As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
HP built plotters and printers because their customers wanted hardcopies of what they saw on their instrument screens. They built computers to control the instruments and calculators to assist engineers with calculations. Then, for some reason, the computers and printers started selling even better than the instruments. HP, which still thought of themselves as an instrumentation company, didn't catch on quickly or aggressively enough to capitalize, so their computers and printers did not keep pace and became... other than undisputably first tier. Eventually they span off the first-tier instrumentation company as Agilent (bio + EE) which in turn eventually span off Keysight (EE).
Electrical Engineers are still salty that the mediocre printer company got to keep the HP name while the best-in-class instrumentation company that still commands respect to this very day had to rebrand as "Keysight."
https://youtu.be/dB5rg_TqmD8?t=32
I'd like to think that if Bill and Dave (Hewlett and Packard) were still alive they could still take pride in their T&M legacy, even though it's the DRM-hobbled one-quarter-full printer ink cartridges that wound up with their names on the front.
Incidentally, Agilent did the same thing with Varian -- an NMR company that was involved in the acquisition of data ultimately in several nobel prizes. They didn't make enough money in a two year period, and Excel and MBAs killed a multi-decade business [1], leading to unemployment and a monopoly in the field of preclinical MRI, EPR/ESR, and a duopoly in NMR spectroscopy. Ain't progress grant?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109078071...
2. They were very innovative in a lot of the areas they touched. Instrumentation, which was their core business, but also printing, plotting, portable computers (I own one of their mid-80s HP-UX portable computers), touchscreens (the HP-150, for example).
3. Quality was hugely important. That 35 year old workstation still powers up. I have a similar vintage plotter that still works. HP laser printers were an absolute gold standard. Everything they made was the absolute highest build quality.
4. They had an rmarkable culture. For example, Hewlett and Packard mandated that managers would sit in an open area, while their engineers and scientists would have offices. This was based on what now gets called servant leadership - the idea that the manager needed to be available to facilitate the staff, not the other way around. Employees could freely borrow equipment for personal projects.
Sadly, all of that was flushed away starting in the 90s.
I don't think anyone had offices. It was all cubicles. (I worked at HP Labs in the 80's and met both Bill and Dave a couple of times.)
One cool thing HP had was "lab stock" cabinets on every floor that were full of free-for-experimentation ICs and other components. I think it's likely that the Apple I and Apple II computers were designed using components taken from those lab stock cabinets. (The story is that Steve W. tried to get HP interested in producing the Apple computers, but they just wouldn't go for it.)
It's shocking how far HP has fallen from its illustrious past.
Or are you asking why he'd even have wanted an internship there in the first place?