Re: Help me decode this serial number... Message #5 Posted by Frank Wales on 27 Mar 2003, 6:35 p.m., in response to message #3 by David Smith
As I understand it, HP serial numbers are unique not only to a product line or facility, but across all HP products made anywhere in the world.
Although I haven't done it for a while, I regularly called HP during the 1980s and early 1990s for hardware support. The first question they asked was "What's the serial number of the equipment?" They didn't have to ask a second question; giving them just the serial number was enough to let them know exactly what the piece of equipment was: disk drive, printer, server, PC, calculator, protocol analyser, whatever. And it was not necessary to give them these serial numbers in advance as part of the support contract, so they weren't looking at our contract details in order to figure out what the equipment was.
So I've never assumed that the five digits after the letter indicated the number of calculators produced in a week. Still, I'd be interested if someone who actually worked in the allocation of these numbers at HP could clarify this.
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