David Packard Writes HP Epitaph

ewhac writes "David W. Packard, son of HP's co-founder of the same name, obviously has some strong feelings on the merger between HP and Compaq. Today he shared those feelings on a poster put up in the lobby at the Stanford Theatre. The text of his message appears below. David W. Packard is president of The Stanford Theatre Foundation, a non-profit organization formed in the 1980's to save the classic Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, CA, from destruction. He is also the son of HP co-founder David Packard, and has been very close to the company and The HP Way."

ewhac continues: "Today, he shared his thoughts on the merger in the form of a poster placed in the Stanford Theatre lobby:

Hewlett Packard
1938 -- 2002
R.I.P.

The Stanford Theatre still exists today only because of the employees of the Hewlett Packard Company. Without their achievements over the years, there would have been no foundation to purchase and restore this theatre.

Palo Alto might have had one more book store, or perhaps another restaurant. Architects had plans ready for a new "Casablanca Cafe" at this location when the Packard Foundation rescued the theater in 1987.

The Hewlett Packard Company was founded in 1938 in a garage on Addison Street only a few blocks from where you are now standing. Back then, the Stanford Theatre was showing brand new movies. In 1938 you could have seen Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday . You could have seen Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood . You could have seen Alice Faye, Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, and Tyrone Power in Alexander's Ragtime Band . You could have seen Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur in Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You . You still can see these same movies at the Stanford Theatre. Our audiences know that they are truly timeless.

The HP Way also touched many people's lives. Most of us expected that it would last forever -- that it would prove as timeless as a Frank Capra movie. But those entrusted with the duty to safeguard it have exercised their legal right to make another choice. Dura lex, sed lex. The law is harsh, but it is the law.

HP employees are now on a new ship, being taken on a new voyage. The company has even changed its stock symbol to HPQ to stress that the "old" HP is gone. For the sake of the surviving employees, of course I hope for a good outcome. But it is hard to imagine that their leaders can invent something better than what they left behind.

David W. Packard
The Stanford Theatre Foundation.

"The San Jose Mercury News also has a short article about Packard's message.

"Editorial Content: HP's road to the merger has been the subject of much lunchtime controversy out here. As one of the "founders" of Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard has for decades been a highly respected institution who earned their reputation through solid engineering and research, and by creating a legendary workplace envied the world over.

"Especially in the Valley, people within and without HP came to feel as David Packard did; that The HP Way would survive management fads and fickle stockholders, and serve as a lasting example of How To Do It Right. But HP's current management has won the right to move onward; to where, no one is sure.

"Though the company is still there, the HP mythos and The HP Way seem to be gone. All anyone can do now is watch and see what happens next."

Comments

Interesting

[colmore]

I think we forget that these companies are groups of people.

He's not saying anything about HP's products or technology, his business is a movie theater and his concerns lie elsewhere. He's lamenting the passing of an organization founded by his father, not a line of consumer and business electronics.

It's kind of like my highschool. It certainly wan't a great place, and won't be winning any awards for education. But I miss being there with my friends.

Re:interesting

[Jonathunder]

"Dura lex sed lex" -- an old legal maxim meaning the law is hard but it is the law.

What I find interesting...

[nortcele]

is that several of my friends who work in the trench at HP were very much against the merger while another friend at HP (upper management and gets to ride in the plane with Carly) was for it. Don't know what that tells you, but there is a definite fragmentation between employees and management. Time will tell, but the fragmentation is hard to overcome.

Second thing... Feel bad for the many good employees at Enron and Arthur who really had no say in the demise of their companies AND lost their jobs. I'd rather receive a call like the DEC emplyees did than spend endless nights awake wondering if/when/where the second shoe would drop. Just reaffirms the advice that everyone should have 3-6 months of expenses banked away. I finally got there and have never been sorry (well, I had some nagging thoughts during the dotcom stock craze about missed opportunity, but not now). No, it wasn't easy... but I sure sleep better.

Re:Original HP

[Guy Harris]

Well, from a historical point of view HP was a test and measurement company. They expanded into the clone market,

Umm, if by "clone market" you mean the market of selling "IBM-compatible PC's", you left out a small step there, i.e. the step where they got into the computer business before there was a "clone market" (heck, before there were "IBM-compatible PC's").

They had a line of 16-bit minicomputers dating back to the 1960's, and other lines of computers such as the HP 3000's, the original 68K-based UNIX boxes, and the PA-RISC boxes (running both UNIX and the MPE OS from the HP 3000's; they used, as I remember, binary-to-binary translation to allow both native 32-bit PA-RISC code and the old stack-based 16-bit HP 3000 code to run on the PA-RISC 3000's).

You want to know what HP used to mean??

[SharpNose]

Used to be, you turned to HP when you needed a transistor tester, a logic analyzer, a microcomputer with CRT display and built-in printer that you could hook up to a lot of other equipment but was small enough to carry under your arm, an oscilloscope, a precision function generator, the kind of calculator you needed when you were through "screwing around," a minicomputer to run avionics test systems - basically most everything you would need to design, build, and test complex electronic equipment.

Now, you turn to HP when you want to buy a PC from a department store that runs a second-rate, security-compromised OS whose basic goal when you first turn it on appears to be to sell you stuff.

Re:You want to know what HP used to mean??

[billstewart]

The High Priced hardware was always rock-solid - the HP35 calculators weren't the only things you could accidentally run through a snowblower without damaging them. However, their equipment was often very proprietary and quirky in the way it did things, with as much Not Invented Here So We'll Build Our Own Deliberately Different Spec as anybody in the industry. Remember the HP-IL Interface Loop for talking to peripherals (competing with Appletalk)? Remember using HP-IB (the IEEE-488 Interface Bus stuff) as a way to connect all sorts of things together? (It was pretty cool for what it did, and actually did make sense in the test-equipment world, but as a computer interface it meant you had to buy all the peripherals from HP.)

HP3000s were Really Funky Mainframe-like Things. The Unix-based machines ran HPUX, which was almost exactly like Unix, but had really bizarre ideas about how RS-232 should be dealt with, and I spent far too much of my career for a couple years haggling with it and with drivers for HP printers.

On the other hand, remember when HP printers came with manuals that actually told you what the escape sequences were so you could do anything you wanted, not just 'how to tell Microsoft Products X/Y/Z that you have an HP printer?? That's because they were written by engineers for engineers, so you could actually understand what the equipment was doing and how to use it. Nobody writes manuals like that any more, unfortunately.

Re:Quite tasteful

[Super Gimpy]

Imaging that, you actually have to pay fair market value for your ink cartridge. You don't have to buy it.

Having been an HP tech (SB1104) for about a decade, I can tell you that the HP Way was all about treating employes fairly, building loyalty, and having managers that have a clue.

HP promoted from within. Engineers became managers of engineers. There were always people around to guide, advise, and mentor.

Try finding that now.

My IT department is currently managed by a former assistant hotel manager. About as clue free, and clue proof as you can get.