111–120 of 161 posts
At school (1991-1994), we had HP and Sun workstations. The HP were nicknamed the toasters because they were hot. The Sun were beautiful beasts. After power failure, we regularly had problems with Sun, never with HP. When we were downloading games from the net, it was easy to compile them on Sun, but was always a nighmare on HP (non standard includes, libraries, ...). I think HP is excellent about hardware, but terrib…
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Also, past the LaserJet 5, their printers started taking a nosedive in quality. In my own experience at work, the 1000 didn't last long before it started spewing toner all over the page, and the 4550N, a gigantic color laser with extremely expensive consumables, did likewise. Don't get me started on their inkjets. Nothing like an all-in-one that won't even let you SCAN when it decides to "expire" a costly printhead.…
What's a brand of printer that doesn't sell the printer at a loss and then has you pay through the nose for tiny cartridges of ink? I made the mistake of buying a Canon once and now I'm looking for a new printer.
Brother B&W laser printer. You want color? Go to Kinkos. That's what we do at our house, at least. It is rare that the printout really needs to be in color, so rare that I can't remember the last time we actually went to Kinkos to print something. And Brother makes a solid printer. Consumables prices? Dunno, I change the toner so rarely. I do remember that the last time I bought one, they were so cheap that I bought two instead of the one I planned.
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Technically the HP division for oscilloscopes and ee equipment still lives on via Siglent/Agilent/whatever name they're calling it now. Does anybody know why their test instruments division was spun off in the 90's? Was it to cut down on bureaucracy, or to "reinvent" the company for the digital age, or something else?
Siglent is a Chinese test equipment company. Agilent is HP's life science division (test equipment for biology folks) and the electronic test equipment division is now called keysight. As far as I'm aware these two were spun out since the growth wasn't as good as the consumer electronics division.
Here's what I noticed:
In the startup that I worked for (BladeLogic), we started small and we grew organically. Many of our early customers were very small, but eventually we grew big enough to sell thousands of licenses to companies like Target and Bank of America.
By growing organically, it gave us an opportunity to improve the software without 'sinking the ship.'
IE, if you sell fifty thousand licenses to a company like Target, you better have your software sorted out before they sign the contract.
At Hewlett Packard, we didn't start small at all. From day one, we were doing huge deals, and selling software that was just months old. If I had it my way, I would've started off slowly, worked out the bugs, and then followed with a wide release to the big customers.
I dont know about HP before the late 90s, but I have been working in some form of tech for 15 years now, and I have developed an aversion to any HP product. Seeing that logo fills me with dread and anxiety. Early on it was dealing with printer drivers, and explaining to users that you don't need the full install to use the device. Then it was painfully navigating HPSM. Then test driving the HP Stackable Switches whic…
I've gone both ways. Pre-90s, HP in my head brought to mind solid pieces of equipment with good engineering. You could back over a HP-41CV with your car, and it would still work (or at least I wouldn't be surprised; never tried). I'd blindly buy a piece of HP kit if the specs said it would do the job. Then over the years my mental image gradually changed. HP printers weren't reliable workhorses over the complete prod…
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it was easy to compile them on Sun The Sun machines were much more common and a lot of software was tested/built on SunOS.
In the 90's and early 2000's Sun machines were pretty much the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.) I worked at HP during this time helping software vendors port to HP-UX. I also spent some time on the side compiling open source projects for fun on HP-UX and then p…
I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.
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Ah, yes, the floating point bug that set the FP error handing to "software" instead of "hardware". Of course, no one thought to inform the application software side of the house, so you were one divide-by-zero away from an application crash because the FPU said "not my problem anymore". You could fix it with a liberal sprinkling of _fpreset(), assuming your language/environment allowed that option. To be fair, HP was…
The application I worked on was quite popular, and I can guarantee our customers used every printer that was out there. The HP was the only one that exhibited this bug.
But, doesn't matter, it's long since been fixed regardless of who did or did not have the bug. :-)
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Also, past the LaserJet 5, their printers started taking a nosedive in quality. In my own experience at work, the 1000 didn't last long before it started spewing toner all over the page, and the 4550N, a gigantic color laser with extremely expensive consumables, did likewise. Don't get me started on their inkjets. Nothing like an all-in-one that won't even let you SCAN when it decides to "expire" a costly printhead.…
What's a brand of printer that doesn't sell the printer at a loss and then has you pay through the nose for tiny cartridges of ink? I made the mistake of buying a Canon once and now I'm looking for a new printer.
You can't tell by brand (at least company) because all the manufacturers do it at the low end, because the dynamics at the low end of the market make it a losing strategy to do otherwise.
Gassée's problem is that he sees everything through an Apple-tinted lens. There's almost no subject that he can't turn back to his comfort zone of talking about Apple. Here we're promised an alternative account of why the conventional story of HP mismanagement is false, and end up with a lot of handwaving and 'Apple starting' as an inevitable explanation for HP's decline, despite Apple nearly going bankrupt in the in…
Indeed. Apple got lucky 3 times: the first was that the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was written for Apple II first, out of sheer happenstance. It was a blockbuster that propelled hardware sales. Apple II's were otherwise considered too expensive.
Second was a boom in "desktop publishing" which saved the Mac. Macs were far more expensive than CPM & PC's per processing power, and the nice GUI alone wasn't enough to justify the price for most consumers in the early years. However, desktop publishing, a field that didn't really exist when the Mac was built, took advantage of the graphical nature of the Mac and jolted its sales. (If Amiga had better coddled desktop publishing software co's, Commodore may have also survived.)
The 3rd was the return of Steve Jobs. Apple would probably have sank without him.
My wife has an HP Chromebook. She loves it.
She has no idea that it's made by HP. If I told her she would probably forget.
Now she wants to replace it with a newer, high end Chromebook. It might be an HP, or it might not, but either way she doesn't care.