Posted by
michael
on from the lovely-plumage dept.
scratch writes: "Computing pioneer and all 'round good guy Bill Hewlett has died.
NYT obit is here ." Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
I remember my first programmable calculator, an HP-67, programmable, card reader for storage! Maybe its in my genes, but RPN seemed very natural to me. Last time I tried to use it I found that the card drive wheel had turned to gunk. I just found the HP Museum site with repair info.
http://www.hpmuseum.org/
I may get that thing running again.
By the way,/. needs a script to filter out posts with screens of empty lines in them. Some jerks can be so annoying.
Packard and Hewlett were two great gentlemen. I was at Stanford when Packard died in 1996; only then, reading the man's obituary did I realize that the two of them and their families had given tens (if not hundreds) of millions to the school they dropped out from.
And the reason I hadn't realized that was that most of the buildings they funded had the names of others (on their request), most notably Dr. Terman's, their EE prof who pushed them to form a company and helped them out when HP was still two guys out of a garage.
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
Are you kidding? Reverse Polish Notation is a wonderful thing. Who needs parentheses (a la TI) anyway... just pop the stack. I fondly remember my 1st HP calculator... an 11C I think... and still use my 41 CX (with Math/Stat plugin doodad) when doing problem solving.
I think the 15 C could do arrays operations, such as solve determinants and systems of equations etc. When I was in college my 41 CX saved me a few points on an exam; I was solving an integral by hand and missed a sign and that became apparent after approximating the integral solution with the calculator.
In fact, now that I think back, the 41CX was my high school graduation present. Such fond memories. Rest in peace Mr. Hewlett!
Leigh Orf
-- A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Geek and Fraternity Brother, too!
by
cjsnell
·
· Score: 3
In addition to being a notable geek, William Hewlett was also a member of theKappa Sigma Fraternity. And I'll bet you thought that all fraternity guys were dumb geeks who couldn't turn on a computer to save their asses.:-)
Hey, I think it's a great compliment to him and tribute to his work to take note that he had a huge impact on the world (and despite that managed to get me to refuse to use one of his caclulators.) Anyway, like a nother guy here said, chill. If we can joke about him without guilt, we know we respect him.
-- Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Thanks, Bill. We'll Miss You.
by
BigBlockMopar
·
· Score: 4
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
At least you can be sure that once you've figured out how to use the damned calculator, you won't need to replace it for a *long* time.
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for building indestructible test equipment and laser printers.
At the office, we have a ten year old LaserJet IIID. It's had a fuser in it because our receptionist caught a label in it and scratched the teflon off it by trying to scrape the sheet out with scissors. Aside from that, a toner/drum cartridge every two weeks. Yes, a toner cartridge every two weeks. We do print that much, and the thing has never missed a beat.
Estimating conservatively 3,000 pages per cartridge (probably more because we do lots of long documents) and 50 weeks in a year (actually 52, but that's okay):
10 years x 50 = 500 weeks.
New toner every 2 weeks = 250 toner cartridges.
3,000 pages per toner x 250 = 750,000 pages.
And to think that the office supply company told us to buy an offset press. Ha!
More stuff should be built like that. It goes without saying that when the engineering department needed a printer of their own, we bought another LaserJet.
Now, if only I could get that damned 25-year-old HP dual-trace oscilloscope to die so I can buy a new HP Digital Storage scope. Or the friggin' 35-year-old HP Microwave Power Meter that uses a bank of 12AX7s which require a few seconds to warm up but 20 minutes to stabilize before I can take a good reading.
Damn you, Bill Hewlett. <grin> Sometimes excessive quality is a liability. And it's really cool to be able to complain about this.
Re:Thanks, Bill. We'll Miss You.
by
pestel
·
· Score: 3
I love the stories! I have the same feeling. Back when I was an undergraduate, I was working in an atmospheric chemistry lab and using an HP gas chromatograph. The guy I was working for was a temporary hire so we got the hand me downs. The GC was over 15 years old and used analog controls while all the other labs around us had nice new ones with digital readouts and such. We modified that GC to work for us and the damn thing never ever broke (I wanted a new one)! That was 10 years ago and as far as I know that GC is still in use...
