Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the thinning-the-herd dept.
jacexpo069 writes: "You can find it here , however, the highlights are
HP Omnibook, HP Kayak, HP Vectra, HP Jornada and HP Netserver all being phased out. TRU64 phased out, however OpenVMS lives on. Read all the gory details in this detailed roadmap "
Good news about the iPAQ line:
by
Subliminal+Fusion
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"Smart Handhelds
Decision: The Compaq iPAQ(TM) Pocket PC, re-named the HP iPAQ Pocket PC, will be our smart handheld platform. The best of the current HP Jornada technology will be engineered into the platform. Jornada products will be phased out of the market in 2002."
Good to know that they were smart about their handheld lines and decided to stick with the iPAQ (not that there was really much doubt, but...). The iPAQs have been on the leading edge of things for a while now, if they would only integrate something more than SD (and *not* CF type I like the Jornadas had) into the unit...
Re:Good news about the iPAQ line:
by
bleckywelcky
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nice to see the 700 bucks I spent on a Jornada 760 a couple months ago is going to waste. Too bad I can't return it.
Awesome.
by
Wakko+Warner
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
OSF/1 (nee TRU64) needed to die a slow, painful death.
And, now it shall.
- A.P.
-- "Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What ever happened to HP's other stuff?
by
jettaman16v
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
What happened to the HP calculators? Did they discontinue then pre-merger, or were they dropped just recently? It does suck that the Kayak line is being killed, but I can't say I will miss anything Compaq ever made. I have never seen a nice piece of Compaq equipment, save for the iPAQ.
You knew this stuff was coming.. I thought they'd kill HPUX for sure, though! DEC Unix (aka compaq tru64) finally dies.. it was truly a legendary OS. That's the only thing that surprises me about this roadmap. Maybe it's just because I used DU more than HPUX.
The rest of it is pretty predictable. I mean, I never even heard of a damn HP Kayak.. wtf is that? Of course OpenView and Insight Manager both have to stay, due to their ubiquity. iPaq kills Jornada hands-down. Compaq trounces HP for business desktops.
And let's see.. printing.. there's no clear winner there. HP's got a LaserJet in every office in the universe.. But don't rule out Compaq, they are great at rebranding plastic Lexmark inkjets!
"We will continue to offer both the Compaq Presario(TM) and HP Pavilion lines of consumer desktop PCs and notebooks..." So they will have two competing brands for their consumer pc offerings. HP says this is due to existing brand awareness and retailer's opinion. (The paper also says they will phase out HP's buisness PC line in favor of Compaq's.)
The Compaq name will dissapear...
by
c.r.o.c.o
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From what I can tell, the Compaq name will be kept only on a few categories of devices, especially business class ones and consumer laptops. Everywhere else, the lines will either be discontinued or they will be rebranded.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but in a couple of years (maybe a bit more) Compaq will go the way DEC went a while back.
HP will keep it alive just long enough for customers to get used to the change. Then it will dissapear from all refferences, products and documentation. HP will stop updating the Compaq product support sites, and eventually will even stop hosting them altogether.
You don't believe me? Try a google search for DEC, and you'll see how many Compaq hosted docs and web pages you will find. A couple of years ago I needed technical info on a DEC dual P classic workstation for a school project. It would have been a pretty fast machine, and I had 2 p200Mhz available to plug into it (up from the single P90Mhz that I found inside). After 4 hours of continuous searching for the jumper settings, I gave up and salvaged another slower computer.
This is the same that will happen to Compaq soon enough. Ironic, isn't it?
Old Out, New In
by
BeagleBoi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It looks like Hewlett Packard have been working hard on this change while the whole stockholder vote/battle was going on.
Even so, I was still taken aback when the familiar Flash-driven "Powered by Compaq" icon at the Yahoo Mail site was replaced by a "Powered by HP" icon today.
Ok, I think I can answer this, though no idea if I've got it right. I started out as a winslave user, and taught myself a little programming, a little of everything. Enough, that soon I got a job as a pc tech, and have been moving up from there. About 3 years ago, I started having enough spending money to blow on dumb stuff, and found myself buying vintage computers, learning all the trivia and history. Everyone in the industry has something that they can claim credit for, but DEC's reads like something that would be hard to believe if I didn't know it to be true.
