Curator Marc Mislanghe Dies Unexpectedly

The developer and our Curator of this website, Marc Mislanghe, passed away on July 23, 2014. He had been undergoing some medical procedures, when all of his friends, and the Internet audience of this website, were stunned to hear that he had died. His enthusiasm and energy and vision for a measurements museum, both real and virtual (this website) are gone forever.

Marc's charming life story is told in these pages, his joy was being hired by Hewlett-Packard Co. as a Support engineer and Sales engineer for a productive career. In his retirement, Marc became enamored with the idea of a measurements museum. He was accumulating a collection of vintage HP instruments and computers, in his home basement in France. As a preamble to a real museum, he decided to create a virtual one, using this website.

As his website expanded with instrument-related content, inventories, HP instrument introductions, described by decade, large archives of HP publications, application notes and measurement processes, he happened upon several HP author memoirs. This led to a new website section which began a long look at the human side of Hewlett-Packard, the HP Way, and the work culture of the preeminent high tech company of the 20th century. By the time of his shockingly-unexpected death, he had compiled 20 HP memoirs, which reveal the memories of a variety of HP authors, from division managers to the telephone operator who knew Hewlett and Packard personally.

In these pages, you will see his vision for his future measurements museum, sketches, a promotional pamphlet, ideas for structuring some of the key instrument and computer breakthroughs of those decades. His personality shows through in all of those pages, little animations, large numbers of people and product pictures. In most cases, Marc would rehabilitate an old vintage instrument, clean it up, and THEN take the picture to use in his web content. He had an almost innate sense of where to look in HP publication archives to find a picture of some company event or personality profile. His greatest dream was to create a Hewlett Packard museum of instrumentation and measurement hosted by the newly created Keysight Technologies company -->

Alas, where will we find another history visionary like Marc? Marc leaves two sons; Franck and Walter. He had one granddaughter, Marie, 10.

Preserving Marc's website as a Legacy of his Work, with a new URL title:

HPMemoryProject.org

Marc's heirs have given their permission to maintain the website, until a suitable and permanent custodian is found. Our intention is to freeze the contents of the website as it was at Marc's death. We feel that his personality and spirit lives on in the breadth of this HP history that he captured. We wish to preserve all that in memory of Marc. It is a superb legacy.

For reasons involving Web-Hosting services, plus some previous confusion caused by Internet searchers looking to buy HP computer memory products, we have chosen to move all his contents from his original hpmemory.org site to a new website with the title that Marc actually used on his home page: HPMemoryProject.org.

You can imagine that Marc had an even-larger vision for his work going forward. Of course, those hopes and plans won't happen. And yet, there is still more HP people history remaining to be written: Memoirs, personality profiles of exceptional employees, other HP writings. To that end, we, as volunteer custodians, with the permission of Marc's family, are creating a New Section, which will become an addendum to the Home site. We plan to identify the new additions, keep them separate, but connected, so that there will be a dividing line at Marc's passing day.

Tributes to the life of Marc Mislanghe

Click the Tributes to Marc Mislanghe link to read heartfelt letters, in tribute to Marc's life and times. This section is open to any and all who have enjoyed his work and legacy, and wish to remember their encounters with Marc.

What & Why ?

This site is the virtual showcase of a private collection of equipment and documents acquired over a lifetime career of work in the high-tech era of the 20th Century. The overall HP Memory Project is a work of gratitude from one of the many people who had the good fortune to spend a full professional life working for one of the world's most successful High-Tech Companies, the Hewlett-Packard Co. HP was one of the very few Companies in which the frame of mind of the founders, David Packard and William Hewlett, grew from their cooperative philosophy of life into a model of a wonderful way of management...The HP Way.

Personal Memoirs of the HP Work Culture

In 2011, we added an archive of personal stories of a number of HP employees, which has turned out to be a very popular attraction for our collection. Go to the Timeline section to access these Memoirs and Personalities of the HP of the last half of the 20th Century. For questions about the origin of the project, please see the Presentation chapter. For more What & Why answers take a look at the About Us and Curator Chapters. For a quick overview of this site content, try the Interactive Site Map.

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