Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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HP was once considered one of the best places to work, and known for innovation and making some of the best products.

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.)

The "HP" that was widely considered a great place to work hasn't existed in a long time. They spun off their original field (test & measurement) as Agilent, who then spun it off as Keysight. The two companies that kept the "HP" in their name have pretty much nothing else in common with the once-great company.

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.

Can you point to some HP products that are still great? As a student of computing history this is interesting to me.

The one in my field of view right now is an HP LaserJet Pro 400 series.

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".)

Those old LaserJets are absolutely bulletproof. My parents are still using the one we bought with our very first 486 clone in the mid 90s. I had to mod it a little to swap the serial port for USB a decade or more ago, but it is still cranking along.

Yep, I'm still using an old HP LaserJet too. Got it from a university discard, I believe, and it's over 14 years old and still cranking. Love it.

> serial

Laser printers with a serial port? Maybe Centronics?

I usually used Ethernet-connected ones, but I'd think RS232 serial at a doable bit rate was viable for most purposes.

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.

No, they did used to have serial ports, especially if PS printers (since you could then use the postscript interpreter interactively).

> Laser printers with a serial port? Maybe Centronics?

Probably not what OP means, but Mac printers all connected over serial

Whoops, parallel port not serial. Looking at pictures, this must have been a 4L.

Not as old, but I’m still running an HP3600n color printer going on 13 or 14 years now. Just toner changes every couple of years.

My HP z840 workstation I feel was well engineered. HP Chromebook 13 also great, IMO. (Both machines a few years old at this point).

I have 2 different HP MF 1212nf (multi-function laserjet) that have run rock solid for 8+ years. The HP laptops designed for business use (e.g. HP Elite X2, my current HP Elitebook 360) have been great as well, slim, and user upgradable (drive, battery). Even a consumer laptop (Compaq) has been solid-ish apart from a prematurely failing cooling fan, which I admit was a pain to replace.

The HP 50g RPN graphing calculator is the best calculator ever made. Unfortunately they moved on to make the HP Prime, which is vastly inferior.

As much as people like to hate on Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd had positive things to say about the changes she made. He gave her a lot of credit for laying the groundwork for things that eventually worked out.

This does not make me think better of Carly Fiorina, it makes me think worse of Mark Hurd.

Selling off undervalued assets to the same investors while they screw over employees and small share holders?

All currently big companies were once great places to work in. The constant need to grow to satisfy wallstreet (or their own Ego), makes them do shitty things like play games with Iknjet consumables.

Its just the way capitalism works.

>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.

Capitalism accentuates that underlying nature. It's a lot easier to say no to something clearly unethical/unscrupulous when there isn't a pile of money riding on it.

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.

Corporatism is not capitalism.

What's the (meaningful) difference?

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