California Wildfires Burned Irreplaceable Documents on Silicon Valley History | Hacker News Reader

California Wildfires Burned Irreplaceable Documents on Silicon Valley History

pressdemocrat.com

237 pointscurtis97 comments

I used to work at this company and facility when the document move likely occurred. They used to have a really good library and a librarian on site. After the 2008 financial crisis, they had a massive layoff (over 10%) that included the librarian. I don't remember if they shut down the library, but it seems likely given that these documents were stored in a modular building. The two modular buildings that burned down were like very large mobile homes. They were supposed to be tempory (built during the dotcom boom) but were probably built as well as any silicon valley strip mall.

The library got turned into a conference room, but there is still a skeleton library staff. It's strange that the important docs ended up in the modulars since that's where they put a bunch of random storage stuff, IT contractors, the ergo people, etc. But if you were there you know that the HP Way is long dead. So it goes.

I didn't use the library at all, but thought the lab stock perk was awesome. Basically, you could take anything you wanted from a central prototyping parts storage area and use it for personal projects. It gradually got worse and worse as they stopped maintaining it as well. Do they still have lab stock?

Yes, we still have labstock and it is great. Although, I was told we weren't allowed to take stuff home. The old hands seem to have a different, if judicious, understanding.

The records went from "special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards" to boxes on shelves in a modular building.

I don't know anything about Keysight, but I think their actions tell me everything I need to know.

"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much"

Is this a common adage? I'm not sure I understand its meaning in this context.

It's a reference to the biblical parable of a shrewd/dishonest steward from Luke 16 [1]. It looks a little more like ancient corruption to modern readers, or an admonition to escort disgruntled employees out the door the day they are fired or give notice, rather than maintaining their privileges for two weeks: the guy buys friends on the outside by mismanaging his employer's funds when he realizes that he's going to be fired.

I believe the parent is saying that if Keysight was lazy, shortsighted, or irresponsible with these historical documents, they probably won't treat the design, construction, and your purchase of an expensive oscilloscope with a different attitude. So, ostensibly, buy Tektronix (or, for hackers, buy a Rigol - more value for less money; I love my $900 MSO1074Z-S and the closest Keysight device is a $8000 oscilloscope that doesn't include most of the software decoders you want, and doesn't include the $3000 function generator).

[1] https://www.bible.com/bible/111/LUK.16.niv

I don't know how different the culture at Keysight is from the original Hewlett-Packard.

But I do remember in 1994 or thereabouts, calling the h-p customer service number with questions about the old hp 'scope I had just picked up for $50 that came without a manual. The lady who answered the phone put me on hold to go digging through file cabinets and then came back with the documentation to politely answer all my questions.

I have never been anything but completely impressed by all of Hewlett-Packard's instruments or any interaction I've ever had with them.

And BTW, IIRC that Rigol made some of HP's low end DSO's back in the early 00's.

A lot of us believe in the old HP Quality. But certainly things are not the same as they used to be.

HP Test and Measurement > Agilent > Keysight

Keysight in essence is the spiritual (if not literal) inheritor of the original Hewlett-Packard. They still make fantastic well designed, long lived hardware. But all of those mergers and spinoffs, and whatnot had a less than ideal effect on the capital available to preserve it's (honestly) awe inspiring legacy.

For all we know, this was a temporary storage location, pending to something more permanent being built, or they were located there due to renovations. Heck, for all we know they were placed there while under the care of Agilent Technologies, before the spin-off. I'd hesitate to judge them based on this however.

Well, if there were extenuating circumstances, Keysight neglected to mention them in its statement, which is the sort of self-serving denial that we have come to expect in these circumstances. TL;DR: We did not make any mistakes and you should not be asking about it.

Those kind of statements almost never mention extenuating circumstances - to do so is often looked upon as making excuses.

"Keysight took appropriate and responsible steps to protect the company archives"

"This is a time to begin healing, not assigning blame.”

-Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber

I've tried to digitize the mountain of paper that I have. Scanning with a flatbed scanner was hopelessly slow. A sheet fed scanner helped a lot, and produces the best results.

But the fastest method for random paper was to simply point my phone at it and take a picture. The resolution of the phone camera is plenty good enough these days.

I know some archivists cringe at the thought of just putting the stuff on a table and clicking away, but it's the cheapest and fastest way to do it, and you've got far better than nothing if the originals get destroyed.

I trust multiple copies distributed to different physical locations a lot more than fireproof vaults. (And a fireproof vault won't help in a flood, either.)

Cameras have gotten good enough that they're also used for book "scanning" now. Nondestructive and very fast.

