Foreword

The Life Cycle of a Great Industrial Undertaking-HPSQF-Hugh Walker

The history of high-tech in the second half of the 20th century is one of continuous growth. After winning the WWII with technology, the world embarked on an industrial revolution, filling industrial, commercial and personal demands with an ever-increasing plethora of creativity. I have always maintained that our technology sector was pretty hot stuff for 50 years, ignoring the remarkable two decades of the 21st century. Well, we did invent the microcircuit, put a man on the moon, invented the computer and the internet, and unraveled the human genome.

Pacing all of that global industrial wonder was Hewlett-Packard, creating and building the equipment which underpinned all of that expansion. Our lab geniuses were on the forefront of the technology needed for modernizing the world. The HP birth was in a garage in downtown Palo Alto, growing on Page Mill Rd down by the Southern Pacific railroad, then to the hilltop in Stanford Industrial Park. We were learning how to grow and expand at the same time we created and refined the human base of a great corporation.

Bill and Dave were visionaries in more than industrial success. They realized that the HP footprint on society had limits on the towns that hosted these large enterprises, which should be limited at some point. In about 1960, this led them to direct movement out of Palo Alto, first to Santa Clara, CA, then out of state to Loveland, Colorado, and Santa Rosa, CA, and Colorado Springs, and by acquisition to places like Boston and New Jersey and Pasadena and San Diego.

We got pretty good at it. And many of the HP memoirs on these pages are a testament to the HP human factor which figured out how to pick up a huge product line, sometimes $50 million dollars worth, and put in another place, usually a town with university environments, but almost always with a lower cost of living.

But Bill Hewlett was an internationalist, and foresaw the need to put manufacturing into other nations to afford a reciprocity for their governments to balance the revenues that HP earned with local sales with production factories and research labs that brought jobs to those countries. It started in Germany, then Japan, and then the UK, and many more later in the century, Malaysia being dominant.

Our HPMemoir archive here has already captured some of those national operations, Jirgal for Germany, Wastle and Smelek for the UK, Steiner and Cottrell for other European sales efforts. But there is always more to learn about how creative visionaries brought the HP Way and HP operations into foreign cultures. Hugh Walker's new book-length remembrance is super comprehensive, as it involves not only the operational details of building facilities and hiring staff, the processes of manufacture, and filling research laboratories with inventive new product developments, but also contains almost half of the contents devoted to product technology for the fast growing markets of communications, which became the particular expertise of HP South Queensferry.

Hugh's book of 2 volumes is already archived on the BT Cloud. With Hugh's permission we have decided to present several of the chapters here, and then display all the chapters and URL references to the contents which are readily downloadable with a click of your mouse.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of Hugh Walker's career at hp results from the work of the www.hpmemoryproject.org website of Marc Mislanghe, who with John Minck edited and published the original archive of Memoirs. After Marc's untimely death in 2014, Ken Kuhn has now assumed the custodianship with John, and together they will continue to expand the Memoirs section.

One of the main objectives in starting this website in 2011 was (and still is today) to get in touch with people who have worked at hp from the birth of the company up to today. We are interested in hearing your memories no matter what division or country you worked in, or whether you were in engineering, marketing, finance, administration, or worked in a factory. This is because all of you have contributed to the story of this unique and successful enterprise.

Your memories are treasure for this website. While product and technology are our main concern, other writings related to the company life are highly welcome, as far as they stay inside the hp Way guidelines.

Anybody Else? Please get in touch by emailing the webmaster on the Contact US link at http://www.hpmemoryproject.org