UNIX, and C, simultaneously invented on the PDP.
And for whatever reason that unix wasn't good enough, they went out and wrote their own oddball OS, that in many ways is every bit as powerful. Bizarro Unix, from a parallel dimension. I'm still not sure if it's folly or genius.
Intel gives us x86 cpu crud. DEC gave us a beatifully clean PDP cpu, which later inspires the MC68k cpu family. Not sure if they can claim credit for a Motorola chip, but deserves a mention.
DEC didn't invent ethernet either. But they had sense enough to recognize it for what it was, when Metcalfe told them about it. DEC was the "D" in the DIX alliance, after all.
They fielded their own risc CPU, for christ's sake. And not just any, but an alpha... I literally lusted after these, when I was still a winslave. (Wanted to run NT on them, but I've since wised up). Alpha. That alone should land them in the Computing Hall of Fame.
Their own networking protocol. Some of the big names can claim this, but can HP?
And you just don't know how big circuit boards can be, until you've held a unibus card in your hands...
Hell, they were around challenging IBM in the 1950's, half a century ago with the PDP series. The PDP-1 debuted at a price of $100,000 or so, a tenth of anything IBM offered.
And this is the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, mind you. There are all sorts of obtuse little technical things, that I'm not sure everyone could appreciate. Vax clustering, some funky per-thread security architectures, etc.
Then again, I could just be the proud owner of PDP-11/04, VaxStation 4000/90, DECstation 5000/120, and a mosix cluster of 2 Prioris 5100 XL's. Only need a Rainbow, and an Alphastation, and my collection will be reasonably complete.
And please, if anyone else knows something interesting, help out. I'd love to hear something I don't already know...
All that, and more, is why DEC kicked(s) ass.
RED HERRING'S open letter to HP CEO Carly Fiorina
by
IvyMike
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Saw this letter a few months ago, but it still seems relevant today. (Quote: "The merger is like two starving men agreeing to share a crust of bread.") Short but insightful, highly recommended.
Re:PA-RISC & HP-UX
by
guacamole
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Isn't IA64 binary compatible with PA-RISC? IA64 was HPs next PA-RISC processor before they gave the IP to Intel.
Re:Emphasis on Inanium
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No mention of calculators. Will they stay in that business? HP made, and makes, great calculators. Had to put new batteries in my HP-11C today, after fifteen years.
I hear you. I grew up around HP test equipment and such and bought a HP-48 in 1993, I had a HP-11 in highschool. I always associated the HP brand with quality.
The bad news is that HP is going down the tubes.
The good news is that HP spun off their test and meaurement division a couple of years ago as Agilent.
I have been pleasantly surprised in dealing with Aglent. For example, I purchased some parts for an HP stethoscope from their online store using a credit card, I got an email the next day telling me that the parts had shipped an that they were not charging my credit card because I was a student! They had my money, but they gave it back!
So, my point is, they got the names backwards when they spun off Agilent: People looking for the old "HP way" should look to Agilent, people who expect HP quality from the new "HPQ" are in for a surprise.
I guess they did not know what to do with the calculater division when they split. I am sad that it went to the HP part, because if they had given it to Agilent I might be posting this on my '69gx calculator.
Re:Looks like no Linux development for the NEW HP
by
Bruce+Perens
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You are correct that there is still strategy being worked on. The integration team was sort of clean-room until the merger closed - it would have been a bad idea to contaminate all of HP management with Compaq insider information if the merger for some reason did not close, so a lot of them are being brought in now. I have some future deliverables in this regard.
It seems that Jornada PocketPCs will be replaced by iPaqs but what about their handheld PC line? I would hate to see them phase out the 700 line... I've had a Jornada 720 for over a year and it is indispensible.
Does anyone know what the story is here?
-- sudo eat my shorts
Re:Alphas & Tru64
by
sasami
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I wonder what exactly it was that prevented Alpha-based machines from taking a position like Sun or IBM
It's the usual answer: DEC never knew how to market them. And Compaq? As far as I'm concerned, they never even tried.
