efforts.
The tragedy here is not that some copies of uncommon but otherwise
extant product documentation were lost. From the description, there were
a large number of unique, individual documents created by significant
historical figures. Fair bet that many of these didn't exist anywhere
else. Certainly not if it included drafts of speeches and
correspondence, as well as the final copy, etc.
A better question (not that it does any good to ask it now) is why this
stuff wasn't in the hands of university conservators or similar. I love
bitsavers and warchive.org, but this is a level beyond what they
typically focus on. (And to be sure, CHM would have at least kept such
artifacts safe even if they couldn't do anything with them for a few
years/decades.)
Sigh. And I don't really mean to criticize anybody at Keysight, humans
are generally bad at recognizing and planning for this kind of
contingency - and I'm probably worst than most...
--S.
8:19 p.m.
Karen Lewis felt Stanford was the place they should go...
ed#
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Sunday, October 29, 2017 Steven M Jones via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
General comment to several earlier replies re: Bitsavers-type efforts.
The tragedy here is not that some copies of uncommon but otherwise
extant product documentation were lost. From the description, there were
a large number of unique, individual documents created by significant
historical figures. Fair bet that many of these didn't exist anywhere
else. Certainly not if it included drafts of speeches and
correspondence, as well as the final copy, etc.
A better question (not that it does any good to ask it now) is why this
stuff wasn't in the hands of university conservators or similar. I love
bitsavers and warchive.org, but this is a level beyond what they
typically focus on. (And to be sure, CHM would have at least kept such
artifacts safe even if they couldn't do anything with them for a few
years/decades.)
Sigh. And I don't really mean to criticize anybody at Keysight, humans
are generally bad at recognizing and planning for this kind of
contingency - and I'm probably worst than most...
--S.
30 Oct
30 Oct
11:06 a.m.
Apparently some of Hewlett's papers went to Stanford
"Two new collections open for research: Helen and Newton Harrison & William
Hewlett"
http://library.stanford.edu/blogs/special-collections-unbound/2016/04/two-n…
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Sharpe [mailto:couryhouse at aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2017 8:19 PM
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David
Packard
Karen Lewis felt Stanford was the place they should go...
ed#
Sent from AOL Mobile Mail
On Sunday, October 29, 2017 Steven M Jones via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
General comment to several earlier replies re: Bitsavers-type efforts.
The tragedy here is not that some copies of uncommon but otherwise extant product
documentation were lost. From the description, there were a large number of unique,
individual documents created by significant historical figures. Fair bet that many of
these didn't exist anywhere else. Certainly not if it included drafts of speeches and
correspondence, as well as the final copy, etc.
A better question (not that it does any good to ask it now) is why this stuff wasn't
in the hands of university conservators or similar. I love bitsavers and warchive.org, but
this is a level beyond what they typically focus on. (And to be sure, CHM would have at
least kept such artifacts safe even if they couldn't do anything with them for a few
years/decades.)
Sigh. And I don't really mean to criticize anybody at Keysight, humans are generally
bad at recognizing and planning for this kind of contingency - and I'm probably worst
than most...
--S.
2376
days inactive
2378
days old
12 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
cctalk＠snarc.net -
classiccmp＠crash.com -
COURYHOUSE＠aol.com -
davidkcollins2＠gmail.com -
pete＠pski.net -
t.gardner＠computer.org -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au -
trash80＠internode.on.net