Comment by charlieyu1
Comment by charlieyu1 6 months ago
Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
Comment by charlieyu1 6 months ago
Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.
The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be like; I miss those days.
I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.
HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.
And the company was an engineer's paradise--that's why Woz was so reluctant to quit.
That sounds about right. Just checked and that's when Carly's tenure started. Compaq ruined DEC, HP ruined Compaq, then HP ruined HP.
> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.
Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.
I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.
But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
You aren't wrong. 70s and 80s HP scientific gear was the gold standard - often because it was pioneered into existence.
I was recently fixing a WinNT 4.0 box, attached to a daily-used 30yo HP Spectrophotometer. The latter needed no service.
Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation (including but not limited to their legendary calculators). Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once got to go to work with him and see one of their giant plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.
My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.
HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).
They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.