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115-502: The Ultrix Window Manager was developed by the Digital Equipment Corporation for its Ultrix operating system . It was released in 1985. Shortly thereafter, it became included as part of the base X Window System distribution, beginning with X10R3. Initially, it was distributed alongside two other window managers ( xwm and xnwm ). In 1986, the X Window System switched to version 11 of the protocol. Only uwm

230-426: A 19-inch rack . The backplanes allowed 25 modules in a single 5-1/4 inch section of rack, and allowed the high densities needed to build a computer. The original laboratory and system module lines were offered in 500 kilocycle, 5 megacycle and 10 megacycle versions. In all cases, the supply voltages were -15 and +10 volts, with logic levels of -3 volts (passive pull-down) and 0 volts (active pull-up). DEC used

345-749: A Fortune 500 ranking of 9 in 2009. In November 2009, HP announced its acquisition of 3Com , and closed the deal on April 12, 2010. On April 28, 2010, HP announced its buyout of Palm, Inc. for $ 1.2 billion. On September 2, 2010, HP won its bidding war for 3PAR with a $ 33 a share offer ($ 2.07 billion), which Dell declined to match. On November 1, 2015, Hewlett-Packard was split into two separate companies. Its enterprise products and services business were spun-off to form Hewlett Packard Enterprise , while its personal computer and printer businesses became HP Inc. Bill Hewlett and David Packard graduated with degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company started in

460-547: 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 forming the company. In 1938, Packard and Hewlett began part-time work in a rented garage with an initial capital investment of US$ 538 (equivalent to $ 11,645 in 2023). In 1939, Hewlett and Packard decided to formalize their partnership. They tossed

575-643: 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 ", an attempt to capture the spirit of the company's founders. 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

690-610: A VAX CPU was the VAX-11/780 , announced in October 1977, which DEC referred to as a superminicomputer . Although it was not the first 32-bit minicomputer, the VAX-11/780's combination of features, price, and marketing almost immediately propelled it to a leadership position in the market after it was released in 1978. VAX systems were so successful that in 1983, DEC canceled its Jupiter project , which had been intended to build

805-466: 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 (known as a "pilot light") as a temperature dependent resistor in a critical portion of the circuit, and a negative feedback loop to stabilize

920-611: 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

1035-593: 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

1150-522: A foreign subsidiary. HP ended its relationship with Redington Gulf after the SEC inquiry. 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. Prior to this, plans had been in place to consolidate the companies' product teams and product lines. The newly-merged company would officially launch five days after

1265-789: 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. 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. Hewlett-Packard's HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices primarily for internal use. Instruments and calculators were some of their products using semiconductor devices. During

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1380-583: A new virtual memory system, and would also improve performance by processing twice as much data at a time. The system would, however, maintain compatibility with the PDP-11, by operating in a second mode that sent its 16-bit words into the 32-bit internals, while mapping the PDP-11's 16-bit memory space into the larger virtual 32-bit space. The result was the VAX architecture, where VAX stands for Virtual Address eXtension (from 16 to 32 bits). The first computer to use

1495-476: A new device to be added easily, generally only requiring plugging a hardware interface board into the backplane and possibly adding a jumper to the wire wrapped backplane, and then installing software that read and wrote to the mapped memory to control it. The relative ease of interfacing spawned a huge market of third party add-ons for the PDP-11, which made the machine even more useful. The combination of architectural innovations proved superior to competitors and

1610-467: A profit at the end of its first year. The original Laboratory Modules were soon supplemented with the "Digital System Module " line, which were identical internally but packaged differently. The Systems Modules were designed with all of the connections at the back of the module using 22-pin Amphenol connectors, and were attached to each other by plugging them into a backplane that could be mounted in

1725-543: 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 . 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