> Nondestructive

This is the important part, IIRC.

Example: http://diybookscanner.org/archivist/

If just getting the information contained on it, then sure, phone cameras are fine and better than nothing. If it's for digital archival purposes though, like, museum quality, then investing time and effort in e.g. scanners is worth it. It's also some of the most boring work I can imagine, but hey.

The question there is do documents like this need that level of detail in scans? Just pages of someone's notes or corporate documents probably don't need that super fine level of detail.

The thing is, a lot of stuff (like the HP archive) does not get digitized because scanning them takes too much time and costs too much.

That's where the quick & dirty phone camera shines.

Yes, it's boring, but so is mowing the lawn.

Might be worth investing in a document scanner. I purchased a Brother ADS2400N to scan all of my archives. It goes pretty fast. No good for books obviously. Doesn't like stapled document either.

The sheet fed scanners work well on modern, clean, 8*11 sheets of copier paper. They simply do not work well on older pieces of paper of random slickness, fragility, notebook paper, dirt, odd shapes, torn pages, taped paper, carbon sheets, etc.

I scanned old bills and bank statements that were up to 13 years old, some in pretty bad state, with a pretty wide range of paper quality. It all went pretty smoothly except for sheets that were either stapled together, of unusual formats, or made of cigarette paper-thin paper.

> 13 years old

When I said old, I meant old :-) I have lots of family documents going back over a century.

The phone camera works well for old family photo albums, too, which are too big for the scanner.

I hope they don't just consider it a complete loss and throw everything out... there has been successful attempts at recovering and digitising burnt documents:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8921286

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8984425

If only they could have found a vendor selling enterprise grade multi-site data backup solutions. Or a scanner.

That's not as disruptive as this fire seems to have been.

If anything actually important was lost then perhaps in the future it'll just be noted that user error was just as much an issue for developers and entrepreneurs as the actual users those sorts of people usually denigrate with "perhaps next time you'll make backups haw haw haw".

I doubt it but it would be an irony if it were not digitized.

It wasn't.

Which to me is the main story. Document scanners are really fast nowadays, they could have lined up a few of them, hired some temp worker, and it could possibly have taken them just a week to scan the whole thing with a modest budget.

We should really do that with any paper archives and books that matter. The physical document usually doesn't have much value, outside of some really ancient documents. The content has. Digitizing also makes it more accessible and searchable.

Countries must be sitting on massive archives of paper documents.

> Countries must be sitting on massive archives of paper documents.

Which are currently safely in locked rooms. If they're digitized, they become much less likely to stay private in the hands of most government contractors.

I agree that they should be digitizing this content, but they also need to work on establishing basic competency in securing it once it's digitized. Also, in preserving it - it's easier to just leave documents intact in a long row of boxes and file cabinets than it is to dispose of them, but it takes effort and maintenance to keep them alive on hard drives.

Locked room or some dodgy basements. I remember watching a documentary many years ago on the transfer of the archives of the french republic where many were lost to rats and other fungus.

But I agree with your point that if we scan anything confidential, it will need to be stored in a lock room very much in the same way than the paper originals (as opposed to anything connected to the internet). But it will still be easier to have multiple copies in multiple locations.

Sounds like someone wasn't following the 3-2-1 rule!

Get your license of HP Data Protector now!

I thought The Traitorous 8 were generally considered the beginning of Silicon Valley.

As we know it, however there were farms and stuff there first

In those days, it was called "The valley of heart's delight." There used to be bus tours along Blossom Hill Road to look out at the vista of fruit trees in blossom.

For anyone interested, run Google Earth (the real desktop version), zoom in on the SF Peninsula from Palo Alto through Cupertino or Saratoga, select View/Historical Imagery, and then run the slider back to 1948 or 1953.

As you keep zooming in, look for a regular grid of dark dots in many places. These are orchards. Of trees. With fruit on them. All over the valley!

I worked at Tymshare in the '70s when we moved into two new buildings on the north side of Valley Green Drive between Beardon and Bandley (now Apple buildings). The first year we were there, they'd only built one of the two buildings, and the lot for the other building was still an apricot orchard.

We got to pick all the apricots we could eat. What a glorious summer!

The next year they built the second building, and it was less glorious. Tymshare had just acquired Douglas Engelbart's research team, and then discovered they had no idea what to do with the technology. It really didn't fit into any of Tymshare's business initiatives.

I remember running into Doug a few times there, and he always seemed a bit forlorn after a "successful exit" but now facing an uphill battle getting the company on board with anything he was doing.

