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.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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.
--
This is not a Fugazi.sig
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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