On the other hand I'm very thankful for the durability of HP products. I've been using an HP 15C for almost 20 years. My dad worked at HP and got one for me for a birthday gift. I've actually had 3 of them - the first one was stolen in high school when my locker mate left the damn locker open! The second one I got was destroyed when some person who was clearly upset with me, snuck into my office when I was in graduate school and stabbed it with a knife! I managed to find another one for $50 somehow almost 5 years past the last time they were made. Now I worry about what will happen if this one dies! I don't like the 48 series - too big! As someone else said about the 12C, the 15C for me was the end all of the scientific calculator. It could integrate, do complex numbers and matrices, was programmable, and yet was compact enough to carry around in a shirt pocket. If I can't find batteries, I've contemplated buying a 12C (since they're still in production) and stealing its batteries!:-) I sure can't use a non-RPN calculator!
I remember a friend of mine had a 12C and it has a cool function where you can input 2 dates into it and it will tell you how many days there were between them. I remember being taunted into showing that the same thing could be done on the 15C (which didn't have that built in). It was the first program I ever wrote.
I still have my HP IIP printer that is over 10 years old - still works great. Our department ONLY uses HP printers.
Goodbye Bill - we'll miss you.
(and my dad met both Hewlett and Packard when he worked at HP)
There's a reson why professionals such as surveyors, engineers, and toolmakers (like me) use HP calculators:
They're not brain damaged. Brain damage is a calculator that does "algebraic" data entry, but does postfix notation when using the trig functions (Hello, TI and Casio). Consistency across the user interface, on top of RPN, makes for an extremely powerful and useful machine.
Seriously, once one gets used to RPN (it takes about a week, or a day if you're really pounding the keys), there's no going back to infix math. Everything else just seems *inferior*. It's like the hackers' disdain for "strong typing".
If there's anything confusing about calculators, it's trying to remember how deep the parentheses are nested in that nasty equation. RPN dispenses with parentheses entirely and gives the user a stack to push and pop numbers to and from. Algebraic calculators typically only limit the user to 6 layers of parentheses, but the HP stack is limited only by available memory.
To top it off, HP calculators tend to be so much more durable than the offerings of TI, Casio, and Sharp and the keyboards can't be beat for feel and durability. HP calculators also tend to be logically laid out on the keyboard, and important functions on the graphical calcs are NOT buried under menus (my last Casio graphing calc put the most common trig functions in a menu. Really.), or if they must be menued, are only 2 keypresses away.
I have also heard that Hewlett Packard calcs are "too expensive". I thought this too, until I bought one. HP is competitive with TI in this area. Hewlett Packard's calcs tend to be a bit *less* expensive than the corresponding offerings from TI on the high end (HP49G vs TI-92).
In my not-so-humble opinion, there is no substitute for a good tool, and a Hewlett-Packard calculator is a Good Tool.
Typical non-hp user vs Me.
Non HP user - "Hey, can I borrow your calculator for a sec?"
Me - "Sure" *hands calc*
Non HPer - "WTF!?"
Me - "wossamatta, never seen a real calculator before?"
Non HPer - "Man, that's fucked up. Why don't you use a _normal calculator_?"
Me - "I'm far from normal" *gives evil eye and a mad-scientist chuckle*
Mr. Hewlett, we will miss you dearly.
HP's an evolutionary company.
by
s390
·
· Score: 5
When someone passes away in a community, those who knew them or knew of them will gather to raise a glass and remember their life; it's called a wake.
I've got a glass of Chivas, and MP3s playing on the CD-R in my Thinkpad's DVD drive, so here's a story - just my small contribution to William Hewlett's online Slashdot wake.
Tektronix started out building oscilliscopes. They built excellent and increasingly complicated oscilliscopes (in the 60's, I believe Tek was the largest private employer in Oregon). And they believed in hardware - hardcore EE: circuits, transistors, PC boards, ICs. They had all the big customers - US military, IBM, etc., all locked in. So Tektronix didn't notice much when HP started building oscilliscopes, too. Nor did they pay attention when HP started using _software_ to drive its new oscilliscopes. Tek's company culture was hardware, period. Big mistake.
