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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.'"
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.