Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard

[Steven M Jones]

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.