Speaking of down a hole…
Not to mention another comment later:
Very off-topic, but I can’t resist… a lot of companies that started out doing one thing for a living ended up doing a different thing (including one or two I’ve worked for). I read a long time ago that, before Hewlett and Packard (HP) got into the computer stuff, their first business model was manufacturing men’s urinals.
Sorry, I don’t know where you saw that. They were founded in a Palo Alto, CA garage in 1938 and originally manufactured electronic test and measurement equipment. They’ve been through many mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs since then.
[HP] originally manufactured electronic test and measurement equipment
Once upon a time in the early '80s, we had an HP multichannel analyzer that was giving trouble. A lab mate who did most of the electronics called up HP to see if he could get some schematics or other help. They said ‘What’s a multichannel analyzer? We certainly never made anything like that!’ so the lab mate asked if he could please talk to their oldest engineer, and they actually dug up their oldest engineer who said, ‘gosh, I’d forgotten we made those. I’ll see if I can come up with something.’ A week or so later the schematics came in the mail and the box got fixed.
Not all of the old days were good, but I sure miss the ones that were.
Bill Hewlett was so impressed with a phone call he received from a 13 year old High School student named Steve Jobs asking about electronic parts that he sent him the equipment for free and offered him an internship at HP:
I met Bill Hewlett at my old job once. He was touring design firms in New York with the HP team in the late 90s. He was very old but got to his feet when i introduced myself. I shook his hand and explained a different team was going to pitch but I wanted to thank him and his generation for the leaps they had made to make all the folks in that office careers possible. I said “you were the original guys in the garage.” and he beamed right back at me. Later that season there was a full page ad from HP in the NY Times, a garage door with type overlaid “The rules of the garage”. A different agency but I like to think something was set in motion…
I don’t remember where I saw it either. Perhaps it was really a joke, or somebody who had a beef with them. It sounded real at the time… sorry if I’m spreading a falsehood, not my intention. But I did think it was funny. And I can think of companies (like a couple of different ones I used to work for) that completely changed what they did for a living. Which I think was my real point… nothing in life (or business, or technology) is static.
Back in the mid '80s, my company got an expensive HP in-circuit emulator/debugger system. I think that was in some respects their entre into personal computers, but it was not priced like a PC! HP always had the reputation back then of being expensive but high quality. Seems to me once they went into the PC business, their quality in general started going down. The printers, similarly, started as some of the best quality for a premium price. But then HP joined the industry trend of selling cheaper printers and making their money on toner sales…
I thought this was pretty fitting:
It’s worth mentioning again that today’s HP is not the same HP that many of us grew up with. There have been several restructurings and carve-outs from the original Hewlett-Packard. While it’s true that HP Inc is the legal successor to the original Hewlett-Packard Company, that original company no longer exists.
If you’re looking for the original company’s DNA, you’re more likely to find it in Agilent, a 1999 spinoff that took a lot of the high-quality instrumentation business with it. There’s also Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is where HP’s server and enterprise services businesses landed, but that’s had its share of ups and downs, too. Unfortunately, HP Inc is just another consumer-level tech company that has adopted a strategy of customer subscriptions and lock-ins to maintain its margins in a declining segment. I have very fond memories of the durability and reliability of HP printers up until around 10-15 years ago, but I haven’t had the same experience with more recent models.
Remembering the history, back in 1998, Compaq acquired DEC, makers of the PDP and VAX series of computers.
And then in 2002, HP acquired Compaq.
I’ve always thought (could be wrong) that all of the server expertise from DEC made its way into HP Enterprise, although who knows how much of that talent is still working for HP. (We know that many of DEC’s software engineers went to Microsoft and contributed a lot to the Windows NT kernel.)
I think that HP’s PC business is very much Compaq. Whether that’s good, bad or indifferent is a matter of (to me, pointless) debate, but when you’re dealing with HP’s PC business, you’re dealing with Compaq.
I have no clue about their printer business and where that talent went, but I think we can all agree that things have gone far downhill since the 80’s and 90’s when “HP LaserJet” (based on Canon engines 
) was considered the gold standard of small-office printing solutions.
