Re: Calculator Manufacturing Locations Message #5 Posted by Frank Wales on 15 Oct 2006, 7:56 p.m., in response to message #3 by Steven Kutoroff
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The idea is that until the calculator, HP was a small volume test and measurement company.
Except it wasn't. According to this Potted history of Agilent, by 1970 HP already had 16,000 employees, and manufacturing operations in Europe. Note that they went to the Europe before they went to any U.S. state beyond California, and years before HP Labs even existed.
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Until 1972, I don't find many references to overseas offices. I am told that HP Labs did not open an office out of the US until 1984, and that was Bristol UK. ... If those earlier locations were manufacturing, then I've got some work to find out more about them. If they were R&D, then that conflicts with another source.
Most HP R&D was done in the individual product divisions, not at HP Labs, so their relatively late overseas growth doesn't mean much.
More specifically, all the HP calculator-related inventions I'm aware of were made at Corvallis, or its fore-runner, the Advanced Products Group in Cupertino, not HP Labs.
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I was thinking that as the first volume product...
In manufacturing terms, HP had many volume products before calcs, from electronic components to medical equipment.
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...the calculator changed HP into a global organization that easily became a PC company,
Wouldn't that require the calculator division somehow giving birth to the PC division? They were poles apart organizationally, and couldn't have had less to do with one another if they'd been in different companies.
Quote: it was already making desktops before anyone else.
I actually have no idea what you mean by this; the closest the calculator people got to a desktop computer system was the HP-85, but that came to market years after things like the Apple II or TRS-80. It also came to market years after HP's own 9845, made by HP's other calculator division in Colorado.
And the HP-85 certainly didn't lead HP to a dominant position in desktop systems, in part because the divisions tasked with business systems and desktop systems didn't create it, and had other misguided ideas, such as the HP 150.
Perhaps you could read 'The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I built our company' by David Packard (from which the Agilent timeline is taken). It might help you to see the relatively small part the calculator division played in HP's growth, despite its importance to those of us in these parts.
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