wow... what an amazing article. Few interesting bits...
- HP was offering so many products that it took a four-pound, nearly 600-page catalog to describe them all.
- In what has to be one of the most famous design briefs in electronics history, Bill Hewlett asked Osborne and Cochran to shrink the 9100. “I want it to be a tenth of the volume, ten times as fast and cost a tenth as much.”
- At the time it seemed like an impossible request, but Hewlett didn’t let the idea go. Cochran, who for a time lived across the street from Hewlett, would occasionally give him a ride to work.
- It soon became clear that the entire project was going to cost around a million dollars.
- Stanford Research Institute did market survey and their conclusion was clear: “we don’t recommend that you go ahead with this.”
- Hewlett, despite the SRI report, decided he wanted one and thought his engineers should have one as well.
- For the log and exponential functions they used pseudo division and multiplication algorithms from Briggs’ 1624 Arithmetica Logarithmica. For the transcendental functions they used Volder’s CORDIC algorithm, originally developed for B-58 navigation.
- It took them more than a little finessing to fit everything into the 5140 bits (or 0.6 K).
- First industrial design featuring angled the display, a textured case, rubber feet serve as battery compartment latches.
- The entire project took 14 months, half of HP’s typical design cycle.
- Hewlett said the name would be the HP-35, after the device’s 35 keys. HP’s computerized inventory system only recognized four-digit names
- HP typically priced their equipment at the cost of the material list × π (or in an especially competitive market, list × e)
- “We [had to worry about] sales per square foot on the first floor of Macy’s, vs. the second floor.”
- HP-35 “[was] something only fictional heroes like James Bond, Walter Mitty or Dick Tracy are supposed to own,” a device that Captain Kirk of Star Trek was supposed to own.
- climbers carried to the top of Everest to do altitude calculations; Apollo astronauts used it in space to calculate re-entry coordinates
- In all, 100,000 HP-35’s (or more than 10× their estimate) were sold in the first year—accounting for more than half of the company’s total profits
It's amazing the similarity between HP and Apple's success stories. And then the fact that Steve Jobs bought the property that summer and the site is now part of Apple’s new Pentagon-sized spaceship headquarters.
I think pretty much every thing you need to know why companies succeed and fail is in this story.