I joined DEC right out of college. Exactly one week later, it became Compaq. None of the employees knew anything about it until it happened. But Compaq had damage control prepped and ready to go: the line they fed us was that corporate purchasers usually invite the top three companies to bid on a contract, and since DEC was fourth (after Sun, IBM, and HP, apparently), it was disproportionately locked out of the game. But whenever DEC managed to get invited, they would usually win. So the "strategy" for the new behemoth was pretty much that they expected to get invited everywhere and win lots of contracts. Almost without trying.
Well, we all know how Alphaserver sales just took off after that, don't we?
Interestingly, they had well-known DEC execs deliver these fabulously optimistic forecasts... execs that promptly departed before the integration even began. (Not that anything resembling integration actually happened anyway.)
I guess Alpha was pitched as more of a number crunching box.
Not really. Alpha did have that reputation, for obvious reasons, and it had a stable market in the technical computing field (CERN and LLNL come to mind). But that's a fairly small niche, not enough to sustain the business. The wider market penetration just never happened. When I left DEC in, I dunno, 1999 or something, I couldn't tell what marketing was doing at all. It was listless, confused, and worse than directionless.
And even that came to an end, didn't it? I didn't notice at the time, but in retrospect I don't recall seeing any kind of public support of Alpha after 2000 or so.
And so it faded away. My blood, sweat, and tears are in Digital Unix, but I began and concluded my mourning months ago, when Compaq murdered Alpha and handed its head to Intel on a platter. This merger is a postlude, nothing more...
---
I like canned peaches.
-- Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
I sit in front of a Dell commodity PC, but my X sessions are open on a six-node Alpha Cluster running VMS. It is the development cluster for the largest electronic futures and options exchange in the world. The same system is used by CBOT.
I expect are some management who would love to port the application to somthing else but it would be painful to move away from the uptime that we enjoy, the clustered file system, the distributed lock manager, journalling and so on (especially that uptime).
Production downtime is bad news and it is a very sensitive subject. We paid Digital now Compaq sh*t loads of money for support and got it. I very much hope that HP can do the same.
I don't know what happened to the main Alpha architect (Dick Sites), but many of the rest of the chip designers went over to AMD and are probably one of the reasons that they have been doing relatively well of late.
Many of the software technologies have been sold off such as RdB (non portable but oh so fast) and PolyCenter, but VMS remains.
Incidently, you forgot one major technology that was backed by Digital and that was X-windows. In those days, Digital had some of the key people working with them like Jim Gettys. Digital were also responsible for the VT100, one of the first high quality VDUs produced at a reasonable price.
The thing I'll miss more than anything
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Is when Tru64 disappers i highly doubt the people at hp will be able to port over AdvFS....it is undoubtably the best filesystem EVER. Also I'm sure on this but isn't tru64 microkernel and HP-ux monolithic? That would cause more than a few problems in the port of anything
Slashdot Mirror
"Smart Handhelds
Decision: The Compaq iPAQ(TM) Pocket PC, re-named the HP iPAQ Pocket PC, will be our smart handheld platform. The best of the current HP Jornada technology will be engineered into the platform. Jornada products will be phased out of the market in 2002."
Good to know that they were smart about their handheld lines and decided to stick with the iPAQ (not that there was really much doubt, but...). The iPAQs have been on the leading edge of things for a while now, if they would only integrate something more than SD (and *not* CF type I like the Jornadas had) into the unit...
OSF/1 (nee TRU64) needed to die a slow, painful death.
And, now it shall.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What happened to the HP calculators? Did they discontinue then pre-merger, or were they dropped just recently? It does suck that the Kayak line is being killed, but I can't say I will miss anything Compaq ever made. I have never seen a nice piece of Compaq equipment, save for the iPAQ.
"It tastes like.... burning." -Ralph Wiggum
You knew this stuff was coming.. I thought they'd kill HPUX for sure, though! DEC Unix (aka compaq tru64) finally dies.. it was truly a legendary OS. That's the only thing that surprises me about this roadmap. Maybe it's just because I used DU more than HPUX.
The rest of it is pretty predictable. I mean, I never even heard of a damn HP Kayak.. wtf is that? Of course OpenView and Insight Manager both have to stay, due to their ubiquity. iPaq kills Jornada hands-down. Compaq trounces HP for business desktops.