Over the following 10-15 years, HP took a big chunk of the oscilliscope market from Tektronix by using _software_ to build less expensive yet more versatile instruments. By the mid-80s (when I worked there for a couple years), Tek was visibly stagnating and losing its core customers. (At it's peak, they employed something like 20,000 people at several plants in the area).
[Tek had an IBM 3090-200 at its headquarters campus, and two IBM 4381s at each of five satellite plants. I remember being impressed that I could logon to one system, submit a job to be run on a second system 20 miles away, and direct the printout to a third system 30 miles from it (that's called JES2 NJE, and it _still_ works like that... across oceans and continents, now).]
Now Tektronix is a small fraction of that size, having sold off its printer business to Xerox and downsized steadily. The largest private employer in Oregon is now Intel, if I'm not mistaken.
Who pulled the marketshare out from under Tek? Hewlett-Packard! HP used software to drive test & measurement devices... including oscilliscopes. Tektronix didn't get it, not in time.
HP only started on computers much later, as an incidental line of business. Now, HP is a computer company, having spun off the test & measurement (plus medical) business into Agilent.
Hewlett-Packard was smart enough to see the future and get there early. They've evolved the company and I take my virtual hat off to the memory of William Hewlett, a smart gentleman.
I hope God gives him Heaven's garage to tinker in.
H-P's first product was an audio sine-wave oscillator based on Hewlett's MSEE thesis at Stanford. He has described how he baked the paint on the front panels in the home oven while his wife was gone, and how Walt Disney Studios gave them their first order for 8 oscillators, which financed them to make more. But nobody here has yet mentioned the cleverness of the design, which is something/. readers might appreciate, so let me briefly describe it.
There are many ways to incorporate a tuned circuit in the feedback path of an amplifier to cause it to oscillate. All were well known in the late 40's. The tricky part is to control the amplification: too little, and the sine waves get smaller and disappear; too much, and they get bigger and distorted and finally clip and come out as square waves, or lock up the amplifier altogether. A stable, low-distortion oscillator requires close level control of the feedback, which determines the amplification.
Hewlett found a beautifully simple way to accomplish this within the feedback network itself, without a separate circuit. By applying the output to a resistor with a positive temperature coefficient, when the output level increased, the resistor would heat up, increasing its resistance. A decreasing level would let the resistor cool off, reducing its resistance. Such a resistor in the the right place in the feedback network would provide automatic self-adjustment of the amplification, and thus the possibility of low distortion and constant output level, all without the need to constantly adjust the oscillator.
So where do you get the necessary resistor? It must have sluggish response so it didn't appreciably change over the course of a cycle of oscillation, which would cause distortion. Hewlett's solution was to use the PILOT LIGHT as the gain-control device! He designed the rest of the circuit around the light bulb on the front panel, and achieved a clean, stable sine wave oscillator that required far fewer parts (and fewer precision parts) than previous designs, but performed much better.
When the light bulb lit up over this inventor's head, he took it literally, and the rest is history.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
Taking Bill Hewlett's Name in Vain
by
BigBlockMopar
·
· Score: 5
Ok, this is kinda offtopic, but man, chill. Everyone always gets all uppity when someone dies and takes things way to serious. I mean hell, obviously the guys at slashdot thing highly enough of Bill Hewlett to post about his death, which is a tribute to him in and of itself.
Exactly. I'm an HP fan. I use a lot of their test equipment in my work. And put a lot of miles on their printer. Hewlett-Packard makes fine products, and it takes a fine man with vision and concern for his customers to enforce that.
And with no disrespect for him - Bill Hewlett and David Packard are two people whom I admire tremendously - I will take his name in vain next time I fire up that damned 25 year old HP oscilloscope that I've been trying to get my boss to replace. I know that I'm not going to get the new 'scope I want until that thing dies. I also know that thing is not going to die on its own. And it's too much of a work of art to pull a Kevorkian on it by dropping a quarter into one of its ventilation slots.
