The Hewlett-Packard Journal

During more than 50 years the Hewlett Packard Journal has created a record of HP's technical achivements by communicating technical information to professional people in all fields served by HP.
The origins of the Hewlett Packard Journal is explained in an article titled "40 Years of Chronicling Technical Achivement" published october 1989 for the fiftieth anniversary of the company.
This article is signed Charles L. Leath - Associate Editor.

"The initial idea for the HP Journal came from a periodical called the General Radio Experimenter. General Radio, now known as GenRad, produced primarily electronic measurement instrumentation, and the Experimenter was a monthly publication devoted to supplying "unbiased information pertaining to radio apparatus design and application."
The Experimenter started publishing in 1926 (11 years after the founding of General Radio) and was the first periodical of its type in the radio industry. It was distributed free of charge to qualified experimenters and it was a popular periodical in the industry. Many HP engineers were devoted readers of the Experimenter. One of those readers, David Packard, was impressed with the quality of the articles and thought that HP should have something similar. This idea turned into reality when Frank Burkhard, the first HP Journal editor, was assigned the task of creating HP's version of the Experimenter. There was some consideration given to calling the Journal the HP Experimenter. However, after examining periodicals from other companies (e.g., the Bell System Technical Journal) the name HP Journal stuck.
Although one of the initial objectives for the Journal was to produce a periodical similar to the General Radio Experimenter, other objectives included telling customers about HP products and their applications, showing the quality and workmanship that went into each product, and giving credit to the product designers. The Experimenter also included information about the product designers. Like HP's corporate objectives, the Journal's original objectives have been expanded and clarified. Today the HP Journal is a periodical for the communication of technical information from all of HP's R&D, manufacturing, and quality organizations to professional people in all fields served by HP."

This is just a small part of the article that we will reproduce in full, soon on this web site.
We now own a complete collection of originals of the Hewlett-Packard Journal published from September 1949 up to the last issue in 1998. Reference to the article, if any, published for every instrument in our collection can be found in the Collection tables. Links from those tables to the related Hewlett Packard Journal articles will be added as this work grows. We plan to do that work in the order of historical importance of the products, processing at first the product lines most representative of HP leadership like Spectrum & Network Analysis, Time & Frequency Standards, System Automation etc...

Reproduction of Hewlett Packard Journal articles and Application Notes relative to the most significant products of the Hewlett Packard history is one of our main objectives. Some examples of the kind of work we plan to do for many other major HP products can be seen in the News chapter:

• The HP 2116 - First HP Computer
• The HP 9100 - First HP Desktop Calculator
• The HP 5100 - First Frequency Synthesizer
• The HP 300A - Harmonic Wave Analyzer
• The HP 150A - Oscilloscope
• The HP 1980 - First HP Digital Oscilloscope
• The HP 2680 - First HP Laser Printing System

We will try that way, adding all the document sources available to the product description, to give an accurate measure of the innovation brought by the product at the moment of its birth.