1840-737: A range of printers and other imaging products. The company directly marketed its products to households; small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises, as well as via online distribution; consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers; software partners; and major technology vendors. It also offered services and a consulting business for its products and partner products. In 1999, HP spun off its electronic and bio-analytical test and measurement instruments business into Agilent Technologies ; HP retained focus on its later products, including computers and printers. It merged with Compaq in 2002, and acquired Electronic Data Systems in 2008, which led to combined revenues of $ 118.4 billion that year and

1955-546: 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 their 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

2070-438: A selection of System Building Blocks to implement a small 12-bit machine, and attached it to a variety of analog-to-digital (A to D) input/output (I/O) devices that made it easy to interface with various analog lab equipment. The LINC proved to attract intense interest in the scientific community, and has since been referred to as the first real minicomputer , a machine that was small and inexpensive enough to be dedicated to

2185-485: A self-sustaining business, the company would be free to use them to develop a complete computer in their Phase II. The newly christened "Digital Equipment Corporation" received $ 70,000 from AR&D for a 70% share of the company, and began operations in a Civil War -era textile mill in Maynard, Massachusetts , where plenty of inexpensive manufacturing space was available. In early 1958, DEC shipped its first products,

2300-511: A separate input/output processor for further performance gains. Over 400 PDP-15's were ordered in the first eight months of production, and production eventually amounted to 790 examples in 12 basic models. However, by this time other machines in DEC's lineup could fill the same niche at even lower price points, and the PDP-15 would be the last of the 18-bit series. In 1962, Lincoln Laboratory used

2415-467: 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. At the end of 1968, Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in

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2530-485: A single large mainframe case, with a hexagonal control panel containing switches and lights mounted to lie at table-top height at one end of the mainframe. Above the control panel was the system's standard input/output solution, a punched tape reader and writer. Most systems were purchased with two peripherals , the Type 30 vector graphics display, and a Soroban Engineering modified IBM Model B Electric typewriter that

2645-659: A single task even in a small lab. Seeing the success of the LINC, in 1963 DEC took the basic logic design but stripped away the extensive A to D systems to produce the PDP-5 . The new machine, the first outside the PDP-1 mould, was introduced at WESTCON on August 11, 1963. A 1964 ad expressed the main advantage of the PDP-5, "Now you can own the PDP-5 computer for what a core memory alone used to cost: $ 27,000". 116 PDP-5s were produced until

2760-653: A successor to the PDP-10 mainframe, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as the single computer architecture for the company. Supporting the VAX's success was the VT52 , one of the most successful smart terminals . Building on earlier less successful models, the VT05 and VT50 , the VT52 was the first terminal that did everything one might want in a single inexpensive chassis. The VT52

2875-440: A turn to use the stripped-down TX-0, while largely ignoring a faster IBM machine that was also available. The two decided that the draw of interactive computing was so strong that they felt there was a market for a small machine dedicated to this role, essentially a commercialized TX-0. They could sell this to users where the graphical output or real-time operation would be more important than outright performance. Additionally, as

2990-506: A wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses ( SMBs ), and fairly large companies, including customers in government, health, and education sectors. The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939, and initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment. The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue

3105-567: A workstation, and software to manage them—OpenView Client Configuration Manager 2.0. In 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 began its marketing campaign called "The Computer is Personal Again" in May 2006, aimed at bringing back the personal computer as a personal product. The campaign utilized viral marketing and sophisticated visuals, as well as its own website. Some of

3220-766: Is accessed either by clicking on the root window to bring up a menu or by holding down the Meta key while clicking or dragging within windows. It is possible to configure the key and mouse button bindings and the contents of the menus by using a configuration file, a feature inherited by many later window managers. Uwm does not provide ICCCM compatibility or multiple screen support. Descendants of uwm include awm and Tekwm (the Tektronix Window Manager), which also are currently not maintained. Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC / d ɛ k / ), using

3335-677: Is most famous as the machine for which the Unix operating system was originally written. Unix ran only on DEC systems until the Interdata 8/32 . A more dramatic upgrade to the PDP-1 series was introduced in August 1966, the PDP-9 . The PDP-9 was instruction-compatible with the PDP-4 and −7, but ran about twice as fast as the −7 and was intended to be used in larger deployments. At only $ 19,900 in 1968,