From everything I've heard about him, that little tale would make William Hewlett smile.
Rock on, Bill. The world needs more people like you.
I work for HP and here's a clip of our newsletter:
---BEGIN-CLIP---
NEWSGRAM: news for HP people Friday, January 12, 2001
BILL HEWLETT: THE PASSING OF A LEGEND
Bill Hewlett, revered Hewlett-Packard co-founder and one of the world's foremost business leaders, technologists and philanthropists, died at home in his sleep at 8 a.m. PST today of natural causes. He was 87 years old.
The venture that Hewlett and his long-time partner and good friend Dave Packard founded in a Palo Alto, California, garage in 1939 has grown into two companies: Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. HP had total revenue of $48.8 billion (U.S.) in its FY00 fiscal year and has more than 88,500 employees worldwide. Agilent had net revenue of more than $10.8 billion for FY00 and has more than 47,000 employees. Packard died March 26, 1996, at the age of 83.
During his lifetime, Hewlett received dozens of high professional honors. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was co-founder of the American Electronics Association; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which gave him its Founders' Award in 1993; a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and an honorary lifetime member of the Instrument Society of America.
Funeral arrangements for Hewlett are pending.
---END-CLIP---
CNN obit for those who don't like to log in to NYT
by
adavidw
·
· Score: 5
The 12C is a unique tech achievement
by
astrashe
·
· Score: 4
I don't know if Hewitt had much or anything to do with the HP-12C financial calculator, but if he did, he accomplished something extraordinary.
The 12C, alone out of all of the electronic devices that I can think of, is "finished". It hasn't been changed for more than a decade. Even the documentation is the same. But even so, it's still the overwhelming first choice for financial professionals.
My point is that it's complete, changing it would make it worse. The interface, the functionality that's built in, the functionality that's left out. The size, shape and weight of the device. According to the market, no one has been able to top it. The design is perfect.
What other electronic product can make any of those claims? The idea that a tool -- like a word processor -- could be "finished" is totally alien to the way we think about our tools. Most geeks would say that "finishing" is impossible. But the 12C shows that's not true.
Hewitt's company has done a lot of great things, and people will write about most of them over the next few days. I hope the 12C doesn't get lost in the shuffle.
Re:Hewlett Packard
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3
Yes, Woz used to work for HP, and speaks highly of the company.
Woz had designed TWO computers. The first was a slick Dual Z-80 machine with intergrated monitor that ran CPM (CPM was the most popular OS in those pre-MSDOS days). The second Z-80 cpu was used as a Video Co-processor! That computer later became the HP-125 and sold for $3500. And HP sold several of them. I own a later version, the HP-120 (same machine as the HP-125, much smaller case).
The second computer was a cheap 6502 based machine with a rom based OS. The OS had not even been developed yet. It was so cheap, you had to use a TV for a monitor. HP was not interested in building that one. But if Woz was interested, he could build it himself. And if it didn't work out, HP still had a job if he wanted one.
The Apple 1 was designed at HP, and sold for $666. And everybody owned the later version, the Apple II.
Given the above choice, most companies would chose to build the $3500 slick machine. What HP did that was significant was to let Woz *HAVE* the other design. Even though it was designed on company time.
And this wasn't an isolated event. Dozens of Sillicon Vally companies started inside HP. Tandom's original computer was basically a HP-3000 Series 2 with a dual CPU.
This is part of the HP Way.
And this is how Bill and Dave started Silicon Vally.
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
Confusing? What's so confusing about having a stack and using reverse-postfix notation? In high
school, I went from a TI-45 (or something like that -- the 8x and 9x series had yet to be birthed into existance) to an HP-46G. I never went back
to a standard calculator. The HP calcs made sense, and you weren't limited to a linear string of calculations like you were with other calulators on the market at the time. Hewlett-Packard was far, far ahead of the other
pocket calculator manufacturers back in the day.
It's sad to see that one of the men responsible for all of this in no longer with us.