And let's see.. printing.. there's no clear winner there. HP's got a LaserJet in every office in the universe.. But don't rule out Compaq, they are great at rebranding plastic Lexmark inkjets!
"We will continue to offer both the Compaq Presario(TM) and HP Pavilion lines of consumer desktop PCs and notebooks..."
So they will have two competing brands for their consumer pc offerings. HP says this is due to existing brand awareness and retailer's opinion. (The paper also says they will phase out HP's buisness PC line in favor of Compaq's.)
From what I can tell, the Compaq name will be kept only on a few categories of devices, especially business class ones and consumer laptops. Everywhere else, the lines will either be discontinued or they will be rebranded.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but in a couple of years (maybe a bit more) Compaq will go the way DEC went a while back.
HP will keep it alive just long enough for customers to get used to the change. Then it will dissapear from all refferences, products and documentation. HP will stop updating the Compaq product support sites, and eventually will even stop hosting them altogether.
You don't believe me? Try a google search for DEC, and you'll see how many Compaq hosted docs and web pages you will find. A couple of years ago I needed technical info on a DEC dual P classic workstation for a school project. It would have been a pretty fast machine, and I had 2 p200Mhz available to plug into it (up from the single P90Mhz that I found inside). After 4 hours of continuous searching for the jumper settings, I gave up and salvaged another slower computer.
This is the same that will happen to Compaq soon enough. Ironic, isn't it?
It looks like Hewlett Packard have been working hard on this change while the whole stockholder vote/battle was going on.
Even so, I was still taken aback when the familiar Flash-driven "Powered by Compaq" icon at the Yahoo Mail site was replaced by a "Powered by HP" icon today.
What other changes have people seen?
Ok, I think I can answer this, though no idea if I've got it right. I started out as a winslave user, and taught myself a little programming, a little of everything. Enough, that soon I got a job as a pc tech, and have been moving up from there. About 3 years ago, I started having enough spending money to blow on dumb stuff, and found myself buying vintage computers, learning all the trivia and history. Everyone in the industry has something that they can claim credit for, but DEC's reads like something that would be hard to believe if I didn't know it to be true.
UNIX, and C, simultaneously invented on the PDP.
And for whatever reason that unix wasn't good enough, they went out and wrote their own oddball OS, that in many ways is every bit as powerful. Bizarro Unix, from a parallel dimension. I'm still not sure if it's folly or genius.
Intel gives us x86 cpu crud. DEC gave us a beatifully clean PDP cpu, which later inspires the MC68k cpu family. Not sure if they can claim credit for a Motorola chip, but deserves a mention.
DEC didn't invent ethernet either. But they had sense enough to recognize it for what it was, when Metcalfe told them about it. DEC was the "D" in the DIX alliance, after all.
They fielded their own risc CPU, for christ's sake. And not just any, but an alpha... I literally lusted after these, when I was still a winslave. (Wanted to run NT on them, but I've since wised up). Alpha. That alone should land them in the Computing Hall of Fame.
Their own networking protocol. Some of the big names can claim this, but can HP?
And you just don't know how big circuit boards can be, until you've held a unibus card in your hands...
Hell, they were around challenging IBM in the 1950's, half a century ago with the PDP series. The PDP-1 debuted at a price of $100,000 or so, a tenth of anything IBM offered.
And this is the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, mind you. There are all sorts of obtuse little technical things, that I'm not sure everyone could appreciate. Vax clustering, some funky per-thread security architectures, etc.
Then again, I could just be the proud owner of PDP-11/04, VaxStation 4000/90, DECstation 5000/120, and a mosix cluster of 2 Prioris 5100 XL's. Only need a Rainbow, and an Alphastation, and my collection will be reasonably complete.
And please, if anyone else knows something interesting, help out. I'd love to hear something I don't already know...
All that, and more, is why DEC kicked(s) ass.
Saw this letter a few months ago, but it still seems relevant today. (Quote: "The merger is like two starving men agreeing to share a crust of bread.") Short but insightful, highly recommended.
Isn't IA64 binary compatible with PA-RISC?
