Have you ever wondered, while shopping for Laserjet toner cartridges or ink refills for your HP printers, just where this company called Hewlett-Packard came from? It is an interesting story spanning eighty years and bringing a humble side-job startup out from the red to the black and out from a small town to the world stage. David Packard and Bill Hewlett, the namesakes for Hewlett-Packard, began their company in a one car garage at Palo Alto USA following their graduation from Stanford University where they had studied electrical engineering. Sheltered from the difficult depression economy by a fellowship and the mentorship of a college professor named Fredrick Terman, they sought to innovate as they designed their products. It is strange to think that this little startup with an initial investment of under six hundred dollars now sells equipment every day priced at a hundred times that. HP scored an early and lasting success in their production of something called a precision audio oscillator which was picked up by Disney who used it to work on the audio in fantasia. In fact that very design oscillator was still on the market, with notable improvements, in the nineteen seventies due to its unique, rugged, and highly effective design. At the beginning, because of its innovations, they were selling the device for a quarter of what their competition could charge. Eventually in the nineteen forties the company began to focus its market on high end electronics testing equipment as they, like always, pushed for making each product better than what was standard on the market.
Hp also played an important role in the establishment of Silicon Valley, the tech company Mecca of the modern age, which also involved their entrance into the computer market of the 1960s, even though computers in the nineteen sixties worked much along the lines of modern-day calculators. Not only this, but HP was foundational in the conceptualization of the personal computer and marketed some of the earliest designs despite their wish to stay in the industrial and technological fields. This involvement gave HP the boost necessary to pass even IBM in sales in the 1970s, which was no easy feat at the time. However, it was not until the 1980s that HP began to market inkjet and LaserJet printers along with inkjet and HP ink cartridges. Ironically, considering the weight of the HP brand name in the printing industry, much of their printer technology originated in Xerox with improvements taken up by Cannon, the company which built much of the components and framework for the HP brand printers of the time. It was HPs connection to the computer market which made their ascension possible, however, as HP perfected and developed much of the technology which allows information to be sent from the computer and converted into special dot information for the printer so that the ink can be placed correctly on the paper. And, to top off their claims to early technological fame, HP was the ninth registered internet domain name on the internet, making the HP website nearly as old as the world wide web itself. The culture of HP is defined in a document known as the HP way, which states that the company values individual contribution and integrity and turns that foundation to large scale problem solving as they push the limit on what their products can do.
Major changes have occurred recently, however. Compaq, a well known computer company which serviced the private sector exclusively, merged with HP giving the company a hugely increased presence in the computer market. Unfortunately the company suffered setbacks on the stock market through the 2000s as did many other technology companies which had been over-inflated in the late 1990s, an even which many refer to as the Bubble Bursting. Following restructurings and mergers through 2010, as well as some corporate drama and a few technical errors and product recalls, HP announced its intention to back off on the computer market, creating a new company to handle that market while HP itself focused more on servers and online services. HP is also a powerful player in the Camera, Printing, and phone industries and they have won numerous awards over their history. Awards for nature conservation, fair labor practices, innovation, and corporate culture. So, whether you are buying an HP pavilion notebook, Presario laptop, HP 2840 toner, or a photo smart camera you can rest assured that your purchase comes from the 11th most valuable brand, a company with a long history marked by innovation, determination, and quality.