I'll tell you what's confusing. My first calculator was an HP-25. I was perfectly comfortable learning and using RPN. Now I have trouble using my Casio, what with all those parentheses and other damn fool things.
HP-25 program for Fibonacci series (I might have forgotten the exact syntax - it's been 25 years):
Would have expected a better RPN comment from /.
by
_N0EL
·
· Score: 4
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
How many of you have over the years thoroughly enjoyed handing your HP to someone asking to borrow your calculator, only to see the look of horror and disbelief on their face seconds later? Better yet, how many friends have you made when the borrower knew how to use RPN?
When I was at Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech (before it was coed) we'd get together and have calculator races with our HPs (yes, on Saturday night). I was so disappointed when the carrying case of my most recent HP48G didn't have a belt loop! What have we become???
--
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
Ok, this is kinda offtopic, but man, chill. Everyone always gets all uppity when someone dies and takes things way to serious. I mean hell, obviously the guys at slashdot thing highly enough of Bill Hewlett to post about his death, which is a tribute to him in and of itself.
I think they also handled it right by not getting all uptight about it, that's not the way to celebrate someones death, it's to be happy and rejoice in the life they had, i mean hell, if you can be happy and laugh ever once in a while then what the hell is the purpose of life.
tdawg
-- You can kill the revolutionary but you can't kill the revolution
Slashdot Mirror
I remember my first programmable calculator, an HP-67, programmable, card reader for storage! Maybe its in my genes, but RPN seemed very natural to me. Last time I tried to use it I found that the card drive wheel had turned to gunk. I just found the HP Museum site with repair info. /. needs a script to filter out posts with screens of empty lines in them. Some jerks can be so annoying.
http://www.hpmuseum.org/
I may get that thing running again.
By the way,
Packard and Hewlett were two great gentlemen. I was at Stanford when Packard died in 1996; only then, reading the man's obituary did I realize that the two of them and their families had given tens (if not hundreds) of millions to the school they dropped out from.
And the reason I hadn't realized that was that most of the buildings they funded had the names of others (on their request), most notably Dr. Terman's, their EE prof who pushed them to form a company and helped them out when HP was still two guys out of a garage.
That's class people...
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
So these generations of users were confusing? What does this have to do with HP?
More
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
Are you kidding? Reverse Polish Notation is a wonderful thing. Who needs parentheses (a la TI) anyway... just pop the stack. I fondly remember my 1st HP calculator... an 11C I think... and still use my 41 CX (with Math/Stat plugin doodad) when doing problem solving.
I think the 15 C could do arrays operations, such as solve determinants and systems of equations etc. When I was in college my 41 CX saved me a few points on an exam; I was solving an integral by hand and missed a sign and that became apparent after approximating the integral solution with the calculator.
In fact, now that I think back, the 41CX was my high school graduation present. Such fond memories. Rest in peace Mr. Hewlett!
Leigh Orf
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
In addition to being a notable geek, William Hewlett was also a member of theKappa Sigma Fraternity. And I'll bet you thought that all fraternity guys were dumb geeks who couldn't turn on a computer to save their asses. :-)
Hey, I think it's a great compliment to him and tribute to his work to take note that he had a huge impact on the world (and despite that managed to get me to refuse to use one of his caclulators.) Anyway, like a nother guy here said, chill. If we can joke about him without guilt, we know we respect him.
Rest Peace In
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for confusing generations of calculator users.
At least you can be sure that once you've figured out how to use the damned calculator, you won't need to replace it for a *long* time.
Hewlett-Packard: responsible for building indestructible test equipment and laser printers.
At the office, we have a ten year old LaserJet IIID. It's had a fuser in it because our receptionist caught a label in it and scratched the teflon off it by trying to scrape the sheet out with scissors. Aside from that, a toner/drum cartridge every two weeks. Yes, a toner cartridge every two weeks. We do print that much, and the thing has never missed a beat.
Estimating conservatively 3,000 pages per cartridge (probably more because we do lots of long documents) and 50 weeks in a year (actually 52, but that's okay):
10 years x 50 = 500 weeks.
New toner every 2 weeks = 250 toner cartridges.