A few years after that, microcomputers became a thing. Some of us had experimented with them and thought they had potential. But when we talked with the sales and marketing people, the message was clear: Tymshare had a successful and profitable business with their mainframe timesharing services. They didn't want to get into microcomputers, because they could be a threat to the established business lines.

And you know what, they were right!

I suppose technically it would have been Vacuum Tube Valley back when HP was founded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

They would be considered among the first "Silicon" pioneers. But the real progenitors are Hewlett and Packard -- or more properly, their mentor at Stanford, Fred Terman.

Hewlett and Packard were only two of the key founders who were 'discovered' and nurtured by Terman. His name is way too obscure today, given his influence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Terman

much like the leadership of Eric Schmidt or Steve Jobs of the recent era, William Hewlett and David Packard did a lot to set the culture and ethos of the Bay Area tech scene in their time - in the 60s through the 80s. Since HP ended up being one of the larger companies of that period, many engineers and managers were influenced by early experience there.

Were they not digitized yet?!

It's HP. Where could they possibly get scanners?

Good old negligence, never fails to amaze me what people let happen.

Did they digitize any of this? is the information lost, not just the artifacts?

The original article[0] is much better, and should ideally replace this thin Gizmodo rehash.

[0]: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-pa...

Interesting photo of the burned down buildings considering the trees/bush plants immediately surrounding the two buildings are completely intact.

Often, plants will survive wildfires (especially in CA, where wildfires are somewhat normal and plants have evolved to survive them) because they have moisture inside them. Buildings do not usually have moisture inside of them, and when embers land on common cladding materials or rubberized roofs with wood beneath them... well.

Well that's obviously a pretty bad way to build a house for an archive.

Buildings do not usually have moisture inside of them

Do sprinkler systems count?

(I know about water damage, but that's usually not as bad as fire damage... and there would be the highly effective Halon if it weren't for the CFC-scare banning it...)

There are plenty of such systems that don't use Halon, but they're expensive.

There's replacements for Halon that work just as well without making a big hole in the ozone layer.

Sprinkler systems only put out fires that start inside. When the fire starts outside and burns down through the roof, the sprinkler systems are not going to do you a lot of good.

The photos of a lot of the neighborhoods show similar effects though the standing trees were still damaged, also, adjacent houses would have wildly different outcomes for not easily apparent reasons.

It's confused a lot of people. There's a whole subculture of conspiracy theorists [1] who believe that the trees are evidence of an intentional government operation. It involves laser weapons shot from space, apparently.

[1] https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1942601975998002...

Hewlett Packard archives not being digitised would be a very cruel kind of irony.

Shouldn't this kind of stuff be in a museum?

For what it's worth, they were authored before digitization was feasible, and they were collected before it was cheap. I can see why, but it's sad to see.

Agree. This is really inexcusable. I just had my college and high school papers and letters digitized at 4 cents a page (8 cents a page if the machine detects writing on the other side). Ironically it’s a place in East Bay that’s receiving a lot of business due to the fires. The standard industry grade machines can scan 60 pages per minute and provide basic OCR. Higher power machines can apparently do 600 pages per minute. So, a box of papers containing about 2500 pages would be $100 and take a professional 45 minutes. It’s too bad this wasn’t digitized and put online or in a museum, like the ones Wells Fargo have in their major flagship bank locations. I guess banks want to show a 100-year history whereas it’s not a selling point for tech.

Where is this? I've been a hobbyist writer since I was 3 and really want to get all my stuff digitized.

> Where is this? I've been a hobbyist writer since I was 3 and really want to get all my stuff digitized.

You learned to write when you were 3?

I was reading to my kindergarten class when I was 4, self-taught (lots of Sesame Street and Electric Company), and I am not remotely brilliant.

I can certainly believe someone writing at 3, although it's pretty damned impressive.

Whoops, I forgot, I could write at 3. My aunt loves to tell the story of how she got me to finally talk by making me ask for a Coke, after discovering I could read and write.

Early but not totally implausible. My mother taught me to read when I was four and I could write before I was five. It was a pain at school where I had to endure a couple of years of reading simple John and Jane books while everyone else was catching up. Unfortunately, while I could write, I never developed the technical skill of writing legibly and fast so even I have difficulty in deciphering quite a lot of my writing. More than thirty five years of using computers to create documents hasn't improved things either.

When one of our kids was around 3, we would write down the stories that he would dictate, which he would then illustrate. It was a lot of fun and I'm glad we still have those.

Haha, of course it wasn't any good! But yes I was reading (terribly) and "writing" (awfully) at age 3.

