4 ms·

Hewlett-Packard?

• stcredzero 17y ago
  That level of old, but not HP. It was actually the first company to exist off of 100% software sales/licensing revenue. (Not hardware sales, with accompanying software, like IBM in those days.)
  • blasdel 17y ago
    SPSS?
• tesseract 17y ago
  Does anyone know whether HP had anything like 20% time in its earlier days? I've never heard that they did, but now that you mention it it does seem like the kind of thing that HP might have done.
  • CamperBob 17y ago
    Old-school HP was so awesome it would have made Google look like a Communist labor camp. As long as you did what they paid you to do, your time basically was your own, along with a key to the company stockroom. One (admittedly high-level) guy built a stereo amp -- http://www.hpmemory.org/news/barney_ampl/barney_page_00.htm http://www.hpmemory.org/news/barney_ampl/barney_page_00.htm -- and the company indulged him by allocating some surplus factory capacity to a limited production run.
    • philwelch 17y ago
      I remember reading that Woz used his time at HP to invent the first Apple computer. (Then HP decided that microcomputers were a silly waste of time so they gave Woz back the rights to it.)