3,000 pages per toner x 250 = 750,000 pages.
And to think that the office supply company told us to buy an offset press. Ha!
More stuff should be built like that. It goes without saying that when the engineering department needed a printer of their own, we bought another LaserJet.
Now, if only I could get that damned 25-year-old HP dual-trace oscilloscope to die so I can buy a new HP Digital Storage scope. Or the friggin' 35-year-old HP Microwave Power Meter that uses a bank of 12AX7s which require a few seconds to warm up but 20 minutes to stabilize before I can take a good reading.
Damn you, Bill Hewlett. <grin> Sometimes excessive quality is a liability. And it's really cool to be able to complain about this.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Is that really needed here?
There's a reson why professionals such as surveyors, engineers, and toolmakers (like me) use HP calculators:
They're not brain damaged. Brain damage is a calculator that does "algebraic" data entry, but does postfix notation when using the trig functions (Hello, TI and Casio). Consistency across the user interface, on top of RPN, makes for an extremely powerful and useful machine.
Seriously, once one gets used to RPN (it takes about a week, or a day if you're really pounding the keys), there's no going back to infix math. Everything else just seems *inferior*. It's like the hackers' disdain for "strong typing".
If there's anything confusing about calculators, it's trying to remember how deep the parentheses are nested in that nasty equation. RPN dispenses with parentheses entirely and gives the user a stack to push and pop numbers to and from. Algebraic calculators typically only limit the user to 6 layers of parentheses, but the HP stack is limited only by available memory.
To top it off, HP calculators tend to be so much more durable than the offerings of TI, Casio, and Sharp and the keyboards can't be beat for feel and durability. HP calculators also tend to be logically laid out on the keyboard, and important functions on the graphical calcs are NOT buried under menus (my last Casio graphing calc put the most common trig functions in a menu. Really.), or if they must be menued, are only 2 keypresses away.
I have also heard that Hewlett Packard calcs are "too expensive". I thought this too, until I bought one. HP is competitive with TI in this area. Hewlett Packard's calcs tend to be a bit *less* expensive than the corresponding offerings from TI on the high end (HP49G vs TI-92).
In my not-so-humble opinion, there is no substitute for a good tool, and a Hewlett-Packard calculator is a Good Tool.
Typical non-hp user vs Me.
Non HP user - "Hey, can I borrow your calculator for a sec?"
Me - "Sure" *hands calc*
Non HPer - "WTF!?"
Me - "wossamatta, never seen a real calculator before?"
Non HPer - "Man, that's fucked up. Why don't you use a _normal calculator_?"
Me - "I'm far from normal" *gives evil eye and a mad-scientist chuckle*
Mr. Hewlett, we will miss you dearly.
When someone passes away in a community, those who knew them or knew of them will gather to raise a glass and remember their life; it's called a wake.
I've got a glass of Chivas, and MP3s playing on the CD-R in my Thinkpad's DVD drive, so here's a story - just my small contribution to William Hewlett's online Slashdot wake.
Tektronix started out building oscilliscopes. They built excellent and increasingly complicated oscilliscopes (in the 60's, I believe Tek was the largest private employer in Oregon). And they believed in hardware - hardcore EE: circuits, transistors, PC boards, ICs. They had all the big customers - US military, IBM, etc., all locked in. So Tektronix didn't notice much when HP started building oscilliscopes, too. Nor did they pay attention when HP started using _software_ to drive its new oscilliscopes. Tek's company culture was hardware, period. Big mistake.
Over the following 10-15 years, HP took a big chunk of the oscilliscope market from Tektronix by using _software_ to build less expensive yet more versatile instruments. By the mid-80s (when I worked there for a couple years), Tek was visibly stagnating and losing its core customers. (At it's peak, they employed something like 20,000 people at several plants in the area).
[Tek had an IBM 3090-200 at its headquarters campus, and two IBM 4381s at each of five satellite plants. I remember being impressed that I could logon to one system, submit a job to be run on a second system 20 miles away, and direct the printout to a third system 30 miles from it (that's called JES2 NJE, and it _still_ works like that... across oceans and continents, now).]
