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You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.
by alnwlsn 7mo ago
You would never suspect they once made some of the world's finest test/scientific equipment.
- bell-cot 7mo agoRome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.
- bombcar 7mo agoI'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.
- StableAlkyne 7mo agoThey sort of still do! It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- _ks3e 7mo agoThe spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).
- rnrn 7mo agoNo, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight. HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.
- StableAlkyne 7mo agoInteresting, had no idea they used to make proper lab equipment
- anonymousiam 7mo agoI've got two garages full of 80's and 90's HP lab equipment, and most of it even works. In that era, HP had the best hardware design/production capability in the world. Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).
- pjmlp 7mo agoAnd great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...