IA64 was HPs next PA-RISC processor before they gave the IP to Intel.
No mention of calculators. Will they stay in that business? HP made, and makes, great calculators. Had to put new batteries in my HP-11C today, after fifteen years.
I hear you. I grew up around HP test equipment and such and bought a HP-48 in 1993, I had a HP-11 in highschool. I always associated the HP brand with quality.
The bad news is that HP is going down the tubes.
The good news is that HP spun off their test and meaurement division a couple of years ago as Agilent
I have been pleasantly surprised in dealing with Aglent. For example, I purchased some parts for an HP stethoscope from their online store using a credit card, I got an email the next day telling me that the parts had shipped an that they were not charging my credit card because I was a student! They had my money, but they gave it back!
So, my point is, they got the names backwards when they spun off Agilent: People looking for the old "HP way" should look to Agilent, people who expect HP quality from the new "HPQ" are in for a surprise.
I guess they did not know what to do with the calculater division when they split. I am sad that it went to the HP part, because if they had given it to Agilent I might be posting this on my '69gx calculator.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
It's funny, you wonder how companies start-out and you find-out they did something somewhat related but not the same...
For instance...
Sega of America did mechanical-based games for the Army. The name "Sega" came from it's original name "Service Games."
Nintendo of Japan started out as a playing card company.
It seems that Jornada PocketPCs will be replaced by iPaqs but what about their handheld PC line? I would hate to see them phase out the 700 line... I've had a Jornada 720 for over a year and it is indispensible.
Does anyone know what the story is here?
sudo eat my shorts
I joined DEC right out of college. Exactly one week later, it became Compaq. None of the employees knew anything about it until it happened. But Compaq had damage control prepped and ready to go: the line they fed us was that corporate purchasers usually invite the top three companies to bid on a contract, and since DEC was fourth (after Sun, IBM, and HP, apparently), it was disproportionately locked out of the game. But whenever DEC managed to get invited, they would usually win. So the "strategy" for the new behemoth was pretty much that they expected to get invited everywhere and win lots of contracts. Almost without trying.
Well, we all know how Alphaserver sales just took off after that, don't we?
Interestingly, they had well-known DEC execs deliver these fabulously optimistic forecasts... execs that promptly departed before the integration even began. (Not that anything resembling integration actually happened anyway.)
Not really. Alpha did have that reputation, for obvious reasons, and it had a stable market in the technical computing field (CERN and LLNL come to mind). But that's a fairly small niche, not enough to sustain the business. The wider market penetration just never happened. When I left DEC in, I dunno, 1999 or something, I couldn't tell what marketing was doing at all. It was listless, confused, and worse than directionless.
And even that came to an end, didn't it? I didn't notice at the time, but in retrospect I don't recall seeing any kind of public support of Alpha after 2000 or so.
And so it faded away. My blood, sweat, and tears are in Digital Unix, but I began and concluded my mourning months ago, when Compaq murdered Alpha and handed its head to Intel on a platter. This merger is a postlude, nothing more...
---
I like canned peaches.
Freedom is not the license to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.
I expect are some management who would love to port the application to somthing else but it would be painful to move away from the uptime that we enjoy, the clustered file system, the distributed lock manager, journalling and so on (especially that uptime). Production downtime is bad news and it is a very sensitive subject. We paid Digital now Compaq sh*t loads of money for support and got it. I very much hope that HP can do the same.
I don't know what happened to the main Alpha architect (Dick Sites), but many of the rest of the chip designers went over to AMD and are probably one of the reasons that they have been doing relatively well of late.
Many of the software technologies have been sold off such as RdB (non portable but oh so fast) and PolyCenter, but VMS remains.
Incidently, you forgot one major technology that was backed by Digital and that was X-windows. In those days, Digital had some of the key people working with them like Jim Gettys. Digital were also responsible for the VT100, one of the first high quality VDUs produced at a reasonable price.
Is when Tru64 disappers i highly doubt the people at hp will be able to port over AdvFS....it is undoubtably the best filesystem EVER.
Also I'm sure on this but isn't tru64 microkernel and HP-ux monolithic? That would cause more than a few problems in the port of anything