HP Publications

Technical Publications & Periodicals

As stated page 26 of the 1970 Catalog:

"The endless expansion of technology requires continual development of new measurement tools. This, in turn, requires continuing education of those who use them. Hewlett-Packard recognizes the importance of keeping its customers informed about new techniques and new instruments and towards this end, Hewlett-Packard publishes periodicals and application notes about new developments in the practice of measurement, analysis and computation."

This measurement frame of mind could be considered to be embedded in the HP DNA for 60 years. John Minck used to teach in the Sales Training seminars for Field Sales Engineers, and used to emphasize that we were selling Measurement Processes as well as products. This concept followed from the other sales and promotion processes and the distinction between features (the product) and benefits (the measurements you made).  He noted the old marketing truism, "when you buy a 4mm drill motor (the product), what you really want is a 4mm hole (the benefit)."

So when you buy from the extremely wide variety of instrument domains covered by the Hewlett-Packard catalog, you need tutorial on the best procedures of measurement. Therefore, in a real sense, HP sells measurements, not just products. Over decades this has led to HP's reputation as the home of the most important archive of publications, probably over 1000,  ever produced by a private company in the electronic and computation sciences. Most of these publications contain theory fundamentals of a high educational value perfectly usable today.

John Minck expands on the Hewlett Packard sales philosophy and sales techniques in his essay titled, "Selling Measurements - Development of the Sales Process at HP" HERE.

For the technical part of the story, which is our main objective, the most useful publications are the General Catalog, the Hewlett-Packard Journal, the Application Notes and the Product data-sheets. You will find a complete listing of the documents available in the collection in this chapter of the web site. For the human part of the story, many other HP internal publications will be used and are listed in the "Other Documents" and "External Resources" chapter.

Memory Project Tools

These chapters list the various tools used to make this project what it is today.

Memory Project Other External Resources

We will try to list and update in these chapters, every source of information that could be of interest for the HP Memory keeping.