Happy Birthday HP

On this day of August 18, 1947, Hewlett-Packard Co. was incorporated, nine years after William Hewlett and David Packard sold their first oscillators from a garage in Palo Alto, where they had set up shop with $538 in capital. They determined the order of their names in the company by a coin toss.

Moving from oscillators, the first of which they sold to Disney for the movie Fantasia, the Stanford graduates built one of the world’s largest electronics companies.

Visit the museum online

Goes to show that even the lumbering giants of our day had humble beginnings.

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Yep, the inventors of the Platonic ideal of a calculator. Never a better one before or since…

and lets not forget some of the best designed test gear ever made!

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Yep and sellers of some of the most crappy Switches this side of server space

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Yeh, by the time concentrators started getting called switches, HP was no longer the company it once was. I suspect it started when they went from being run by Engineers to Accountants and Lawyers…

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Convex, where I worked for eight plus years, was acquired by HP. Some of my fellow Convex employees are still working there, but many left, including me. HP, once the ideal of American engineering excellence, has fallen from the heights of excellence and esteem it once enjoyed. I agree with Walter. Once the company became a company run by non-engineers they started to decline in prominence. They now focus on things besides building the best quality and best technology in the business instead focusing on out-sourcing and trying to please the investors and improve the bottom line.

It is not the company engineers once dreamed of working for. They still have some very fine people working for them, but the culture of innovation and excellence is long gone.

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Just now seeing this topic… incidentally I started working there on August 18, 2009, in the former Convex building in Richardson shortly before they moved to a different building in Irving. I was there 5 1/2 years; in my final year, they moved yet again to roll into the big “mothership” former EDS campus in Plano.

And yeah, what @coloneldan said. I could go on… maybe in person. :stuck_out_tongue:

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