Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California. Growing to become an influential high-tech powerhouse at the heart of Silicon Valley, the company was known for its progressive business philosophy, deemed the HP Way. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services, to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses, and fairly large companies, including customers in government sectors. At its peak in 2011, HP employed 350,000 people around the globe. The company officially split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. in 2015.
HP initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment. It won its first big contract in 1938 to provide the HP 200B, a variation of its first product, the HP 200A low-distortion frequency oscillator, for Walt Disney's production of the 1940 animated film Fantasia, which allowed Hewlett and Packard to formally establish the Hewlett-Packard Company on July 2, 1939. The company grew into a multinational corporation widely respected for its products. HP was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007 until the second quarter of 2013 when Lenovo moved ahead of HP. HP specialized in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software, and delivering services. Major product lines included personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software, and a range of printers and other imaging products. The company directly marketed its products to households, small- to medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, as well as via online distribution, consumer-electronics, and office-supply retailers, software partners, and major technology vendors. It also offered services and a consulting business for its products and partner products.
In 1999, HP spun off its electronic and bio-analytical test and measurement instruments business into Agilent Technologies; HP retained focus on its later products, including computers and printers. It merged with Compaq in 2002 in what was then a major deal within the industry. They made numerous other acquisitions including Electronic Data Systems in 2008, which led to combined revenues of $118.4 billion that year and a Fortune 500 ranking of 9 in 2009, and later 3Com, Palm, Inc., and 3PAR, all in 2010, followed by Autonomy Corp. However, as a result of the turmoil created by several of these acquisitions, the company's fortunes swiftly declined in the 2010s. This led to Hewlett-Packard Company's split into two separate companies on November 1, 2015: its enterprise products and services business were spun-off to form Hewlett Packard Enterprise, while its personal computer and printer businesses became HP Inc. The split was structured so that the former Hewlett-Packard Company would change its name to HP Inc. and spin off Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a newly created company. HP Inc. retained the old Hewlett-Packard's stock-price history and original NYSE ticker symbol; Hewlett Packard Enterprise trades under its own ticker symbol: HPE.
History
and David Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company started in a garage in Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with past professor Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression, whom they considered a mentor. In 1938, Packard and Hewlett began part-time work in a rented garage with an initial capital investment of. In 1939, Hewlett and Packard decided to formalize their partnership. They tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.Hewlett and Packard's first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator known as the HP 200A, which used a small incandescent light bulb as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, and a negative feedback loop to stabilize the amplitude of the output sinusoidal waveform. This allowed the HP 200A to be sold for when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over. The 200 series of generators continued production until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years.
One of the company's earliest customers was Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer for Walt Disney Studios, who bought eight HP 200B audio oscillators to be used in the animated film Fantasia. HP's profit at the end of 1939, its first full year of business, was on revenues of.
In 1942, they built their first building at 395 Page Mill Road and were awarded the Army-Navy "E" Award in 1943. HP employed 200 people and produced the audio oscillator, a wave analyzer, distortion analyzers, an audio-signal generator, and the Model 400A vacuum-tube voltmeter during the war.
Hewlett and Packard worked on counter-radar technology and artillery shell proximity fuzes during World War II; the work exempted Packard from the draft, but Hewlett had to serve as an officer in the Army Signal Corps after being called to active duty.
HP was incorporated on August 18, 1947, with Packard as president. Sales reached in 1951 with 215 employees. The company went public on November 6, 1957. In 1959, a manufacturing plant was established in Böblingen and a marketing organization in Geneva. Packard handed the presidency over to Hewlett when he became chairman in 1964, but remained CEO of the company.
1960s
HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley, though it did not actively investigate semiconductor devices until a few years after the "traitorous eight" abandoned William Shockley to create Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. The company's HP Associates division was established around 1960 under the leadership of Jack Melchor to develop semiconductor devices primarily for internal use. Instruments and calculators were some of the original HP products that used semiconductor devices.During the 1960s, HP partnered with Sony and Yokogawa Electric in Japan to develop several high-quality products. The products were not a huge success, as there were high costs involved in building HP-looking products in Japan. In 1963, HP and Yokogawa formed the joint venture Yokogawa-Hewlett-Packard to market HP products in Japan. HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999.
HP spun off the small company Dynac to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo could be turned upside down to be a reflected image of the logo of the new company. Dynac was eventually renamed Dymec and folded back into HP in 1959. HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputers with its instruments, but entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers after it decided that it would be easier to build another small design team than deal with DEC. The minicomputers had a simple accumulator-based design with two accumulator registers and, in the HP 1000 models, two index registers. The series was produced for 20 years in spite of several attempts to replace it, and was a forerunner of the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers.
Beginning in 1961, Hewlett-Packard was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under its own ticker symbol, "HWP". At the end of 1968, Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in the incoming Nixon administration. He resumed the chairmanship in 1972 and served until 1993, but Hewlett remained the CEO.
1970s
The HP 3000 was an advanced stack-based design for a business computing server, later redesigned with RISC technology. The HP 2640 series of smart and intelligent terminals introduced forms-based interfaces to ASCII terminals, and also introduced screen labeled function keys. The HP 2640 series included one of the first bit mapped graphics displays that, when combined with the HP 2100 21MX F-Series microcoded Scientific Instruction Set, enabled the first commercial WYSIWYG presentation program, BRUNO, that later became the program HP-Draw on the HP 3000. Although scoffed at in the formative days of computing, HP surpassed IBM as the world's largest technology vendor in terms of sales.HP was identified by Wired magazine as the producer of the world's first device to be called a personal computer: the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, introduced in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Hewlett said: "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator, and all such nonsense disappeared." An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits, and the CPU assembly was entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $5,000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between the keyboard of a scientific calculator and the keyboard of an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak originally designed the Apple I computer while working at HP and offered it to them under their right of first refusal to his work. They did not take it up as the company wanted to stay in scientific, business, and industrial markets. Wozniak said that HP "turned him down five times", but that his loyalty to HP made him hesitant to start Apple with Steve Jobs.
The company earned global respect for a variety of products. They introduced the world's first handheld scientific electronic calculator in 1972, the first handheld programmable in 1974, the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable in 1979, and the first symbolic and graphing calculator, the HP-28C.
Like their scientific and business calculators, HP oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other measurement instruments had a reputation for sturdiness and usability. HP introduced the Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus computer peripheral interface on their relay actuator products in 1973. HPIB was later integrated into most high end test & measurement equipment it produced from 1980 onward.
As early as 1977, HP began production of the HP856x spectrum analyzers to complement its RF power meters and sensors capable of measuring signals in excess of 20 GHz. HP also produced configurable chassis based sweep generators capable of generating signals to 20 GHz. Other T&M products of the time included lab grade multimeters, microwave frequency counters, RF amplifiers, high accuracy microwave detectors, lab grade power supplies and more. These products were succeeded by modernized versions as well as the introduction of the scalar and vector network analyzer product lines prior to the business being spun off into Agilent Technologies.
The HP 9800 series of technical desktop computers started in 1971 with the 9810A. The HP Series 80 started in 1979 with the 85. Some of these machines used a version of the BASIC programming language, which was available immediately after they were switched on, and used a proprietary magnetic tape for storage. HP computers were similar in capabilities to the much later IBM Personal Computer, though the limitations of available technology forced prices to be high.
In 1978, Hewlett stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by John A. Young.