The story
Founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard on Jul 2, 1939, in Palo Alto.1
Bill Hewlett and David Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company started in a garage in Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with past professor Frederick Terman at Stanford during the Great Depression, whom they considered a mentor. In 1938, Packard and Hewlett began part-time work in a rented garage with an initial capital investment of US$538 (equivalent to $12,305 in 2025). In 1939, Hewlett and Packard decided to formalize their partnership. They tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Packard-Hewlett.
Hewlett and Packard's first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator known as the HP 200A, which used a small incandescent light bulb as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, and a negative feedback loop to stabilize the amplitude of the output sinusoidal waveform. This allowed the HP 200A to be sold for $89.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $200. The 200 series of generators continued production until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years.
One of the company's earliest customers was Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer for Walt Disney Studios, who bought eight HP 200B audio oscillators (at $71.50 each) to be used in the animated film Fantasia. HP's profit at the end of 1939, its first full year of business, was $1,563 (equivalent to $36,177 in 2025) on revenues of $5,369.
In 1942, they built their first building at 395 Page Mill Road and were awarded the Army-Navy "E" Award in 1943. HP employed 200 people and produced the audio oscillator, a wave analyzer, distortion analyzers, an audio-signal generator, and the Model 400A vacuum-tube voltmeter during the war.
Hewlett and Packard worked on counter-radar technology and artillery shell proximity fuzes during World War II; the work exempted Packard from the draft, but Hewlett had to serve as an officer in the Army Signal Corps after being called to active duty.
HP was incorporated on August 18, 1947, with Packard as president. Sales reached $5.5 million in 1951 with 215 employees. The company went public on November 6, 1957. In 1959, a manufacturing plant was established in Böblingen and a marketing organization in Geneva. Packard handed the presidency over to Hewlett when he became chairman in 1964, but remained CEO of the company.
1960s
HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley, though it did not actively investigate semiconductor devices until a few years after the "traitorous eight" abandoned William Shockley to create Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957. The company's HP Associates division was established around 1960 under the leadership of Jack Melchor to develop semiconductor devices primarily for internal use. Instruments and calculators were some of the original HP products that used semiconductor devices.
During the 1960s, HP partnered with Sony and Yokogawa Electric in Japan to develop several high-quality products. The products were not a huge success, as there were high costs involved in building HP-looking products in Japan. In 1963, HP and Yokogawa formed the joint venture Yokogawa-Hewlett-Packard to market HP products in Japan. HP bought Yokogawa Electric's share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999.
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HP spun off the small company Dynac to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo could be turned upside down to be a reflected image of the logo of the new company (DY). Dynac was eventually renamed Dymec and folded back into HP in 1959. HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputers with its instruments, but entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers after it decided that it would be easier to build another small design team than deal with DEC. The minicomputers had a simple accumulator-based design with two accumulator registers and, in the HP 1000 models, two index registers. The series was produced for 20 years in spite of several attempts to replace it, and was a forerunner of the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers.
Beginning in 1961, Hewlett-Packard was listed on the New York Stock Exchange (as well as the now-closed Pacific Exchange) under its own ticker symbol, "HWP". At the end of 1968, Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in the incoming Nixon administration. He resumed the chairmanship in 1972 and served until 1993, but Hewlett remained the CEO.
1970s
The HP 3000 was an advanced stack-based design for a business computing server, later redesigned with RISC technology. The HP 2640 series of smart and intelligent terminals introduced forms-based interfaces to ASCII terminals, and also introduced screen labeled function keys. The HP 2640 series included one of the first bit mapped graphics displays that, when combined with the HP 2100 21MX F-Series microcoded Scientific Instruction Set, enabled the first commercial WYSIWYG presentation program, BRUNO, that later became the program HP-Draw on the HP 3000. Although scoffed at in the formative days of computing, HP surpassed IBM as the world's largest technology vendor in terms of sales.
HP was identified by Wired magazine as the producer of the world's first device to be called a personal computer: the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, introduced in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, as 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, and the CPU assembly was entirely executed in discrete components. With CRT display, magnetic-card storage, and printer, the price was around $5,000. The machine's keyboard was a cross between the keyboard of a scientific calculator and the keyboard of an adding machine. There was no alphabetic keyboard.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak originally designed the Apple I computer while working at HP and offered it to HP under its right of first refusal to his work. It did not take it up as the company wanted to stay in scientific, business, and industrial markets. Wozniak said that HP "turned him down five times", but that his loyalty to HP made him hesitant to start Apple with Steve Jobs.
The company earned global respect for a variety of products. They introduced the world's first handheld scientific electronic calculator in 1972 (the HP-35), the first handheld programmable in 1974 (the HP-65), the first alphanumeric, programmable, expandable in 1979 (the HP-41C), and the first symbolic and graphing calculator, the HP-28C.
Like its scientific and business calculators, HP oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and other measurement instruments had a reputation for sturdiness and usability. HP introduced the Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus (HPIB) computer peripheral interface (later cloned by National Instruments as GPIB and standardized by the IEEE as IEEE-488) on its relay actuator products in 1973. HPIB was later integrated into most high end test & measurement equipment it produced from 1980 onward.
