Possibly Lost

How can some of my papers/presentations/proposals/abstracts be lost?

This might seem strange to people used to the web, and the way back machine or Internet Archives. Although of course we should all be familiar with the concept of link rot for stuff that is on the web, and the Internet Archive is quite incomplete.

But furthermore:

• most of my work was proprietary, never published on the web, except possibly inside a company manual
• rarely I made presentations in public ** even when I made presentations in public, rarely was the abstract or slides archived in any permanent place, or even on a website

Frequently, the only versions of my papers or presentations or slides were

• computer files, PDFs or PowerPoint or ..., kept on a company PC
• possibly paper copies

For the most part when I left a company like Intel I left behind all such computer files or paper copies.

• Not necessarily because they were proprietary...
• I could probably have retained copies of computer files or paper copies of things presented publicly
• But mostly because it was too much work or too much risk to try to separate such proprietary and nonproprietary stuff ** "Risk?" - I was very scared when leaving Intel to join AMD and vice versa that I might accidentally retained corporate secrets from the rival competitor. So I played it safe, and over deleted rather than under deleted.
• The company may have retained copies ** although most companies have retention rules ** although in at least one situation, after I returned to Intel, 1 of my coworkers had retained a copy of a design document that I was quite proud of, but never became a product. But of course, that was proprietary...

OBSERVATION:

• leaving a company is like having a lobotomy
• if you have done publicly visible stuff at a company, best to arrange for its persistence before you are in a rush leaving the company

BTW: when you leave a company like Intel you are supposed to leave all of your email behind. That's what I did. However, some moderately famous people did not do so. I remember the audience distinctly gasping when one such famous person presented 25-year-old email in a retrospective. Not only had they retained stuff they were supposed to have left behind when they left the company, but even if they had not left the company they were supposed to have deleted according to the retention policy, which usually says that email should be deleted within 3 to 5 years if not actually involved in litigation.

Although a side comment: I am fairly sure that some of my employers might have been a lot more successful in patent lawsuits if they had retained some such email. At least while the "1st to invent" rule was still in force. Fortunately (?) This is less of concern now that we have "1st to patent/publish".