3450-522: Is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Unsurprisingly, DEC did not put much effort into the microcomputer area in the early days of the market. In 1977, the Heathkit H11 was announced; a PDP-11 in kit form. At the beginning of the 1980s, DEC built the VT180 (codenamed "Robin"), which was a VT100 terminal with an added Z80 -based microcomputer running CP/M , but this product

3565-429: Is now designated an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked with a plaque calling it the "Birthplace of ' Silicon Valley ' ". The company won its first big contract in 1938 to provide the HP 200B , a variation of its first product, the HP 200A low-distortion frequency oscillator for Walt Disney 's production of the 1940 animated film Fantasia , which allowed Hewlett and Packard to formally establish

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3680-479: The Apple I computer while working at HP and offered it to them under their right of first refusal to his work. They 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

3795-539: The HP Pavilion dv1000 series of laptops in 2004, which included the HP Pavilion dv1658 and dv1040 models. Other laptop models available around this time were the dv4000, dv5000, and the dv8000 series. 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

3910-727: The SAGE system for the US Air Force , which used large screens and light guns to allow operators to interact with radar data stored in the computer. When the Air Force project wound down, the Lab turned their attention to an effort to build a version of the Whirlwind using transistors in place of vacuum tubes . In order to test their new circuitry, they first built a small 18-bit machine known as TX-0 , which first ran in 1956. When

4025-520: The minicomputer market starting in the early 1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through

4140-399: The trademark Digital , was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in

4255-802: The "11" architecture was soon the industry leader, propelling DEC back to a strong market position. The design was later expanded to allow paged physical memory and memory protection features, useful for multitasking and time-sharing . Some models supported separate instruction and data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128 KB within a physical address size of up to 4 MB. Smaller PDP-11s, implemented as single-chip CPUs, continued to be produced until 1996, by which time over 600,000 had been sold. The PDP-11 supported several operating systems, including Bell Labs ' new Unix operating system as well as DEC's DOS-11 , RSX-11 , IAS, RT-11 , DSM-11, and RSTS/E . Many early PDP-11 applications were developed using standalone paper-tape utilities. DOS-11

4370-543: The "Digital Laboratory Module" line. The Modules consisted of a number of individual electronic components and germanium transistors mounted to a circuit board , the actual circuits being based on those from the TX-2. The Laboratory Modules were packaged in an extruded aluminum housing, intended to sit on an engineer's workbench, although a rack-mount bay was sold that held nine laboratory modules. They were then connected together using banana plug patch cords inserted at

4485-439: The "sandbox" for a rising generation of engineers and computer scientists. Large numbers of PDP-11/70s were deployed in telecommunications and industrial control applications. AT&T Corporation became DEC's largest customer. RT-11 provided a practical real-time operating system in minimal memory, allowing the PDP-11 to continue DEC's critical role as a computer supplier for embedded systems . Historically, RT-11 also served as

4600-433: The 1950s, wiped out when new technical developments rendered their platforms obsolete, and even large companies like RCA and General Electric were failing to make a profit in the market. The only serious expression of interest came from Georges Doriot and his American Research and Development Corporation (AR&D). Worried that a new computer company would find it difficult to arrange further financing, Doriot suggested

4715-469: 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. HP spun off

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4830-399: The 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC -based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded. By the early 1990s, the company was in turmoil as their mini sales collapsed and their attempts to address this by entering

4945-572: The 1980s, culminating in the NVAX microprocessor implementation and VAX 7000/10000 series in the early 1990s. When a DEC research group demonstrated two prototype microcomputers in 1974—before the debut of the MITS Altair —Olsen chose to not proceed with the project. The company similarly rejected another personal computer proposal in 1977. At the time these systems were of limited utility, and Olsen famously derided them in 1977, stating "There