I think HP’s large office printers (the ones the size of file cabinets you find only in big corporations and print shops) are still very good, but they’ve definitely gotten sloppy/lazy with their consumer business. Which is why other vendors are taking quite a bit of market share from them.
It’s also worth noting that HP Enterprise is where Silicon Graphics and Cray ended up.
Yup. My old employer was doing market research for HP back then, and we subsequently did work for Agilent also.
I got to meet David Packard in the early Nineties, shook his hand, thanked him for his part in the revolution which spawned so many of our careers. He was gracious, not frail given his age, but didn’t survive more than a few more years.
I have a HP laserjet that’s twenty years old or so, still cranking out paper as our main office printer. But it is a large corporate model. I’ve had much less satisfaction from a colour laserjet, vowed never again.
“ There is a consensus among analysts that HP Inc. is expected to see a return to growth in the PC market by 2024, with replacement cycles and the end of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows 10 support in October 2025 acting as catalysts. Despite this, there are concerns about the print segment, where the company faces challenges from generic competitors and slow growth in new markets like 3D printing.”
So is ours. We bought it when our heavily used and much loved 1984 Laser Writer gave up the ghost. And this reminds me of Mac and Laser Writer’s remarkable ability to produce super duper and absolutely beautiful typography very quickly and efficiently. It really did “change the world.”
It looks to me like HP has focused Compaq on OEM and licensing, and they are getting especially aggressive outside the US:
My guess is that they couldn’t compete with Samsung, Lenovo, etc., etc., who, kind of like Apple in the US, get a large % of their sales direct to consumer. And Especially like Dell, who sells a lot of products DTC as well as to businesses of all shapes and sizes.
Interestingly, both Apple and HP’s laser printers were based on the same Canon engine. Which is why the printers looked very similar and used the same toner cartridges.
HP went with a simple bitmap/font API (which evolved over time into PCL), while Apple’s were equipped with Adobe PostScript. But since the first generation Macs weren’t powerful enough to generate PostScript output, those early systems would upload a “QuickDraw Emulator” application (written in PostScript, I believe), so the apps could send raw QuickDraw commands to it (allowing the printer driver to be trivially simple).
Later on, when Macs had more memory and more CPU power, they switched to sending PostScript directly to those printers.
And just one final note, some of Apple’s ink-jet printers (the StyleWriter series, mostly based on Canon engines) were designed to accept QuickDraw as the native API. This was at the time when others were selling Windows-only printers (that received a version of Microsoft’s GDI language as input), so it wasn’t so surprising, but I’m amused that it also hearkens back to those first laser printers.
HP had a line of programmable desktop computers back in the early 1970s. HP 9800 series - Wikipedia I was working in a military lab then and rewrote a Fortran program that simulated weather for the HP-9800. The physicists in the lab liked it because the desktop (with something like 16K memory) yielded results faster than the Fortran program run on a time-sharing CDC 6600.
HP also made the first pocket calculator. An HP salesman dropped by and the physicists drooled at the pocket calculator. Later that had programmable business calculators in the pocket calculator; I still have one my father used consulting work. So long ago HP did have some sharp computing tech.
If you’re looking for the original company’s DNA, you’re more likely to find it in Agilent , a 1999 spinoff that took a lot of the high-quality instrumentation business with it.
Actually, the DNA of the original HP ended up in Keysight which was created when Agilent spun off their RF and electronic test and measurement business in 2014.
Yes, let’s not forget HP’s line of RPN calculators. I could feel the disturbance in the force when HP decided to discontinue them. The only remnant of those “classic RPN-only” devices appears to be the financial version (HP-12C). That one is still production by HP Inc due to its popularity. I won’t vouch for the quality of those builds.
I have an almost 40 year old HP 16C - the programmer’s model which is extremely rare and a godsend to anyone working in assembly language). Just needs a new set of batteries every few years.
Same here; an HP 10C for everyday/business calculations, and a 16C which I rarely use in retirement, but got a lot of action when I was doing bit-wise programming and debugging of test and measurement equipment I was working on.
Re: the original HP DNA: For many years, our primary competitor in the T&M market was HP (and then Agilent); back in the day, they made some very good bench equipment for electrical testing.