I thought they made printers...
Hewlett-Packard has been building computers, starting with minis, for a long time now.
Back around 1968, Kay Magleby (sp?) designed a 16-bit mini, I believe intended for use as scientific instrumentation control machines. Core memory (4 and 8 kilowords standard), toggle switches, blinking lights, paper tape reader, Hollerith card reader, the whole works. Languages it supported included assembler, FORTRAN, BASIC and Algol. That was the HP 2116. Together with smaller siblings, the 2115, and later 2114, this was moderately successful for HP. This series evolved into the HP-2000 series.
In the mid-70s, if memory serves, they went into Business Computing with a stack-based machine (rumour had it it was derived from the Burroughs stack architecture) called the HP-3000. They sold tons of those guys. Look back in their 10K's; you should see a decent impact to their bottom line from the HP-3000s. Oh yeah, those beasts also ran Cobol :-).
Just a tad before Sun Microsystems started in the early 1980s, a Massachusetts company called Apollo was also using 68000 processors to build engineering workstations. The 68000 could really not page-fault gracefully (the world had to wait for the 68010), and the early Apollos had a dual 68000 system that handed over execution to the idle 68000 when a page needed to be swapped in :-). Seems so crude now, but it was so elegant then.
HP bought Apollo in the late 80s (or perhaps early 90s) and became a force in the workstation business.
In conjunction to that, an HP team had created the Precision Architecture[tm] (PA) processor. I have no idea why their workstation business was not too successful, and I believe the result was HP "gave" Intel the design, and some of the team. This is supposed to be that thing after Merced.
If memory serves, HP created printers to support the 2116. I remember a chain printer (gak... someone else explains to the current generation what a chain printer is :-) for the 2116. In the early 80's they had built their own laser based printer, codenamed "Boise," after the division that has since been manufacturing their laser printers. HP ink jet printers are built in Washington and their wide bed printers in Spain. I believe the marking engines for their laser printers have been Japanese manufactured since 1983.
Now, the real engineers among us will always remember HP as the creator of the HP-200CD oscillator. One of those first vacuum tube based 200CD's went to Disneyland to run "Lincoln." A score of years later, HP finally managed to convince Disney to upgrade to a modern transistor oscillator; for Disney, if it ain't broke, don't replace it. That was how reliable HP's first products were.
BTW, the IEEE Floating Point standard that we all use came originally out of HP.
No, I have never worked at HP :-).
Cheers,
Kok Chen |