5060-450: The CPU which allowed one to easily see the logic modules plugged into the wire-wrapped backplane of the CPU. Sold standard with 4 kWords of 12-bit core memory and a Teletype Model 33 ASR for basic input/output, the machine listed for only $ 18,000. The PDP-8 is referred to as the first real minicomputer because of its sub-$ 25,000 price. Sales were, unsurprisingly, very strong, and helped by

5175-540: 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

5290-634: The Hewlett-Packard Company on July 2, 1939. The company grew into a multinational corporation widely respected for its products. HP was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007 until the second quarter of 2013, when Lenovo moved ahead of HP. HP specialized in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware; designing software; and delivering services. Major product lines included personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software, and

5405-617: 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,

5520-517: The PC, but was more expensive than, and completely incompatible with IBM PC hardware and software, offering far fewer options for customizing a system. Unlike CP/M and DOS microcomputers, every copy of every program for the Professional had to be provided with a unique key for the particular machine and CPU for which it was bought. At that time this was mainstream policy, because most computer software

5635-630: The PDP-8, all in software. Although not a huge seller, 142 LINC-8s were sold starting at $ 38,500. Like the original LINC to PDP-5 evolution, the LINC-8 was then modified into the single-processor PDP-12 , adding another 1000 machines to the 12-bit family. Newer circuitry designs led to the PDP-8/I and PDP-8/L in 1968. In 1975, one year after an agreement between DEC and Intersil , the Intersil 6100 chip

5750-459: The PDP-9 was a big seller, eventually selling 445 machines, more than all of the earlier models combined. Even while the PDP-9 was being introduced, its replacement was being designed, and was introduced as 1969's PDP-15 , which re-implemented the PDP-9 using integrated circuits in place of modules. Much faster than the PDP-9 even in basic form, the PDP-15 also included a floating point unit and

5865-700: The Professional was a superior machine, running inferior software. In addition, a new user would have to learn an awkward, slow, and inflexible menu-based user interface which appeared to be radically different from PC DOS or CP/M , which were more commonly used on the 8080- and 8088-based microcomputers of the time. A second offering, the DECmate II was the latest version of the PDP-8-based word processors, but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang Laboratories ' popular word processing equipment. The most popular early DEC microcomputer

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5980-511: The Rainbow, and in its standard form was the first widely marketed diskless workstation . In 1984, DEC launched its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet . Ethernet allowed scalable networking, and VAXcluster allowed scalable computing. Combined with DECnet and Ethernet-based terminal servers ( LAT ), DEC had produced a networked storage architecture which allowed them to compete directly with IBM. Ethernet replaced Token Ring , and went on to become

6095-492: The System Modules to build their "Memory Test" machine for testing core memory systems, selling about 50 of these pre-packaged units over the next eight years. The PDP-1 and LINC computers were also built using System Modules (see below). Modules were part of DEC's product line into the 1970s, although they went through several evolutions during this time as technology changed. The same circuits were then packaged as

6210-469: The TX-0 successfully proved the basic concepts, attention turned to a much larger system, the 36-bit TX-2 with a then-enormous 64 kWords of core memory . Core was so expensive that parts of TX-0's memory were stripped for the TX-2, and what remained of the TX-0 was then given to MIT on permanent loan. At MIT, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson noticed something odd: students would line up for hours to get

6325-588: The Year" in 2003, which in turn published a press release stating that "[t]he 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

6440-436: The ability to address more memory, often by extending the address format to 18 or 24-bits in machines were otherwise similar to their earlier 16-bit designs. In contrast, DEC decided to make a more radical departure. In 1976, they began the design of a machine whose entire architecture was expanded from the 16-bit PDP-11 to a new 32-bit basis. This would allow the addressing of very large memories, which were to be controlled by

6555-515: The adoption of "\" for pathnames in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows as opposed to "/" in Unix . The evolution of the PDP-11 followed earlier systems, eventually including a single-user deskside personal computer form, the MicroPDP-11. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, and a wide variety of third-party peripheral vendors had also entered the computer product ecosystem. It

