Labor of love: Re-creating the burned hp archives [Spectral Lines]

Some 100 boxes of correspondence, speeches, and other documents produced by William Hewlett and David Packard as they built the company considered to be the original Silicon Valley startup were reduced to ashes by the massive fires that took place in Sonoma County, Calif., last fall. These documents- the collected papers of Hewlett and Packard, containing records of the Hewlett-Packard Co. going as far back as 1937-were assembled before HP began the first of several splits starting in 1999. In recent years, the collection was stored in a modular building on the campus of Keysight Technologies, in Santa Rosa, Calif. (Keysight got custody of the documents when it spun out of Agilent Technologies, which had previously split off from HP.) The collection was hard to access by historians, had yet to be digitized, and was, as we now know, vulnerable to fire.