Now Tektronix is a small fraction of that size, having sold off its printer business to Xerox and downsized steadily. The largest private employer in Oregon is now Intel, if I'm not mistaken.
Who pulled the marketshare out from under Tek? Hewlett-Packard! HP used software to drive test & measurement devices... including oscilliscopes. Tektronix didn't get it, not in time.
HP only started on computers much later, as an incidental line of business. Now, HP is a computer company, having spun off the test & measurement (plus medical) business into Agilent.
Hewlett-Packard was smart enough to see the future and get there early. They've evolved the company and I take my virtual hat off to the memory of William Hewlett, a smart gentleman.
I hope God gives him Heaven's garage to tinker in.
H-P's first product was an audio sine-wave oscillator based on Hewlett's MSEE thesis at Stanford. He has described how he baked the paint on the front panels in the home oven while his wife was gone, and how Walt Disney Studios gave them their first order for 8 oscillators, which financed them to make more. But nobody here has yet mentioned the cleverness of the design, which is something /. readers might appreciate, so let me briefly describe it.
There are many ways to incorporate a tuned circuit in the feedback path of an amplifier to cause it to oscillate. All were well known in the late 40's. The tricky part is to control the amplification: too little, and the sine waves get smaller and disappear; too much, and they get bigger and distorted and finally clip and come out as square waves, or lock up the amplifier altogether. A stable, low-distortion oscillator requires close level control of the feedback, which determines the amplification.
Hewlett found a beautifully simple way to accomplish this within the feedback network itself, without a separate circuit. By applying the output to a resistor with a positive temperature coefficient, when the output level increased, the resistor would heat up, increasing its resistance. A decreasing level would let the resistor cool off, reducing its resistance. Such a resistor in the the right place in the feedback network would provide automatic self-adjustment of the amplification, and thus the possibility of low distortion and constant output level, all without the need to constantly adjust the oscillator.
So where do you get the necessary resistor? It must have sluggish response so it didn't appreciably change over the course of a cycle of oscillation, which would cause distortion. Hewlett's solution was to use the PILOT LIGHT as the gain-control device! He designed the rest of the circuit around the light bulb on the front panel, and achieved a clean, stable sine wave oscillator that required far fewer parts (and fewer precision parts) than previous designs, but performed much better.
When the light bulb lit up over this inventor's head, he took it literally, and the rest is history.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. -Albert Einstein
Ok, this is kinda offtopic, but man, chill. Everyone always gets all uppity when someone dies and takes things way to serious. I mean hell, obviously the guys at slashdot thing highly enough of Bill Hewlett to post about his death, which is a tribute to him in and of itself.
Exactly. I'm an HP fan. I use a lot of their test equipment in my work. And put a lot of miles on their printer. Hewlett-Packard makes fine products, and it takes a fine man with vision and concern for his customers to enforce that.
And with no disrespect for him - Bill Hewlett and David Packard are two people whom I admire tremendously - I will take his name in vain next time I fire up that damned 25 year old HP oscilloscope that I've been trying to get my boss to replace. I know that I'm not going to get the new 'scope I want until that thing dies. I also know that thing is not going to die on its own. And it's too much of a work of art to pull a Kevorkian on it by dropping a quarter into one of its ventilation slots.
From everything I've heard about him, that little tale would make William Hewlett smile.
Rock on, Bill. The world needs more people like you.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
---BEGIN-CLIP---
NEWSGRAM: news for HP people Friday, January 12, 2001
BILL HEWLETT: THE PASSING OF A LEGEND
Bill Hewlett, revered Hewlett-Packard co-founder and one of the world's foremost business leaders, technologists and philanthropists, died at home in his sleep at 8 a.m. PST today of natural causes. He was 87 years old.
The venture that Hewlett and his long-time partner and good friend Dave Packard founded in a Palo Alto, California, garage in 1939 has grown into two companies: Hewlett-Packard and Agilent Technologies. HP had total revenue of $48.8 billion (U.S.) in its FY00 fiscal year and has more than 88,500 employees worldwide. Agilent had net revenue of more than $10.8 billion for FY00 and has more than 47,000 employees. Packard died March 26, 1996, at the age of 83.
