The Hewlett-Packard Company was founded in 1939 by 2 Stanford University William Hewlett and David Packard and professor Frederick Terman.
Their very first financially successful product was a precision audio oscillator, the Model HP200A. The Walt Disney Company was one of the company's earliest customers, having bought eight these Model 200B oscillators for one of their movies, Fantasia.
From the 1940s until well into the 1990s the company focused on making electronic test equipment such as signal generators, voltmeters, oscilloscopes, frequency counters, thermometers, time standards, wave analyzers, and many others.HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley. Hewlett-Packard's HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices and used them primarily in instruments and calculators.
HP entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers. In 1968 HP produced the device that could be called world's first mass-produced PC, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A with CRT display, magnetic-card storage, printer – but no alphabetical keyboard! HP called it a desktop calculator because it really didn't look like an IBM.
They introduced to the world lots of electronic programmable calculators for scientific and business purposes and PC’s - even touch screen computers and later - laptops. They were made with "design for the guy at the next bench" design philosophy.
The company’s most remarkable introduction was a HP atomic clock, which becomes the world's most precise commercially available timekeeping device.
In 1997 the HP PhotoSmart system was introduced. It was first PC photography system designed for home users. It includes a photo printer, a photo scanner, and a digital camera with a 4MB removable, compact flash card inside, photo paper and image-editing software.
Yet HP has to make a niche for itself in digital cameras, though they have launched several series of digicams, not rich in megapixels but possessing Real Life technology and nice & cheap for users.
In the 21st century HP grows to become one of the world's largest IT companies. HP has successful lines of printers, scanners, digital cameras, calculators, PDAs, servers, workstation computers, and computers for home and small business use computers.
