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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.

Your questions though are valid.

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Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.

Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.

That sounds about right. Just checked and that's when Carly's tenure started. Compaq ruined DEC, HP ruined Compaq, then HP ruined HP.

We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day. I think that we printed hundred of thousands of pages and I aways trusted it.

But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else HP now. But HP had a good reputation.

> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.

Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.

I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.

But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.

You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.

And the company was an engineer's paradise--that's why Woz was so reluctant to quit.

That is not a bad rep for the shareholder. They were great in those terms. And gave lots of market opportunity for everyone else but HP dominated the scene.

I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation (including but not limited to their legendary calculators). Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once got to go to work with him and see one of their giant plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.

When I sold printers in the early 90's, HP Laserjets were broadly considered to be the gold standard.

HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.

My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.

HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).

They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.

I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.

The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be like; I miss those days.

About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.

Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...

TIL that Agilent was still in business. I thought it was a straight name-change to Keysight for their electronic test equipment business.

Very popular choice for LC/MS

Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.

You aren't wrong. 70s and 80s HP scientific gear was the gold standard - often because it was pioneered into existence.

I was recently fixing a WinNT 4.0 box, attached to a daily-used 30yo HP Spectrophotometer. The latter needed no service.

Had a black and white laserjet printer in the late 1980s. Was a magnificent device and super reliable.

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