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Hewlett-Packard historical archives destroyed in Santa Rosa fires

I don't understand entirely. Paper, film prints, etc will always be consumed by entropy eventually. Virtual clone'able digital bits can leap from life form to life form indefinitely. Are they saying a nearly hundred year old technology company that was at the forefront of printer and scanner technology for most of its life never figured out how to use one to preserve its history?

Isn't the first rule of archiving in 2017 to take it digital? I don't think the fire is to blame here if the content of the archive is lost forever... still a sad failing on someone's fault though.
 
The building belonged to Keysight, a spinoff of a spinoff of HP, and apparently they didn't care that much about the historical documents of a company they are now so far removed from.
 
vwestlife said:
The building belonged to Keysight, a spinoff of a spinoff of HP, and apparently they didn't care that much about the historical documents of a company they are now so far removed from.
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I would disagree with that. Keysight is probably closer to the original HP now than the company currently known as HP, and also Agilent which they were part of in the prior spin off from HP. HP was originally a test and measurement company which Keysight is and HP and Agilent are not.

I'm sure they cared quite a bit about the documents, even if they didn't take proper steps to safeguard them.
 
It's all too common--there's very little money allocated corporate-wise for preservation of any kind. Old equipment hits the scrappers almost as a matter of course. Think of the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of reels of 1/2" magtape stashed away in government warehouses. It's a big problem for archivists--some of the data on the often unmarked tapes gives no clue to its relevance and may, in fact, be covered by security and privacy laws. Easier to send it to be shredded or incinerated.

In fact, Massachusetts passed a privacy law a couple of years ago that made it illegal for businesses to accept or send media containing third-party personal information. This put one media conversion outfit out of business as they had no way of ascertaining beforehand what was on media sent for recovery.

With defense and space contractors, there's usually nothing in the budget allocated for preservation or archiving. When the contract's up, materials go for disposal.

The US doesn't want to remember its history, it seems.

Your government at work.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Your government at work.
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If the government required every activity to preserve all of the records then things would be more costly, and other people would complain.

Let's try to keep to the original topic. Complaining about how the government works compared to how you feel it should work is generally a dead end unless you are willing to do something more active.
 
Okay, you've got a point. The government should have destroyed the Lunar Orbiter tapes so that the images couldn't be recovered. I'm currently working with preserving a stack of selenodesy tapes from LO missions (written using an IBM 7094).

In fact, I find the HP thing exactly analogous to the your view. The archives represent a liability, in many respects and the destruction of them means that Keysight won't have to deal with the expense of preservation. Similarly, computer vendors shouldn't preserve any documentation for systems and equipment older than 5 years.

Bottom line salvation!
 
Hi Chuck,

I don't think I said the government should have destroyed the Lunar Orbiter tapes.

What I specifically said was there is no point in complaining about it unless you are willing to do something more active. Which means convincing people to preserve these things at the time, not after they are abandoned. Which incurs a cost that somebody else is going to be mad about.

You are mad about the loss of data. Other people will get mad about the incurred cost. "The Government" is damned if it does and damned if it does not.

Good luck with that. And please, no more straw man arguments ... it is distasteful to imply that somebody said something that they clearly did not say or imply.
 
Mike, I'm doing my part--in fact, most of what I do involves preservation. The same with Al K.

I'm not mad--the early papers of Bill and Dave probably don't hold a lot of technical interest and are valuable only to those interested in their narrative value. So it's a shame that they're lost, but I'm not going to lose sleep over it.

On the other hand, re-discovering or re-inventing is a very costly process. Preservation is not so expensive in that light. And the government is probably the biggest depository of technical data by a long shot.
 
If there is any silver lining here, I hope corporate archivists will be more willing to ask for help in making sure history is saved. To Chuck's point, they don't have to go it alone but often do because it doesn't cost any additional money or liability for their legal department to say "no" to every request. Not only are there communities like ours, groups devoted to such efforts like VCFed, but many colleges and universities have extensive academic programs devoted to historical digital preservation; like Georgia Tech.

I've engaged some of the AT&T historical IP holders over the years and am usually met with the response, "we still have customers using that". But I wonder at what point does one live phone switch in rural Kansas stop tipping the scale which has a vast singular vault of technical data on the other side?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Mike, I'm doing my part--in fact, most of what I do involves preservation. The same with Al K.
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I'm aware, and once again, I agree with the need to do preservation. Nobody said anything different.

But before anybody goes off and says "there is your government at work again", do keep in mind that there are reasons for the way things are. And cost is a very large reason.

(I visited Washington, DC last week. I was in two different museums, and walked past many others and the National Archives a few times. Your government is doing quite a bit of preservation work already.)
 
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