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 parla

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.