6670-486: The ads featured Pharrell , Petra Nemcova , Mark Burnett , Mark Cuban , Alicia Keys , Jay-Z , Gwen Stefani , and Shaun White . This marketing campaign was also incorporated directly onto HP's product offerings, which included desktops, laptops, and other hardware and software. HP offered three new laptop models in mid-to-late 2006 with the Pavilion dv2000 , dv6000 , and dv9000 series. In July 2007, HP signed

6785-497: 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

6900-472: The animated film Fantasia . HP's profit at the end of 1939, its first full year of business, was $ 1,563 (equivalent to $ 34,236 in 2023) 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

7015-577: The announcement on May 7, 2002. As Compaq acquired Tandem Computers in 1997 and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1998, HP inherited 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 . Both the DEC PDP-11 and VAX were discontinued years before the merger, and HP supported DEC Alpha until April 2007. The merger

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7130-512: The basis for the new design, although when they first viewed the proposal, management was not impressed and almost cancelled it. The result was the PDP-11 , released in 1970. It differed from earlier designs considerably. In particular, the new design did not include many of the addressing modes that were intended to make programs smaller in memory, a technique that was widely used on other DEC machines and CISC designs in general. This would mean

7245-451: The better-established vendors like IBM or Honeywell , in spite of its low cost around $ 300,000. Only 23 were sold, or 26 depending on the source, and unlike other models the low sales meant the PDP-6 was not improved with successor versions. However, the PDP-6 is historically important as the platform that introduced "Monitor", an early time-sharing operating system that would evolve into

7360-774: The company's first computer, the PDP-1 . In keeping with Doriot's instructions, the name was an initialism for " Programmable Data Processor ", leaving off the term "computer". As Gurley put it, "We aren't building computers, we're building 'Programmable Data Processors'." The prototype was first shown publicly at the Joint Computer Conference in Boston in December 1959. The first PDP-1 was delivered to Bolt, Beranek and Newman in November 1960, and formally accepted

7475-514: The company, and 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. In 2006, HP unveiled several new products including desktops, enhanced notebooks,

7590-411: The compatible DECSYSTEM-20 , along with a TOPS-20 operating system that included virtual memory support. The Jupiter Project was supposed to continue the mainframe product line into the future by using gate arrays with an innovative Air Mover Cooling System, coupled with a built-in floating point processing engine called "FBOX". The design was intended for a top tier scientific computing niche, yet

7705-486: The critical performance measurement was based upon COBOL compilation which did not fully utilize the primary design features of Jupiter technology. When the Jupiter Project was cancelled in 1983, some of the engineers adapted aspects of the 36-bit design into a forthcoming 32-bit design, releasing the high-end VAX8600 in 1985. DEC's successful entry into the computer market took place during a fundamental shift in

7820-477: 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

7935-404: 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

8050-458: The dominant networking model in use today. In September 1985, DEC became the fifth company to register a .com domain name (dec.com). Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company , commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( / ˈ h juː l ɪ t ˈ p æ k ər d / HEW -lit PAK -ərd ) or HP , was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California . HP developed and provided

8165-473: The fact that several competitors had just entered the market with machines aimed directly at the PDP-5's market space, which the PDP-8 trounced. This gave the company two years of unrestricted leadership, and eventually 1450 "straight eight" machines were produced before it was replaced by newer implementations of the same basic design. DEC hit an even lower price-point with the PDP-8/S, the S for "serial". As

8280-475: The first "R" (red) series " Flip-Chip " modules. Later, other Flip-Chip module series provided additional speed, much higher logic density, and industrial I/O capabilities. DEC published extensive data about the modules in free catalogs that became very popular. With the company established and a successful product on the market, DEC turned its attention to the computer market once again as part of its planned "Phase II". In August 1959, Ben Gurley started design of

8395-436: 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

8510-487: The fledgling company change its business plan to focus less on computers, and even change their name from "Digital Computer Corporation". The pair returned with an updated business plan that outlined two phases for the company's development. They would start by selling computer modules as stand-alone devices that could be purchased separately and wired together to produce a number of different digital systems for lab use. Then, if these "digital modules" were able to build

