From time to time, folk go in and clear out their garage or basement, and find 'treasures' from the past. Papers, equipment, old advertisements, a journal, whatever. And strange as it may seem, some of this is incredibly important from a historical standpoint. Two cases in point at the Computer History Museum are the Pelkey interviews and the Jay Last Fairchild papers.
1. The Pelkey interviews. These were 81 audio interviews done with leading network designers and other key people during the 1986-1988 period, later compiled into an ACM book, Circuits, Packets, and Protocols: Entrepreneurs and Computer Communications, 1968-1988 by James L. Pelkey, Andrew L. Russell, Loring G. Robbins Morgan & Claypool, Apr 19, 2022 - Computers - 632 pages. There is a back story here, where the Computer History Museum initially eschewed these as 'anecdotal history' but later realized that this trove is uniquely valuable, and the collection was established thirty years after the fact. Pelkey as of 1988 didn't yet acknowledge Cisco (great back-story), which of course a dozen years later had produced more than half of the Internet routers of the world. Jim assed away in 2023, months after the ACM book was published. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2023/02/10148825/1NVeRg1pnl6
2. Two key efforts enabled capture of the Fairchild semiconductor papers fifty years after the fact. Jay Last, one of the 'traitorous eight'. was very historically minded, and he journaled heavily, plus purloined and saved key papers about Fairchild when he left the company before the founders then started Intel. In addition, he marshaled a collection of Jean Hoerni's papers and journals, that helped serve the later donation by Texas Instruments of old documents that they had accumulated through acquisitions of National Semiconductor (https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/fairchild-release/). Truly historic material, that had gone unnoticed for five decades, this invaluable material has fueled several books and significant historical research in the meantime.
I wrote a small monograph a decade ago for the Computer History Museum Board of Trustees (a group I was privileged to be a Trustee for nearly three decades), entitled 'Preserving Our Digital Revolution Heritage: If not you, who? If not now, when?: (https://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-house/digital-revolution-heritage/paperback/product-12jqr4qz.html?page=1&pageSize=4). It argues for the notion that many of us can participate or contribute to this cornucopia of arcane computer history, and if we fail to do so, that many salient stories will never be captured for posterity. How to do so is the question. For HP lovers (the old HP?), thee is a great mechanism, which is herein described.
In that vein, this month, Bill Dyck (37 year HP veteran) sent a note out, saying to Hewlett Packard Employees - past and present (cf. https://www.facebook.com/groups/2450210642/?multi_permalinks=10174461959035643)
No comments:
Post a Comment