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For people who are only familiar with the sad decline of this company, HP computers used to be great. I learnt to program on an HP-85a. At the time, my friends

For people who are only familiar with the sad decline of this company, HP computers used to be great. I learnt to program on an HP-85a. At the time, my friends had ZX80s or ZX81s with 1k of RAM. My HP-85a (my dad's really) had an insanely massive 32k. It came with really great manuals which taught you to program in basic, a built-in screen, magnetic tape drive and thermal printer and was fantastically engineered in general. The HP12c financial calculator is legendary. There are HP12c still running on their original battery 30+ years after production (the original battery now no longer permitted for non-military applications due to toxic chemicals and what-not) and the legend goes that a zookeeper once accidentally fed one to a hippo (he had been using it to calculate how much feed to give it or something) had it travel through the whole digestive tract of the aforementioned beast and had it still working. My two HP12cs have each been running for 10+ years on their original batteries even though they are using the inferior modern battery technology. I could go on but you get the point.

jbay808 7y ago
They also were a real leader in scientific and precision metrology equipment, like interferometers.
- Junk_Collector 7y ago
  They still are in a sense. That portion of the company is now called Keysight.
  - jbay808 7y ago
    I'm not sure if Keysight is doing any innovation anymore or just subsisting on their legacy. (They also wouldn't answer my company's calls when we tried to purchase equipment from them, which I generally take as sign of decline).
    - Junk_Collector 7y ago
      It probably depends on where you are and what level of equipment you are looking at. All of their low end stuff goes through distributors which was implemented in the bad old days of the 90's and just sort of carried over peaking in the mid 2000's. Since the Agilent/Keysight split they seem to be pulling stuff in house little bit by little bit and their support is improving but you need to find out who your local sales manager actually is. If you are in a low volume area like Arkansas, there may only be one for the state. If you are in a busy area like California or Texas, there will probably be half a dozen or more. In my experience they are getting better with support coverage, but like all vendors will try to nickel and dime you for it. Their CEO has made some noise about being a services company for growth so it will be interesting to see where they go in that regard in the future. On the high end technical side, they are absolutely killing it lately. They have a new out of the box modular system for quantum computing, a new 100 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope that has crazy good noise performance, and their new portable microwave analyzer is a VNA and RTSA in one that works better than many previous generation benchtop boxes but runs on a battery. Those were all released this year.
      - jbay808 7y ago
        We were definitely looking for their top end systems. But you're probably right, we might have just gotten lost in some tangled chain of distributor responsibility. I'm very relieved to hear that they're still innovating, actually. Thanks :)

jbay808 7y ago

They also were a real leader in scientific and precision metrology equipment, like interferometers.

Junk_Collector 7y ago
They still are in a sense. That portion of the company is now called Keysight.
- jbay808 7y ago
  I'm not sure if Keysight is doing any innovation anymore or just subsisting on their legacy. (They also wouldn't answer my company's calls when we tried to purchase equipment from them, which I generally take as sign of decline).
  - Junk_Collector 7y ago
    It probably depends on where you are and what level of equipment you are looking at. All of their low end stuff goes through distributors which was implemented in the bad old days of the 90's and just sort of carried over peaking in the mid 2000's. Since the Agilent/Keysight split they seem to be pulling stuff in house little bit by little bit and their support is improving but you need to find out who your local sales manager actually is. If you are in a low volume area like Arkansas, there may only be one for the state. If you are in a busy area like California or Texas, there will probably be half a dozen or more. In my experience they are getting better with support coverage, but like all vendors will try to nickel and dime you for it. Their CEO has made some noise about being a services company for growth so it will be interesting to see where they go in that regard in the future. On the high end technical side, they are absolutely killing it lately. They have a new out of the box modular system for quantum computing, a new 100 GHz bandwidth oscilloscope that has crazy good noise performance, and their new portable microwave analyzer is a VNA and RTSA in one that works better than many previous generation benchtop boxes but runs on a battery. Those were all released this year.
    - jbay808 7y ago
      We were definitely looking for their top end systems. But you're probably right, we might have just gotten lost in some tangled chain of distributor responsibility. I'm very relieved to hear that they're still innovating, actually. Thanks :)