H historical archives destroyed

Maybe the idiots digitized them.

Bill's comment on The Garage being turned into a state monument was "They should have torn it down long ago". He wasn't one to dwell in the past.

"A few years before Hewlett-Packard?s 50th anniversary in 1988, Lewis was brought in to build an archive out of the boxes of company photos, writings and other materials.

After reviewing the contents, she said, ?I realized, ?Oh my god, this is the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry.??

If nobody else bothered to digitize them or possibly even look at them in the ~25 years since then you gotta wonder just how fascinating they could've been.

Surely _someone_ kept a back-up archive ?:-( ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 | It's what you learn, after you know it all, that counts.

Or how much HP actually cared.

I talked to the HP archivist once. I wanted to get the schematics to repair my HP9100 desktop calculators, the perdecessor to the HP35 calculator. She said yes, I have them and no, you can't see them.

--

John Larkin   Highland Technology, Inc   trk 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I called up Roland Corp's service department back circa 2008 and told them "So this might be a longshot but I have this Roland keyboard from around 1985 that has some broken keys and stuff and was wondering if you had any parts from that era in stock..."

"Yes, we have those parts."

"Oh! Really? Which ones?"

"All of them I'm fairly sure. How many of what would you like?"

They emailed me a high-res PDF of the service manual the same day, too.

Ouch. An archivist was hired in 1988, at which time digitization would have been difficult (but maybe not microfilming). Archiving would have included some cataloging, and even in '88, a digitized catalog would be reasonable to expect.

A corporate mentality might think the archives need secrecy, and that would naturally make the vistors scarce. Thus, the 'asset' could be perceived as nonperforming, and relegated to ... a flimsy temporary building. It makes too much sense.

I had almost the same experience with a Roland digital piano. As a result, I will always consider Roland first if they make something I want.

Clifford Heath.

Hard to say if they're the same in 2k17; it seems their target demographic has shifted over time from making high-end keyboards and workstations for gigging musicians to making beatboxes/desktop beep machines for bedroom "producers" and hobbyists.

A pragmatic choice maybe as the price of home recording equipment have dropped so much over the past 20 years - if you have a decent PC for not much more money you can record 64 or 128 tracks to hard disk no problem.

Drum machines like the TR-909 which came out circa 1983 weren't disposable toys; they cost the better part of $5000 inflation-adjusted so only recording studios could really afford them. Their 2017 re-interpretation of it costs $299 street so I'm not really expecting the same level of support going down the road.

They still make a few flagship workstations but I feel at this point in that market segment there are better options for the money from Korg and Yamaha.

There's an elderly gentleman who lives near my father, Marine vet, who after his service went to work in tech sales, first with DEC and later with HP.

I do pro-bono tech support for him from time to time which mostly involves attempting to get his HP wireless printer to be recognized on his WiFi network or Chromebook - the irony isn't lost.

Hey, he has a closet full of papers and junk from his HP days still sitting around. Maybe they could reconstruct the archives from that.

It's an omen. All remnants of that era are dead, dying or in the process of being destroyed. It may be related to white privilege coming to an end- not sure.

The history of Hewlett Packard stayed with Keysight, while the fast automatic office scanners stayed with the name and HP, the computer company.

--
 Thanks, 
    - Win

One of these many people were willing to buy, cherish and care for. The other is HP automatic office scanners LOL

I had a nice experience with one of the big names in audio in the late 90s. For the life of me, I can't recall right now which company it was. It might have been Roland. Anyway, I sent an email to their UK address asking if there was a chance of getting a service manual or a schematic of one of their products, perhaps through an agent in India. I signed it with just my name, state and country to give them an idea of where I was.

The reply came after a couple of hours, saying that they'd mailed the manual. I wrote back saying that I didn't give them my full postal address but they told me that they'd already posted the document and asked me to wait for some time to see if I got it. They promised to send another copy if I didn't get the first one.

I was pleasantly surprised when the post office delivered the document after about a week. (The town's population then was around 200k).