As early as 1977, HP began production of the HP856x spectrum analyzers to complement its RF power meters and sensors capable of measuring signals in excess of 20 GHz. HP also produced configurable chassis based sweep generators capable of generating signals to 20 GHz. Other T&M products of the time included lab grade multimeters, microwave frequency counters, RF amplifiers, high accuracy microwave detectors, lab grade power supplies and more. These products were succeeded by modernized versions as well as the introduction of the scalar and vector network analyzer product lines prior to the business being spun off into Agilent Technologies.
The HP 9800 series of technical desktop computers started in 1971 with the 9810A. The HP Series 80 started in 1979 with the 85. Some of these machines used a version of the BASIC programming language, which was available immediately after they were switched on, and used a proprietary magnetic tape for storage. HP computers were similar in capabilities to the much later IBM Personal Computer, though the limitations of available technology forced prices to be high.
In 1978, Hewlett stepped down as CEO and was succeeded by John A. Young.
1980s
HP expanded into South Africa in the 1980s. Activists supporting divestment from South Africa accused HP of "automating apartheid".
Sales reached $6.5 billion in 1985 with 85,000 employees.
In 1984, HP introduced both inkjet and laser printers for the desktop. Along with its scanner product line, the printers have later been developed into successful multifunction products, the most significant being single-unit printer/scanner/copier/fax machines. The print mechanisms in HP's LaserJet line of laser printers depend almost entirely on Canon Inc.'s components (print engines), which in turn use technology developed by Xerox. HP developed the hardware, firmware, and software to convert data into dots for printing.
On March 3, 1986, HP registered the HP.com domain name, making it the ninth internet.com domain to be registered.
In 1987, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard started their business was designated as a California Historical Landmark.
1990s
In the 1990s, HP expanded its computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business users, to reach consumers. In 1995, HP entered into the home and home office market for the first time with the introduction of the HP Pavilion brand of personal computers, which initially featured desktop models but later added laptop and notebook models to the lineup in 1999. HP also grew through acquisitions: it bought Apollo Computer in 1989 and Convex Computer in 1995.
In 1992, Young was succeeded by Lewis E. Platt, and in 1993 Packard stepped down from the board, with Platt succeeding Packard as chairman.
In 1993, HP acquired Advanced Design System from Pathwave. The ADS suite of RF simulation tools was spun off into Agilent in 1999 along with related T&M business units, all of which were carried forward into the spinoff of Agilent into Keysight.
Later in the decade, HP opened hpshopping.com as an independent subsidiary to sell online, direct to consumers; in 2005, the store was renamed "HP Home & Home Office Store".
From 1995 to 1999, Hewlett-Packard were sponsors of the English football team Tottenham Hotspur.
In 1999, all of the businesses not related to computers, storage, and imaging were spun off from HP to form Agilent Technologies. Agilent's spin-off was the largest initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley, and it created an $8 billion company with about 30,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments, semiconductors, optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless, research and development, and production.
In July 1999, HP appointed Carly Fiorina as the first female CEO of a Fortune-20 company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Fiorina received a larger signing offer than any of her predecessors. The same year, Fiorina articulated a set of "rules of the garage" in an attempt to reinterpret the spirit of the company's founders.
Sales to Iran despite sanctions
In 1997, HP started selling its products in Iran through a European subsidiary and a Dubai-based Middle Eastern distributor, despite U.S. export sanctions prohibiting such deals imposed by Bill Clinton's 1995 executive orders. The story was initially reported by The Boston Globe, and it triggered an inquiry by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). HP responded that products worth US$120 million were sold in fiscal year 2008 for distribution via Redington Gulf, a company based in the Netherlands, and that as these sales took place through a foreign subsidiary, HP had not violated sanctions.
HP named Redington Gulf "Wholesaler of the Year" in 2003, which in turn published a press release stating that "the seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market — Iran." At the time, Redington Gulf had only three employees whose sole purpose was to sell HP products to the Iran market. According to former officials who worked on sanctions, HP used a loophole by routing their sales through a foreign subsidiary. HP ended its relationship with Redington Gulf after the SEC inquiry.
2000–2005
On September 3, 2001, HP announced that an agreement had been reached with Compaq to merge the two companies. On May 3, 2002, after passing a shareholder vote, HP officially announced the merger with Compaq; the newly-merged company would officially launch a few days later on May 7, 2002. Prior to this, plans had been put in place to consolidate the companies' product teams and product lines.
As Compaq acquired Tandem Computers in 1997 and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1998, HP gained control of both acquired companies' product lines, and offered support for the Tandem NonStop family (now owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise) and DEC products PDP-11, VAX and Alpha for quite some time until the later years where support was gradually dwindled. Both the DEC PDP-11 and VAX were discontinued years prior to the merger, and HP supported Alpha until April 2007.