8625-411: The front of the modules. Three versions were offered, running at 5 MHz (1957), 500 kHz (1959), or 10 MHz (1960). The Modules proved to be in high demand by other computer companies, who used them to build equipment to test their own systems. Despite the recession of the late 1950s, the company sold $ 94,000 worth of these modules during 1958 alone (equivalent to $ 992,700 in 2023), turning

8740-607: 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 . In the 1990s, HP expanded their computer product line, which initially had been targeted at university, research, and business users, to reach consumers. HP also grew through acquisitions: it bought Apollo Computer in 1989 and Convex Computer in 1995. In 1992, Young

8855-512: The high-end market with machines like the VAX 9000 were market failures. After several attempts to enter the workstation and file server market, the DEC Alpha product line began to make successful inroads in the mid-1990s, but was too late to save the company. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. During

8970-546: The incoming Nixon administration. He resumed the chairmanship in 1972 and served until 1993, but Hewlett remained the CEO. 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 , now commonly used on gas pumps and bank ATMs. The HP 2640 series included one of

9085-413: The inspiration for many microcomputer OS's, as these were generally being written by programmers who cut their teeth on one of the many PDP-11 models. For example, CP/M used a command syntax similar to RT-11's, and even retained the awkward PIP program used to copy data from one computer device to another. As another historical footnote, DEC's use of "/" for "switches" (command-line options) would lead to

9200-471: 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

9315-490: The lab's various computer projects. The Lab is best known for their work on what would today be known as "interactivity", and their machines were among the first where operators had direct control over programs running in real-time. These had started in 1944 with the famed Whirlwind , which was originally developed to make a flight simulator for the US Navy , although this was never completed. Instead, this effort evolved into

9430-548: The limited information available, they used it to process radar cross section data for the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft . Gordon Bell remembered that it was being used in Oregon some time later, but could not recall who was using it. In November 1962, DEC introduced the $ 65,000 PDP-4 . The PDP-4 was similar to the PDP-1 and used a similar instruction set, but used slower memory and different packaging to lower

9545-441: The lines were shut down in early 1967. Like the PDP-1 before it, the PDP-5 inspired a series of newer models based on the same basic design that would go on to be more famous than its parent. On March 22, 1965, DEC introduced the PDP-8 , which replaced the PDP-5's modules with the new R-series modules using Flip Chips. The machine was re-packaged into a small tabletop case, which remains distinctive for its use of smoked plastic over

9660-496: The machine would cost much less than the larger systems then available, it would also be able to serve users that needed a lower-cost solution dedicated to a specific task, where a larger 36-bit machine would not be needed. In 1957, when the pair and Ken's brother Stan sought capital, they found that the American business community was hostile to investing in computer companies. Many smaller computer companies had come and gone in

9775-438: The machine would spend more time accessing memory, which would slow it down. However, the machine also extended the idea of multiple "General Purpose Registers" (GPRs), which gave the programmer flexibility to use these high-speed memory caches as they needed, potentially addressing the performance issues. A major advance in the PDP-11 design was DEC's Unibus , which supported all peripherals through memory mapping . This allowed

9890-457: 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 purchase price as a $ 19.5 billion liability against goodwill. As of September 23, 2009, EDS

10005-425: The name implies the /S used a serial arithmetic unit, which was much slower but reduced costs so much that the system sold for under $ 10,000. DEC then used the new PDP-8 design as the basis for a new LINC, the two-processor LINC-8 . The LINC-8 used one PDP-8 CPU and a separate LINC CPU, and included instructions to switch from one to the other. This allowed customers to run their existing LINC programs, or "upgrade" to

