It makes me almost embarrassed to think that I worked for Hewlett Packard for 28 years. Fortunately, that was in the days when it was a leader in electronic measurement technology. It was one of the most admired companies for the way they conducted business and cared for their employees. They were the most ethical company I ever worked for.
The computer side of the company started in a very small way in 1966, marketing timeshare computers. By the end of the 80s they had a full range of personal and large computers. That business outgrew the test and measurement side of the business.
The sales and marketing strategies for the computer side of the business was very different to the traditional Test and Measurement sales process so in 1999 the T&M side of the business spun off as Agilent Technologies, which I continues to work for until 2003, when I retired.
After the split, HP got rid of most of their innovative thinkers and became just another computer company, concentrating on the bottom line. Now, the majority of their profit is made on printer ink sales.

 

There's no other way to say it.
HP can f the f off.

I use my HP all-in-one just for its scanner and fax capabilities. I have a new set of cartridges, but haven't installed them because they usually dry up when I want to print and I waste more ink cleaning the heads than printing. I have 5 laser printers for printing.

 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/
HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitor


There's no other way to say it.
HP can f the f off.

They are on my official office products blacklist.

Looks like FBI/SS/NSA/CIA will no longer require warrants to monitor every document you ever create.

This is the simplest explanation.

 

It makes me almost embarrassed to think that I worked for Hewlett Packard for 28 years. Fortunately, that was in the days when it was a leader in electronic measurement technology. It was one of the most admired companies for the way they conducted business and cared for their employees. They were the most ethical company I ever worked for.
The computer side of the company started in a very small way in 1966, marketing timeshare computers. By the end of the 80s they had a full range of personal and large computers. That business outgrew the test and measurement side of the business.
The sales and marketing strategies for the computer side of the business was very different to the traditional Test and Measurement sales process so in 1999 the T&M side of the business spun off as Agilent Technologies, which I continues to work for until 2003, when I retired.
After the split, HP got rid of most of their innovative thinkers and became just another computer company, concentrating on the bottom line. Now, the majority of their profit is made on printer ink sales.

Yeah, I remember well the days when if you bought something with the letters HP on it, it meant that you had a quality product from a quality company. Like so many other companies in the same vein, those days are long gone. It seems like it has become impossible to find quality anything, at any price.

 

Yeah, I remember well the days when if you bought something with the letters HP on it, it meant that you had a quality product from a quality company. Like so many other companies in the same vein, those days are long gone. It seems like it has become impossible to find quality anything, at any price.

The first division I worked at had a big sign that said HP stood for "Have Pride". That company is long gone.

 

The first division I worked at had a big sign that said HP stood for "Have Pride". That company is long gone.

I always thought it stood for "Heavy Printers"!

 

I always thought it stood for "Heavy Printers"!

That's not what the sign above our HR group said... And it was before HP started making printers. I never visited the Corvallis site where printers first started.

I saw some early prototypes at HP Labs of liquid ink printers (they were X-Y flatbed types).

 

That's not what the sign above our HR group said... And it was before HP started making printers. I never visited the Corvallis site where printers first started.

Let me guess... "Happy People!"?

That's probably what it says these days -- doesn't matter how unhappy they might be in reality, if we put up a sign that says it, it must be true. If you don't believe that, then we will refer you to our Vision Statement.

 

Their HP Vectra had some problems on roll out. Their 1.2 meg floppy drives would quit working but worked perfectly in clone machines. Also, their Western Digital 20 Meg hard drives developed head drift and luckily SpinWrite had been developed just for that problem and kept me busy. That and they never could keep time and to be time corrected regularly. Never had an issue with their LaserJet printers though. We did buy a few local 286 clone machines to put the squeeze on HP for lease pricing. Before the Vectra we leased HP150s that had Touch Screen Monitors and 3.5" 360k floppy disks years before other vendors introduced them to market. You could lease them as cheaply as a terminal for our HP 3000 although there was VERY limited software available. Lotus 123, Executive MemoMaker, and some paint thingy were about it. Can't remember what the printer was but it was a desktop matrix. Never had any problem with it or the HP 3000 terminal printers. The secretaries were using Wangs so the engineers and supervisors only got Lotus123 and some were trying to use it as a word processor as well, what a kludge...

 

The HP150 had an IR matrix built into the screen bezel for the innovative touch screen. The Their first inkjet printer was in 1984, the model 400, dubbed the Thinkjet. I still have the one I bought and ran with my Commodore 64 with a homemade serial interface.

 

The Touch Screens would quit working after several months' use and at the time we had weekly on-site service support engineers and they pretty much gave up on trying to fix them. Yep, forgot about the ThinkJets. They did work pretty well as you would expect for an early generation ink jet printer. They never went back to the 3.5" disk with the Vectra line but the 386 model was much more reliable than the 286 and when they brought the 486's out they soon after offered a dual 486 as well but there was very little software available to utilize dual processors. And if the software was not written to use dual processors the computer had to be initialized as a single processor machine or it was a brick. Learned the hard way with 30k USD of hardware that they would not run FoxBoro DCS Software and even sent it up to Foxboro Mass. to let them investigate the problem and they sent it back telling us it wouldn't run on that hardware even though Foxboro software was designed for HP hardware which Foxboro packaged and sold. Well, I scratched my head and scratched my ass and dug in and made it work by recompiling the bios as a single processor machine and they worked just fine. Kaching! Called the guy up at Foxboro who had worked on the computer and told him what I had done as I thought he ought to be aware of the solution and workaround and he got mad and told me in no uncertain terms that the software would NOT run on those computers! LOL Oh well... It sure did!

 

I rant about their printers but the HP enterprise ProLiant server machines are great. I've built my most of my home computing infrastructure with them and swear by (never at them) them at work on the engineering machines I've integrated using them.

 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...nters-makes-them-unable-to-use-hp-cartridges/
Firmware update bricks HP printers, makes them unable to use HP cartridges