The merger was preceded by a proxy fight in 2001 with numerous large HP shareholders, in particular Bill Hewlett's son Walter and other descendants of the business founders, objecting to the merger, only approving it reluctantly. Prior to the merger, HP's ticker symbol was "HWP", which became "HPQ" shortly after acquiring Compaq, and was subsequently announced on May 6, 2002. The new ticker symbol is a combination of the two previous symbols, "HWP" and "CPQ" respectively, showing the significance of the alliance. HP then became a major producer in desktop computers, laptops, and servers for many different markets in the coming years.
In 2002, Mscape was established as a mobile media gaming platform that could be used to create location-based games.
HP would release new models of laptops under the Pavilion name during the early-to-mid 2000s, including the dv1000 series (which includes the dv1040 and the later dv1658 models) in August 2004 and the dv4000 and dv8000 series in 2005.
In January 2005, following years of underperformance, which included HP's Compaq merger that fell short and disappointing earning reports, the board asked Fiorina to resign as chair and chief executive officer of the company, which she did on February 9, 2005. After her departure, HP's stock jumped 6.9 percent. Robert Wayman, chief financial officer of HP, served as interim CEO while the board undertook a formal search for a replacement.
Mark Hurd of NCR Corporation was hired to take over as CEO and president, effective April 1, 2005. Hurd was the board's top choice given the revival of NCR that took place under his leadership.
2006–2009
In 2006, HP unveiled several new products including desktops, enhanced notebooks, a workstation, and software to manage them—OpenView Client Configuration Manager 2.0. That same year, HP's share price skyrocketed due to consistent results in the last couple quarters of the year with Hurd's plan to cut back HP's workforce and lower costs. HP was delisted from the Pacific Exchange (now closed with trades going through the NYSE Arca platform) on May 1, 2006, but continues to trade on the New York Stock Exchange as well as Nasdaq.
HP introduced a global marketing campaign for its line of personal computers in May 2006 under the tagline "The Computer is Personal Again", coinciding with the launch of its new line of consumer and business products that same month. The campaign aimed at bringing back the computer as a powerful personal tool, utilizing viral marketing and sophisticated visuals, and had its own website. The ads featured Pharrell, Petra Nemcova, Mark Burnett, Mark Cuban, Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Gwen Stefani, and Shaun White. This campaign applied to HP's product offerings which included desktops, laptops, and other hardware and software.
HP introduced new laptop models for the HP Pavilion lineup in 2006, starting with the dv5000 series in January, the dv2000 series in May and later the dv6000 and dv9000 series in July.
In July 2007, HP signed a definitive agreement to acquire Opsware in a cash tender deal that values the company at $14.25 per share, which combined Opsware software with the Oracle enterprise IT management software.
In the first few years of Hurd's tenure as CEO, HP's stock price more than doubled. By the end of the 2007 fiscal year, HP reached the $100 billion mark for the first time. The company's annual revenue reached $104 billion, allowing HP to overtake competitor IBM.
On May 13, 2008, HP and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) announced that they had signed a definitive agreement under which HP would purchase EDS. On June 30, HP announced that the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976 had expired. "The transaction still requires EDS stockholder approval and regulatory clearance from the European Commission and other non-U.S. jurisdictions and is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the other closing conditions specified in the merger agreement." The agreement was finalized on August 26, 2008, at $13 billion, and it was publicly announced that EDS would be re-branded. The first targeted layoff of 24,600 former EDS workers was announced on September 15, 2008. (The company's 2008 annual report gave the number as 24,700, to be completed by end of 2009.) This round was factored into the purchase price as a $19.5 billion liability against goodwill. As of September 23, 2009, EDS was known as HP Enterprise Services (now known as DXC Technology).
On November 11, 2009, 3Com and Hewlett-Packard announced that the latter would be acquiring 3Com for $2.7 billion in cash. The acquisition was one of the biggest in size among a series of takeovers and acquisitions by technology giants to push their way to become one-stop shops. Since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007, tech giants have constantly felt the pressure to expand beyond their current market niches. Dell purchased Perot Systems to move into the technology consulting business area previously dominated by IBM. Hewlett-Packard's latest move marked its diversification into enterprise networking gear market dominated by Cisco.
2010–2012
On April 28, 2010, HP announced that it would buy Palm, Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash and debt. The acquisition of Palm, Inc. was finalized on July 1, 2010. Adding Palm handsets to the HP product line created some overlap with the iPAQ series of mobile devices, but was thought to significantly improve HP's mobile presence as iPAQ devices had not been selling well. Buying Palm, Inc. gave HP a library of valuable patents and the mobile operating platform, webOS. Purchasing its webOS was a big gamble to build HP's own ecosystem. On July 1, 2011, HP launched its first tablet, HP TouchPad, which brought webOS to tablet devices. On September 2, 2010, HP won the bidding war for 3PAR with a $33 a share offer ($2.07 billion) that Dell declined to match. After HP acquired Palm Inc., it phased out the Compaq brand.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hewlett-Packard, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4