The Californian conflagration has destroyed a substantial portion of the company’s early records.
The archive of William Hewlett and David Packard, founders of HP, has been largely destroyed in the wildfires currently ravaging California, according to The Mercury News.
Over 100 boxes of letters, memos, and other early artefacts were destroyed when the two modular buildings housing them fell victim to the ongoing wildfires. The buildings were part of the offices of electronics measurement company Keysight Technologies in Santa Rosa, and the company has drawn criticism for the way in which the archive was stored.
“This could easily have been prevented, and it’s a huge loss,” said HP staff archivist Karen Lewis, who pointed out that previous storage arrangements included permanent buildings insulted with fire-retardant foam. A spokesman for Keysight, Jeff Weber, stated that the company had taken “appropriate and responsible steps” to protect the collection.
The archive included the original memo from Hewlett to engineers, proposing the concept that became the HP-35 pocket calculator, as well as a memo suggesting the pioneering idea of an open-office floor plan. In 2005, the collection was valued at nearly $2million; Lewis called the lost record “invaluable”, although other archive material survives elsewhere.
The wildfires, thought to be the most destructive firestorm in California’s history, has already destroyed 7,000 buildings and claimed 43 lives.