Company · Halsworth Park
TriOptimum Corporate Archive
Seventy-five years of drawings, products, minutes and machines, kept in Halsworth since 1951, at Halsworth Park since 1964 and, since 1995, preserved in partnership with Lazarus, the digital preservation archive run by Frothly.
- Location
- The Old Works, Halsworth Park, Halsworth
- Records
- 4.2 linear kilometers
- Engineering drawings
- 61,400, from 1951
- Products and samples
- 18,420
- Digital records
- 9.3 TB
- Lazarus partner since
- 1995
Our partnership with Lazarus
In 1995 the TriOptimum Corporate Archive became the first company archive to deposit its retired products with Lazarus, then a volunteer effort rescuing old disks in Vancouver and now Frothly’s digital preservation archive. Software and firmware do not keep on a shelf: the media decay, the machines that read them disappear, and the people who knew how they worked retire. Lazarus keeps a verified copy of each item we deposit, and the means to run it.
We deposit firmware, software, manuals and the design files behind them when a product is retired. Most deposits are released for public access in the Lazarus reading room; a few are restricted for security reasons. You can see our deposits on the TriOptimum Corporate Archive page at Lazarus.
The first deposit: AccessNet 4K
The AccessNet 4K was a wall-mounted keypad that controlled the doors of research laboratories in the early 1990s. It checked a four-digit code against a table of authorized codes and logged every attempt, successful or not, to battery-backed memory. It was installed in several hundred buildings, many of them our own.
In August 1995 two of its EPROMs were removed from a Halsworth laboratory building before its demolition and read by Lazarus. The firmware became Lazarus record LZ-00451, released for public access by TriOptimum, and the first item in our partnership.
The installation manual was recovered with the boards. Its section on codes is reproduced here. The AccessNet code scheme outlived the 4K by many years: K-Series controllers still accept 4K code tables, and later TriOptimum facility systems adopted the same four-digit facility PINs so that staff did not have to learn new ones.
The building’s maintenance log, also deposited, suggests that the factory default code was never changed on any of its doors.
Collections
| Collection | Dates | Extent | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Founders’ papers (Pellow, Marchbank, Ostrowski) | 1946–1988 | 187 boxes | Open |
| Board minutes and papers | 1951–present | 1,840 volumes | Open to 1996; closed for 30 years |
| Engineering drawings | 1951–present | 61,400 sheets | Open to 1996, by appointment |
| Product samples and prototypes | 1951–present | 18,420 objects | By appointment |
| Firmware and software (with Lazarus) | 1974–present | 1,126 deposits | Mostly open, in the Lazarus reading room |
| Orbital & Research Systems records | 1989–present | 9,600 files | Closed |
| Advertising and publications | 1952–present | 6,300 items | Open |
Visiting and enquiries
The reading room at the Old Works is open to researchers by appointment, Tuesday to Thursday, 10:00 to 16:00. Please write to archive@trioptimumcorp.com at least two weeks ahead with the subject of your research. Records less than thirty years old are closed, and records relating to any matter under legal hold are not available.
The Corporate Archivist is Margaret Ellery. The archive is part of Corporate Affairs and Communications.