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microcolonel

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...

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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 A friend right now is trying to find money to preserve a sizable collection of SF historical documents, and it is far from easy.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.

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.

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...

> 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..

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

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

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