During his lifetime, Hewlett received dozens of high professional honors. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was co-founder of the American Electronics Association; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which gave him its Founders' Award in 1993; a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; and an honorary lifetime member of the Instrument Society of America.
Funeral arrangements for Hewlett are pending.
---END-CLIP---
CNN obit is here
I don't know if Hewitt had much or anything to do with the HP-12C financial calculator, but if he did, he accomplished something extraordinary.
The 12C, alone out of all of the electronic devices that I can think of, is "finished". It hasn't been changed for more than a decade. Even the documentation is the same. But even so, it's still the overwhelming first choice for financial professionals.
My point is that it's complete, changing it would make it worse. The interface, the functionality that's built in, the functionality that's left out. The size, shape and weight of the device. According to the market, no one has been able to top it. The design is perfect.
What other electronic product can make any of those claims? The idea that a tool -- like a word processor -- could be "finished" is totally alien to the way we think about our tools. Most geeks would say that "finishing" is impossible. But the 12C shows that's not true.
Hewitt's company has done a lot of great things, and people will write about most of them over the next few days. I hope the 12C doesn't get lost in the shuffle.
Yes, Woz used to work for HP, and speaks highly of the company.
Woz had designed TWO computers. The first was a slick Dual Z-80 machine with intergrated monitor that ran CPM (CPM was the most popular OS in those pre-MSDOS days). The second Z-80 cpu was used as a Video Co-processor! That computer later became the HP-125 and sold for $3500. And HP sold several of them. I own a later version, the HP-120 (same machine as the HP-125, much smaller case).
The second computer was a cheap 6502 based machine with a rom based OS. The OS had not even been developed yet. It was so cheap, you had to use a TV for a monitor. HP was not interested in building that one. But if Woz was interested, he could build it himself. And if it didn't work out, HP still had a job if he wanted one.
The Apple 1 was designed at HP, and sold for $666. And everybody owned the later version, the Apple II.
Given the above choice, most companies would chose to build the $3500 slick machine. What HP did that was significant was to let Woz *HAVE* the other design. Even though it was designed on company time.
And this wasn't an isolated event. Dozens of Sillicon Vally companies started inside HP. Tandom's original computer was basically a HP-3000 Series 2 with a dual CPU.
This is part of the HP Way.
And this is how Bill and Dave started Silicon Vally.
Enjoy your rest, Gentlemen. You Deserve It.
And Much Thanks.
It's sad to see that one of the men responsible for all of this in no longer with us.
This is not a Fugazi
I'll tell you what's confusing. My first calculator was an HP-25. I was perfectly comfortable learning and using RPN. Now I have trouble using my Casio, what with all those parentheses and other damn fool things.
HP-25 program for Fibonacci series (I might have forgotten the exact syntax - it's been 25 years):
First push 1 then 0 to the stack
00 - push
01 - push
02 - pop
03 - pop
04 - +
05 - pause
06 - goto 00
How many of you have over the years thoroughly enjoyed handing your HP to someone asking to borrow your calculator, only to see the look of horror and disbelief on their face seconds later? Better yet, how many friends have you made when the borrower knew how to use RPN?
When I was at Rose-Hulman Institute of Tech (before it was coed) we'd get together and have calculator races with our HPs (yes, on Saturday night). I was so disappointed when the carrying case of my most recent HP48G didn't have a belt loop! What have we become???
"My mother works for Microsoft now. A whole other cult."
Ok, this is kinda offtopic, but man, chill. Everyone always gets all uppity when someone dies and takes things way to serious. I mean hell, obviously the guys at slashdot thing highly enough of Bill Hewlett to post about his death, which is a tribute to him in and of itself.
I think they also handled it right by not getting all uptight about it, that's not the way to celebrate someones death, it's to be happy and rejoice in the life they had, i mean hell, if you can be happy and laugh ever once in a while then what the hell is the purpose of life.
tdawg
You can kill the revolutionary but you can't kill the revolution