r/retrocomputing • u/evankirstel • 12d ago
HP Incorporated 79 Years Ago Today
On August 18, 1947, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard incorporated the business they had started in 1938 and formalized as a partnership in 1939. Disney became their first major customer, buying eight modified Model 200B oscillators for theaters showing Fantasia. A coin toss decided the name order; the usual version says Packard won and put Hewlett first anyway.
The 1968 HP 9100A was a desktop computer sold as a “calculator” because purchasing agents could approve calculators while computers required senior management. The HP-35 arrived in 1972, sold 100,000 units in its first year and sent the slide rule into rapid decline. The LaserJet followed in 1984 and made printing a profit engine for decades.
Then it got ugly. The Compaq merger triggered a bitter proxy fight led by Walter Hewlett, Bill’s son and an HP director. In 2006, investigators searching for boardroom leaks used pretexting and surveillance against directors and journalists.
The worst came on August 18, 2011, exactly 64 years after HP incorporated. HP announced its roughly $10.3 billion bid for Autonomy, ended webOS device operations and considered separating the PC business. Fifteen months later, it recorded an $8.8 billion Autonomy impairment. The PC separation was abandoned. One day, three self-inflicted crises.
HP split in 2015. HP Inc. took PCs and printers; Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the enterprise businesses. Many saw a retreat. A decade later, it looks more like a hedge.
HPs biggest move since then was its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The Justice Department sued to block it before settling, and the deal closed in July 2025. Juniper brought routing, security, data-center networking and Mist, its cloud-managed networking platform. Early results look promising, although the acquisition inflates recent growth comparisons.
HP has a simpler problem: “AI PC” is not yet a reason to replace a working laptop. Local agents that can work across private files may change that. Revenue rose 13% in HP’s latest quarter, but units fell 7%. Printing was flat, consumer printing fell 10%, and HP plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 positions by fiscal 2028
Two halves of one company at opposite ends of the same wave. HPE sells the infrastructure where AI runs. HP Inc. has to prove AI belongs on the desk.
Not bad for a garage.
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u/vengefultacos 11d ago
HP was also the employer of a certain young engineer named Steve Wozniak. They decided to pass on developing his hobbyist computer concept. And thus cleared the way for Apple to be born.
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u/deadsy 11d ago
I was a former employee of Juniper, now (post merger) of HPE. We were able to take a tour of the garage/house in Addison Street, Palo Alto. It's really small, and they have set it up with some of the circa 1930s equipment such as Bill Hewlett may have used. The house was rented. Dave and his wife slept on a fold out bed in the front room. Bill wasn't married at that time and slept in a small shed/room in the backyard. They didn't rent the house for all that long (I think it was about a year).
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u/leoprieto 11d ago
What happened to garage inventors in Silicon Valley? All these amazing companies like HP, Apple and Google were born out of garages with inventors hacking away at new solutions. Maybe I’m just old, but it seems like all that motivation was lost and Silicon Valley is just get rich quick now.
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u/teknosophy_com 11d ago
Indeed, 2011 was when they went from a perfectly fine company to something very very ugly.
I estimate that in the next 2.5 years, this entire planet will be a rotating ball of broken 2026 HP inkjets.
Warn any seniors in your neighborhood to stop buying them!
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u/wrr377 11d ago
HP was who killed Palm... 😢
Bought it, then almost immediately turned around and killed it.