The Hewlett-Packard Company (), commonly known as HP, is one of the world's largest information technology corporations. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States, it has a global presence in the fields of computing, printing, and digital imaging, and also sells software and services.

Company history

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From 1939 until the seventies

HP was founded as a manufacturer of test and measurement instruments with a States dollar|US$" target="_blank" >^*500 investment in a Palo Alto, CA garage in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They had both graduated from Stanford University in 1934. Their first product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model 200A. Their innovation was the use of a small night-light bulb as a temperature dependent 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 $200. Their company's name, Hewlett-Packard, was derived from their last names and had Bill not won a coin toss, the company today could have been known as Packard-Hewlett. One of the company's 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.

First Computers

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". An engineering triumph at the time, the logic circuit was produced without any integrated circuits; the assembly of the CPU having been entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT readout, magnetic card storage, and printer the price was around $5000.

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