10120-458: The next April. The PDP-1 sold in basic form for $ 120,000 (equivalent to $ 9,269,291 in 2023). By the time production ended in 1969, 53 PDP-1s had been delivered. The PDP-1 was supplied standard with 4096 words of core memory , 18-bits per word, and ran at a basic speed of 100,000 operations per second. It was constructed using many System Building Blocks that were packaged into several 19-inch racks . The racks were themselves packaged into

10235-581: The price. Like the PDP-1, about 54 PDP-4s were eventually sold, most to a customer base similar to the original PDP-1. In 1964, DEC introduced its new Flip Chip module design, and used it to re-implement the PDP-4 as the PDP-7 . The PDP-7 was introduced in December 1964, and about 120 were eventually produced. An upgrade to the Flip Chip led to the R series, which in turn led to the PDP-7A in 1965. The PDP-7

10350-488: 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

10465-665: The purchase, some parts of DEC were sold to other companies; the compiler business and the Hudson Fab were sold to Intel . At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. Compaq subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson were two engineers who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on

10580-607: The same design. During construction of the prototype PDP-1, some design work was carried out on a 24-bit PDP-2, and the 36-bit PDP-3. Although the PDP-2 never proceeded beyond the initial design, the PDP-3 found some interest and was designed in full. Only one PDP-3 appears to have been built, in 1960, by the CIA's Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) in Waltham, Massachusetts . According to

10695-468: The significance of the alliance and also key letters from the two companies H ewlett- P ackard and Compa q (the latter company being famous for incorporating the letter "Q" on its logo for all of their products). HP then went on to become a major producer in desktop computers , laptops, and servers for many different markets. Mscape was a mobile media gaming platform that could be used to create location-based games originating in 2002. HP released

10810-566: 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. 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

10925-440: 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

11040-489: The underlying organization of the machines from word lengths based on 6-bit characters to those based on 8-bit words needed to support ASCII . DEC began studies of such a machine, the PDP-X, but Ken Olsen did not support it as he could not see how it offered anything their existing 12-bit or 18-bit machines didn't. This led the leaders of the PDP-X project to leave DEC and start Data General , whose 16-bit Data General Nova

11155-467: The widely used TOPS-10 . When newer Flip Chip packaging allowed the PDP-6 to be re-implemented at a much lower cost, DEC took the opportunity to refine their 36-bit design, introducing the PDP-10 in 1968. The PDP-10 was as much a success as the PDP-6 was a commercial failure; about 700 mainframe PDP-10s were sold before production ended in 1984. The PDP-10 was widely used in university settings, and thus

11270-609: 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-41 C), and the first symbolic and graphing calculator, the HP-28C . Like their scientific and business calculators, HP oscilloscopes , logic analyzers , and other measurement instruments had

11385-478: Was either bought from the company that built the computer or custom-constructed for one client. However, the emerging third-party software industry disregarded the PDP-11/Professional line and concentrated on other microcomputers where distribution was easier. At DEC itself, creating better programs for the Professional was not a priority, perhaps from fear of cannibalizing the PDP-11 line. As a result,

11500-507: Was even sold in kit form as the Heathkit H11 , although it proved too expensive for Heathkit 's traditional hobbyist market. The introduction of semiconductor memory in the early 1970s, and especially dynamic RAM shortly thereafter, led to dramatic reductions in the price of memory as the effects of Moore's Law were felt. Within years, it was common to equip a machine with all the memory it could address, typically 64 KB on 16-bit machines. This led vendors to introduce new designs with

11615-623: Was eventually ported along with MS-DOS 2.0 and introduced in late 1983. Although the Rainbow generated some press, it was unsuccessful due to its high price and lack of marketing and sales support. By late 1983 IBM was outselling DEC's personal computers by more than ten to one. A further system was introduced in 1986 as the VAXmate , which included Microsoft Windows 1.0 and used VAX/VMS-based file and print servers along with integration into DEC's own DECnet -family, providing LAN/WAN connection from PC to mainframe or supermini. The VAXmate replaced

