Oh well that's Cray Runined
I understand that HP executives had a belief in management by walking around, and talking to the people on the ground.
I think it was around the time of Fiorina that this changed. There were mergers/acquisitions, changes in management style, and changes in industry.
Today, I still see signs of greatness in some HP products, though I can't forget seeing their brand on corner-cutting consumer PCs, and the playing of games with inkjet consumables is bad for brand goodwill.
I don't know how HPE fits into that history, but I suspect that their market demands they perform well.
I hope HPE keeps the Cray name for at least some purposes, and honors the name with great work befitting it. There's also the great name of HP to honor.
(Story: As a nerdy teen, I once got to go to a Cray division (Cray Research Superservers), to port some software. I'd grown up reading about Cray supercomputers, seeing them on the top supercomputers list, etc., Cray had both technical innovation and style, and there was a huge mystique around them. On-site, typing on a workstation frontend, telneted into a big cabinet across the room that would say Cray on it if the panels were on, was an experience I couldn't process, because I was half-terrified into accomplishing the mission (it turned out to be easy), but there was much gushing in awe to coworkers afterwards.)
My previous LaserJet, a 5N, I found set out for the trash on the curb late one night, in a sprinkling of rain. So I hauled it home, plugged it in, and proceeded to run it for over a decade, very infrequently putting new toner in it (never even had to replace the rollers).
Eventually, the LaserJet 5N's fan started to fail (all the mechanics and fuser and everything still working fine), which presumably was a replaceable muffin fan, but I also wanted a sleep mode (and preferably to not dim the lights at warmup), so I parted it out (too heavy to ship, but the parts were still marketable), and bought a contemporary LaserJet.
The new LaserJet is not as bulletproof-looking, but is sturdy and has worked like a champ for a few years, for letter and envelopes, and it still respects the toner. My only complaints are that I wish they wouldn't play setup convenience tricks with USB, and that I'm unwilling to give its huge firmware direct network access. (For CUPS drivers, instead of using `hplip`, I now use the simpler "HP LaserJet Series PCL 6 CUPS".)
Laser printers with a serial port? Maybe Centronics?
Both HP-PCL and PostScript (I wrote code to generate both) can be sufficiently compact. (And you had the trusty built-in fonts, plus sometimes additional fonts in cartridges/cards, so fonts didn't necessarily have to be sent with the print job.)
What could be a problem for connection via RS232 is large images, or an unfortunate setup that rasterizes the whole page off-printer at high dots-per-inch.
Probably not what OP means, but Mac printers all connected over serial
Its just the way capitalism works.
I would say that it is more to do with they way human nature works (in some people), than capitalism. Applies in every field of life, not just business.
When there's a heavy incentive to pursue this nature for more fundamental needs like food, family security, etc. then it takes a heck of a lot more will power to not participate.
The HP(E) that's buying Cray is not the same organization that gave us LEDs, atomic clocks, scientific calculators, inkjet and laser printers, and the RISC CPUs. That HP is gone.