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HP Garage on National Register of Historic Places
An anonymous reader writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Bill Hewlett's famous garage is now on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. It's not clear what exactly this will do for the structure, since it's already owned by HP and it already very well restored to its original glory. Anyway, for history fans and HP fans alike, this is exciting news, akin to saving the original Edison or Marconi labs. 'At my user group's museum, where David Packard actually worked for a while when it was a military base, our collection features an HP-300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer. That's a generation or two removed from HP's garage years, but it's still fun to appreciate the connections between their first products and the computer revolution.'"
I wonder if one day the garage where Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I be treated in the same reverent manner. From what I've heard, no one even knows where it is anymore.
And what about Microsoft's Albuquerque office where they developed software for the Altair? Or the grad lab where Google started?
Now you can see whay the Register of Historic Places has been criticised for easy access with the NRHP criteria criticised as "so broad as to be almost useless when evaluating specific properties".
It would help if you got your facts straight first. Edison did not invent the light bulb. He merely made one that lasted long enough to be useful.
Egg on face, it wasn't necessarily life that was the only problem (though it was one), but other factors too, such as cost of manufacture or cost of operation.
They got started by making a precision audio oscillator and expanded into other lab test equipment and had had a series of innovative designs in that arena.
Having the first handheld programmable calculator, and the first symbolic calculator didn't hurt either.
I just want to know who owns the patent/trademark/copyright for the HP-11 series of calculators.
There are thousands of engineering types worldwide that want to see this model come back. And, no, it doesn't need blinking lights, multi-line graphical displays or weird keypad layout. Just give us back the old horizontal format RPN machine that is beloved by engineers worldwide.
For those unfamiliar, RPN is sort of like Linux vs. Windows - confusing at first but really powerful once the concept is grasped. Plus it has the added bonus of confusing the "where's the any key?" types who cannot find the "=" button.
Admission fee? Nothing.
Ink to sign the guess book? 4 US $
Forgetting the whole thing? Priceless!
Olrik
- You obviously don't know much about HP. They started out making precision measurement equipment, not PCs and printers. This measurement equipment played a very important role in the development of electronics, and so behind the scenes contributed a lot to the state of electronics as it is today. The printers and PCs came much later. HP was also instrumental (heh) in the development of early calculators.
- Regardless of how much revernment you reserve for the light bulb, this is a technology that is on the verge of becoming extinct, just like the cathode ray tube. The CRT has already progressed quite far, but solid-state lighting technologies will do exactly the same to the light bulb in the next 10-20 years. There is already talk of banning incandecent bulbs (Australia, California) due to the low efficiency. In not too long, Edison's invention will join the steam engine as inventions that did mean a lot in the past, but are completely irelevant to current technology.