11730-636: Was followed by the even more successful VT100 and its follow-ons, making DEC one of the largest terminal vendors in the industry. This was supported by a line of inexpensive computer printers , the DECwriter line. With the VT and DECwriter series, DEC could now offer a complete top-to-bottom system from computer to all peripherals, which formerly required collecting the required devices from different suppliers. The VAX processor architecture and family of systems evolved and expanded through several generations during

11845-731: Was initially available only to DEC employees. It was only after IBM had successfully launched the IBM PC in 1981 that DEC responded with their own systems. In 1982, DEC introduced not one, but three incompatible machines which were each tied to different proprietary architectures. The first, the DEC Professional , was based on the PDP-11/23 (and later, the 11/73) running the RSX-11M+ derived, but menu-driven, P/OS ("Professional Operating System"). This DEC machine easily outperformed

11960-484: 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

12075-441: 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

12190-498: Was launched, effectively a PDP-8 on a chip. This was a way to allow PDP-8 software to be run even after the official end-of-life announcement for the DEC PDP-8 product line. While the PDP-5 introduced a lower-cost line, 1963's PDP-6 was intended to take DEC into the mainframe market with a 36-bit machine. However, the PDP-6 proved to be a "hard sell" with customers, as it offered few obvious advantages over similar machines from

12305-435: Was ported, so it became the only window manager for X Window System until X11R4 release, where it was replaced by twm . Uwm has never been maintained since, although it has been patched for use in modern UNIX-like operating systems through the pkgsrc package manager . Unlike more recent window managers, uwm is not re-parenting , and does not place frames or title bars on windows. Instead, all window management functionality

12420-424: Was preceded by a proxy fight in 2001 with numerous large HP shareholders as well as the sons of the co-founders, with Bill Hewlett's son Walter objecting to the merger, only approving it reluctantly. HP's pre-merger ticker symbol was "HWP". After the merger with Compaq, the new ticker symbol became "HPQ", which was announced on May 6, 2002. "HPQ" is a combination of the two previous symbols, "HWP" and "CPQ", to show

12535-539: Was released in 1969 and was a huge success. The success of the Nova finally prompted DEC to take the switch seriously, and they began a crash program to introduce a 16-bit machine of their own. The new system was designed primarily by Harold McFarland, Gordon Bell , Roger Cady, and others. The project was able to leap forward in design with the arrival of Harold McFarland, who had been researching 16-bit designs at Carnegie Mellon University . One of his simpler designs became

12650-406: Was succeeded by Lewis E. Platt , and in 1993 and Hewlett and 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

12765-404: Was the PDP-11's first disk operating system, but was soon supplanted by more capable systems. RSX provided a general-purpose multitasking environment and supported a wide variety of programming languages . IAS was a time-sharing version of RSX-11D. Both RSTS and Unix were time-sharing systems available to educational institutions at little or no cost, and these PDP-11 systems were destined to be

12880-454: Was the basis of many advances in computing and operating system design during the 1970s. DEC later re-branded all of the models in the 36-bit series as the "DECsystem-10", and PDP-10s are generally referred to by the model of their CPU, starting with the "KA10", soon upgraded to the "KI10" (I:Integrated circuit); then to "KL10" (L:Large-scale integration ECL logic ); also the "KS10" (S: Small form factor ). Unified product line upgrades produced

12995-535: Was the dual-processor (Z80 and 8088) Rainbow 100 , which ran the 8-bit CP/M operating system on the Z80 and the 16-bit CP/M-86 operating system on the Intel 8088 processor. It could also run a UNIX System III implementation called VENIX . Applications from standard CP/M could be re-compiled for the Rainbow, but by this time users were expecting custom-built (pre-compiled binary) applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 , which

13110-410: 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

13225-441: Was used as a printer . The Soroban system was notoriously unreliable, and often replaced with a modified Friden Flexowriter , which also contained its own punched tape system. A variety of more-expensive add-ons followed, including magnetic tape systems, punched card readers and punches, and faster punched tape and printer systems. When DEC introduced the PDP-1, they also mentioned larger machines at 24, 30 and 36 bits, based on

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