I trade a remarkably early start in literacy for literally 0 math skills.

There's an older fellow named Wade who runs a place called "Print Scan Duplicate" in Richmond, CA. He scanned in about 4000 pages for me and it was a little over $300 because there were a ton of staples to remove, about 800 were in color, and he created PDF files based on groupings. https://www.printscanduplicate.com/pricing

Being in a museum is not enough. ALL historical records, artifacts or similar should be digitized.

> never fails to amaze me what people let happen.

Especially since the exact same thing happened a few miles down the road with Terence McKenna's archives at Esalen.

Let us not forget that, until a petty political hysteria[0], there were no plans to have a mirror of Archive.org; just one pretty little building between chaos and order.

As a recurring donor and huge fan of the Archive, I find this pretty concerning.

[0]: https://blog.archive.org/2016/11/29/help-us-keep-the-archive...

I'm also a yearly(-ish) donor and also find it a bit concerning considering they did have a fire in the building 4 years ago. Archive Team have the INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK[0] project. I think they're in need of more disk space if anyone has some to spare.

[0]: http://iabak.archiveteam.org/

Thanks for the link! I did not know about IA.BAK. I think I will commit to backing up the whole drive over the next year. ~110TiB is totally doable!

Thanks for sharing I can lend a few TB to this!

Could BackBlaze or somebody do this, maybe as they are burning in new storage clusters?

Seems like it could be some good PR.

Looks like their wiki says there is roughly 14 petabytes of data to be backed up, and only ~105 terabytes have redundant backups now?

I was going to say that too, Terence book collection loss is a bleeding wound still now..

That's easy to say, but there is typically very little money available for archiving records, and there's very little sense of urgency about it. A friend right now is trying to find money to preserve a sizable collection of SF historical documents, and it is far from easy.

Weird to talk about a lack of money in SV of all places.

There's a lot of that here. It's one of the richest places on the planet but we can't afford to build homeless shelters or significant public transit projects.

For most of recent history the problem has never been the gross availability of resources; proper allocation is the real problem.

Can't, or don't want to?

> there's very little sense of urgency about it.

That probably means it doesn't really matter.

No, it means it has worked fine so far. As long as negligence has no immediate and direct maladies as result it's easy to ignore it.

I think you might have reality somewhat back-to-front, but this is an interesting point on urgency vs importance.

Silicon Valley has veterans sleeping on the sidewalks, but the chatter in the coffee shop yards away is about the new fleeting hotness in web frameworks. Society rarely considers dealing with that which is really urgent until it's too late, and even then fails to act sufficiently. By a similar token, when a bank official says "We are well capitalized." they usually mean "We are in deep trouble and are unable to fix it."

A preventative solution should be as considered as urgent as a cure. Indeed, when one is dealing with a cure, at least the size of the problem is known. When one is considering making a preventative measure, the possible size not yet known with confidence, meaning the problem might be more acute than previously thought.

The best way to raise money is to point to something bad that said money could have prevented.

Is there really a reporter named Robert Digitale on the analog tech archive beat?

OK, we've changed the url to that from https://gizmodo.com/the-california-wildfires-burned-down-irr....

i think it was all done by Skynet. Helps to cover up any negligant details that can hinder progress.

These kinds of jokes become way scarier when this stuff creeps into reality and the military actually names it very aptly "Skynet" [0].

Somebody should tell those guys in the Pentagon that the Terminator movies do not depict a utopian future we would want to emulate, not at all.

[0] http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2017/09/future-us-milit...

We don't but they always think that they can control the demons they conjure.

Original article linked from Gizmodo: http://www.pressdemocrat.com/business/7559762-181/hewlett-pa...

Url changed. Thanks!

I suppose that's a loss but thousands of people lost homes and everything they owned so I'm having a hard time caring.

"I suppose that's a loss but millions of people are starving to death in Africa so I'm having a hard time caring about some rich people losing some material possessions."

You can care about multiple things at once.

That actually seems rare amongst humans, sadly.

Unicaring is in right now.

Why can’t both be sad? The world lost history and lots of families lost their personal belonging, houses and possibly friends and/or family member.

I think both are a tragedy.

Also the devastating impact on wildlife... biodiversity loss is also irreplaceable considering this is the only planet we know with life in the universe so far.

At the same time, hundreds were killed in road accidents. Why care about mere property? And that's only Americans. I don't think humans are well equipped to apply our feelings of caring to strangers we hear about on the news because there are far too many of them. We'd be reduced to blithering wrecks if we actually cared about all suffering.

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