I spent five years of my life competing with Tektronix. I worked for archrival HP. Last October, a wildfire engulfed Santa Rosa and one of the many things lost was more than 100 boxes containing the entire archive of papers documenting the first decades of HP’s existence. (Details here.) Burned to cinders in hours. There were no digital backups of this material. It’s gone.

Please don’t let that happen to Tek.

The non-profit Vintage Tek Museum in Tek’s hometown of Beaverton, Oregon has a treasure trove of more than three million pages of microfiche with Tek operator and service manuals, training materials, marketing and sales materials, and mounds of other unknown and priceless historical documents. The museum has started a crowdfunding project with a very modest goal: buy a $6000 microfiche scanner so that museum staff can create and preserve a digital archive of these documents. An archive stored safely in more than one place to ensure that it’s available for future generations.

As a design engineer working for HP, Tektronix was still important to me. No HP lab engineer in the 1970s wanted an HP scope. Tek’s were the standard. The Tek 465 was THE standard. More important, Tek was a key competitor. It kept the other competitors in the Test and Measurement space sharp—and honest.

If you’re of like mind, please consider pledging some money to this worthy history project. The campaign’s already received $3722 in pledges, which is 60% of the goal. Click here to add your campaign pledge.

Thanks!