Company
ReorganizedHewlett-Packard
Palo Alto · Since 1939
Split in 2015 into HP Inc., which sells printers and PCs, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which sells to companies.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard formalized their partnership in 1939, working out of a Palo Alto garage. The first products were electronic instruments: oscillators, and later the counters and testers engineers used to build other machines. Hewlett-Packard sold tools to the people who were inventing the next industry.
The company grew by hiring engineers and giving them unusual discretion, a style that became part of the Valley's story about itself. The style was real. So were the instruments, which is the part the story sometimes skips.
From the bench to the office
HP entered computing gradually, with controllers and then minicomputers used in laboratories and factories, and later with printers and personal computers. Each step employed a different customer and a different internal staff. The instrument designer, the field engineer who calibrated a customer's bench, and eventually the people who sold a printer to a household were all HP. The garage is the myth. The payroll was the calibration technician.
Two companies
In 2015 Hewlett-Packard split. HP Inc. kept printers and personal computers. Hewlett Packard Enterprise kept the equipment sold to other companies. Both still operate. A former employee has to say which one. The 1939 partnership is the ancestor of both, and of Agilent, spun off earlier from the original instrument business. The catalogue lists one history under one name and marks the status reorganized, because the work continues in pieces.
The work it organized
- Instrument designer
- Calibration technician
- Field engineer
- Printer-line worker
On the timeline
Related
- IBMActive