Hewlett-Packard Analysis

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Company Information

The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly known as HP, is a very large global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Its products are concentrated in the fields of computing, printing, and digital imaging. It also sells software and services.

Histroy and facts

HP was founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who had both graduated from Stanford University in 1934, as a manufacturer of test and measurement instruments. Their first product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model 200A. Their innovation was the use of a light bulb as a temperature stabilized resistor in a critical portion of the circuit. This allowed them to sell the Model 200A for $54.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over US$ 200. One of their earliest customers was Walt Disney Productions, who bought eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) for use in testing the Fantasound stereophonic sound system for the movie Fantasia.

HP is acknowledged by Wired magazine as the producer of the world's first personal computer, in 1968, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as Bill Hewlett said, "If we had called it a computer, it would have been rejected by our customers' computer gurus because it didn't look like an IBM. We therefore decided to call it a calculator and all such nonsense disappeared". The company earned global respect for a variety of products.

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