Foreword

Mr. HP Early Lab Manager-Paul Stoft

If I were to ask you to name the birthplaces of the most creative technologies of the second half of the 20th century, you would probably list Bell Telephone Labs, IBM, and maybe some large government labs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and others. I would argue that one of the top applied research labs of that era was located in Hewlett-Packard's R&D laboratory at the top of the hill on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. This was the fabled HP Labs, led by Barney Oliver, a 180 IQ genius, who did his best to stimulate and manage an entire floor of other creative geniuses.

Over decades, the new technologies that flowed out of HP, enabled so much industrial progress. HP Cesium Beam frequency standards populated the world, and provided global time management, even serving a key role in rocket ship navigation for the US Moon Shot Apollo Program. The dual-mode laser tube technology of Don Hammond was the key to dimensional measurements to 1/10th of a millionth of an inch, and made such crucial measurements easy and routine.

Possibly the pinnacle of the products that revolutionized the daily work of individual engineers around the globe, was the HP desktop technical computer, the HP 9100A. Even before reasonable computational memory circuits were invented this amazing desktop did transcendental functions, including trigonometric, hyperbolic, and logarithmic functions with the click of a key. And it necessarily used a "brute-force" 16-layer printed circuit board and 2400+ discrete diodes for its Read-Only-Memory. Some early evaluators of the calculator looked for an umbilical cable to a larger computer underneath the table! They could not comprehend the power that HP gave to the everyday engineer.

But Bill Hewlett wanted all that HP 9100A computational power to fit into his shirt pocket. And he kept nagging Paul Stoft's 9100 team to find ways to shrink all that circuitry and algorithmic computation into the HP-35 pocket calculator. Paul's team, led by Tom Whitney, accomplished that with the rollout in 1972, during a business recession, which pumped up HP profits and revenues during a critical time.

Paul's role in Barney's Advanced Labs came in about 1960, when the four "charter" divisions were formed. All of the centralized research and development was divided into those four new self-contained operations; Loveland Division (audio video), Frequency and Time (counters, etc), Oscilloscopes (which moved to Colorado Springs), and Microwave (which stayed in Bldg 3 and the new Bldg 5). When those divisions formed, they took all of the lab engineers who were responsible for developing products. What remained was TRULY an Advanced HP Labs. Paul's Lab Section was one third of that remarkable organization.

In those days the term Mission Statement was not yet known. But the idea was that Barney's lab-full of geniuses would be looking for new measurement product ideas and technologies which fell between the charters of the 4 product divisions. They would also push out new technologies, such as quartz crystal research, Cesium beam frequency standards, custom integrated circuits, and the brand new capabilities of personal computing and later, ink-jet printers, among many other fantasies of brains like Hewlett and Barney.

As in any company which ran on the visions of two creative men like Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, Barney's lab also caught the jobs which reacted to ideas coming from Bill Hewlett. In one sense, that part of Paul's Lab Section might be called Bill Hewlett's Job Shop. Bill was an internationalist, and when visiting technology centers and customer companies in Europe, he would sometimes be so enamored with some of their technologies he would buy the patent rights to some particular product idea. Then it was up to Barney's Lab to take the idea to product status. One such project was labeled the "Bandsaw multichannel recorder," which will be explained in Paul's story.

In Paul's decades of management of creative ideas and creative people, possibly his best contribution was his vision in exploiting the integrated circuit revolution of the 1970s. It almost goes without saying, that if HP product designers had to depend ONLY on commercial ICs, from Fairchild or National or Intel, that they could not build unique measurement properties into their new brainchild. Competitors had the same building blocks. It was Paul's vision to bring the genius of our HP Labs to bear on research into the material science and physics and chemistry of integrated circuits. He gathered a team of engineers who set out to understand the manufacturing processes, the best and most efficient techniques for production and testing of new custom circuits to support the product divisions.

Paul's contributions included selling Bill and Dave on the idea of building a state-of-the-art IC facility in a newly-purchased building (from John Atalla at Fairchild), which became Bldg 25 at Deer Creek. It is hard to overestimate the impact of this lab on the fortunes of HP, because the circuit innovations that came out of the lab affected almost all of HP's new products.

As other HP Lab Sections moved into Inkjet printers and Laserjet printers, Paul's Section cooperated in the custom ICs needed for new personal printer functions. His work contributed in such an important way to the growth of the worldwide reputation of HP as it moved into the 21st Century.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of PERSON_NAME'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