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

[Tom Gardner]

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-new-collections-open-research-helen-and-newton 

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.