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HP was a tech industry icon? This is a genuine question. Everyone here seems to have fond memories of HP. I thought HP was a big boring company that made goo

by kablamo 16y ago

HP was a tech industry icon? This is a genuine question. Everyone here seems to have fond memories of HP. I thought HP was a big boring company that made good printers and some decent polish notation graphing calculators and a few crappy PCs. I've never wanted to buy anything from them in the last ... 15 years. Its never struck me as interesting -- especially from the point of view of a software developer interested in startups.

gamble 16y ago
HP may be a shell of its former self these days, but they were the prototype for Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard were a couple of bright engineers who parlayed a clever oscillator circuit built in a garage in Palo Alto into a billion-dollar company. They made the tools almost every engineer used. Thanks to their reputation for technical excellence and respect for their employees, HP was a dream job for many engineers. (Most famously, Steve Wozniak) The best analogy I can think of is that they were the Google of their day. Unfortunately, being a mature company with unsexy product lines like scientific instruments wasn't popular with investors in the late '90s and the bean counters and MBA types were given free reign to strip and gut HP so that now it's little more than a marketing division for cheap, Chinese-made crap with funky bezels.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Hewlett and Packard were the Romulus and Remus of their day. They didn't build a company, they built an idea.
CamperBob 16y ago
You need to read a book called Bill & Dave ( http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526 http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/... ). Seriously. Everything good about Silicon Valley is owed to that company, and to its founders. It's impossible to place Fiorina's actions in any sort of context until one understands that.
Dbug 16y ago
I'd suggest you do some reading, there's a serious hole in your knowledge of HP. The HP history and culture that people admire has nothing to do with PCs or printers, and predates those going back many decades. (Does anyone know of a museum or collector that might be interested in my HP 300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer? I think that was their second product, a very impressive one for the early 40's... It's still useful) HP has a long history of very sophisticated electronic test equipment. A great deal of innovation and hard work went into development of that equipment, including many things that hadn't been done before. Many other tech companies used HP (and Tektronix) gear when developing their products. Aside from the many tech contributions, their corporate culture was certainly one to admire. HP was better known to engineers than consumers, but they did do some things that crossed over. The HP-35 hand-held scientific calculator was the first product of it's type I ever saw (and owned too...), certainly seeming worth the $400 one cost back in the day (around 1972). HP was constantly pushing the state of the art. HP wasn't merely successful, they were special. I was sorry that the HP/Compaq computing combination got the HP name. I wish that had stayed with the real tech products, but in Agilent tech lives on. HP certainly stands out from an era when the U.S. really shined as an engineering and manufacturing leader. HP wasn't another Dell or Gateway. There are (and were) tech companies with a past that goes way back. For instance most think of Motorola as a cell phone company. They were huge in semiconductors (some of that lives on in Freescale), but how many remember them as being the ones behind the first car radio or first under $200 television set, or making communications gear that went to the moon? In comparison, I find it a little sad to see highly valued companies like Facebook that don't really seem to produce anything. If it had never come into being, would we have really missed much that mattered?

by kablamo 16y ago

gamble 16y ago

HP may be a shell of its former self these days, but they were the prototype for Silicon Valley. Hewlett and Packard were a couple of bright engineers who parlayed a clever oscillator circuit built in a garage in Palo Alto into a billion-dollar company. They made the tools almost every engineer used. Thanks to their reputation for technical excellence and respect for their employees, HP was a dream job for many engineers. (Most famously, Steve Wozniak) The best analogy I can think of is that they were the Google of their day. Unfortunately, being a mature company with unsexy product lines like scientific instruments wasn't popular with investors in the late '90s and the bean counters and MBA types were given free reign to strip and gut HP so that now it's little more than a marketing division for cheap, Chinese-made crap with funky bezels.

CamperBob 16y ago
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that Hewlett and Packard were the Romulus and Remus of their day. They didn't build a company, they built an idea.

CamperBob 16y ago

You need to read a book called Bill & Dave ( http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/1591841526 http://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp/... ). Seriously. Everything good about Silicon Valley is owed to that company, and to its founders. It's impossible to place Fiorina's actions in any sort of context until one understands that.

Dbug 16y ago

I'd suggest you do some reading, there's a serious hole in your knowledge of HP. The HP history and culture that people admire has nothing to do with PCs or printers, and predates those going back many decades. (Does anyone know of a museum or collector that might be interested in my HP 300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer? I think that was their second product, a very impressive one for the early 40's... It's still useful) HP has a long history of very sophisticated electronic test equipment. A great deal of innovation and hard work went into development of that equipment, including many things that hadn't been done before. Many other tech companies used HP (and Tektronix) gear when developing their products. Aside from the many tech contributions, their corporate culture was certainly one to admire. HP was better known to engineers than consumers, but they did do some things that crossed over. The HP-35 hand-held scientific calculator was the first product of it's type I ever saw (and owned too...), certainly seeming worth the $400 one cost back in the day (around 1972). HP was constantly pushing the state of the art. HP wasn't merely successful, they were special. I was sorry that the HP/Compaq computing combination got the HP name. I wish that had stayed with the real tech products, but in Agilent tech lives on. HP certainly stands out from an era when the U.S. really shined as an engineering and manufacturing leader. HP wasn't another Dell or Gateway. There are (and were) tech companies with a past that goes way back. For instance most think of Motorola as a cell phone company. They were huge in semiconductors (some of that lives on in Freescale), but how many remember them as being the ones behind the first car radio or first under $200 television set, or making communications gear that went to the moon? In comparison, I find it a little sad to see highly valued companies like Facebook that don't really seem to produce anything. If it had never come into being, would we have really missed much that mattered?