HP sold an early personal computer by calling it a calculator
In 1968 Hewlett-Packard launched the 9100A, which Wired later named the first machine ever described as a personal computer. The company deliberately marketed it as a desktop calculator. Bill Hewlett explained that corporate computer experts would have rejected anything called a computer that did not resemble an IBM.
Bill Hewlett and David Packard earned electrical engineering degrees at Stanford in 1935 and, encouraged by their professor Frederick Terman, began working part-time in a rented Palo Alto garage in 1938 with $538 of capital. A coin toss settled the order of their names. Their first hit was the HP 200A audio oscillator, which used a small light bulb as a temperature-sensitive resistor to keep its output steady. That trick let them charge $89.40 when rivals asked over $200 for less stable instruments.
An early customer gave them credibility. Walt Disney Studios' chief sound engineer bought eight of a variant model for the film Fantasia, and that order helped the partners formally found the company on July 2, 1939. Profit in the first full year came to $1,563 on revenue of $5,369. During the Second World War the firm built its first building, grew to 200 staff and worked on radar countermeasures and proximity fuzes.
Growth was steady rather than flashy. HP went public in 1957, opened a factory in Böblingen in West Germany in 1959, and entered computing in 1966 with minicomputers, after deciding a small in-house team would be easier than working with DEC. Its handheld calculators made history: the HP-35 of 1972 was the first scientific one that fitted in a hand, and the HP-65 two years later was the first programmable model.
One engineer's side project slipped away. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I while employed at HP and offered it to his employer, which declined because it wanted to stay in scientific and industrial markets. HP still became the top PC maker from 2007 until Lenovo passed it in 2013, and at its 2011 peak employed 350,000 people.
Source: Hewlett-Packard
