Then they spun off the interesting bits as Agilent and decided competing head-to-head with other conglomerates in saturated markets was a good business plan.

I think most people don't understand that for most of its life, HP wasn't a consumer products business. It focused on test and measurement equipment for engineers and scientists. The computer and printer sections of the company were created to fulfill the needs of that niche. When personal computers took off and the computer and printer divisions grew, the management thought than in the lusty days of the dotcom boom it would be best to split into two companies. Their rationale at the time was that it was too hard to manage a consumer products business and a industrial products business at the same time. Though, the tech stock market fever at that time was probably the probably the real reason.

HP's history after that is well known. Carly Fiorina has been vilified for destroying Bill and Dave's company, but at least she wasn't responsible for the split. Since the split, years of mismanagement have led it to where it is today.

Agilent, meanwhile at least pays some lip service to the "HP Way." A lot of the old-timers reminisce about the "glory days" of HP that will never come back. But, at least some fragment of Bill and Dave's legacy still carries on.

I think they still make good calculators though??? (/me hugs my 15C).

There went so many life science and industrial products, leaving HP as more of a PC and printer company which had registered outsized growth supplying offices and consumers during the boom. Setting the stage for smooth-talking financial manipulators to dominate the engineering culture like never before. Until it descended into more of an ink company than electronics for a while there.

So many of the brains had been at Agilent for a while by then.

IIRC the inkjet first became available in the HP3396 laboratory integrator (when most offices were still on DOS) as a built-in printer for full letter size sprocket-feed paper to print your scientific results, usually with real-time detailed graphics even if it was only black ink.

Before that, previous models used about a 4 inch wide thermal roll, the OS was outstanding and it was miniaturized like no other since HP used some of their custom application-specific chips for functions that competitive units at the time needed an entire circuit board for. Not too many times as big as a top HP calculator, the old ones had the look and feel of quality along with the performance.

Remember this is when HP was still capable of coming up with a new operating system every two years (that was more advanced than anything Microsoft had ever done).

But since the competitive integrators had a much bigger bench footprint they contained thermal printers for full letter-size output. Or 8.5 inches x more than just 11 inches on those thermal rolls or z-fold packs, since it was common to print things like long chromatograms, banner style much longer than 11 or 14 inches, resembling the output of an analog chart recorder on its rolls of graph paper. The expensive bench instruments which were well established were still all analog output which had originally fed into a dumb chart recorder. So many had a transition where the instruments were first starting to get hooked up to the analog-to-digital input of a device like this but the printouts needed to be handled in the filing cabinets (or faxed, 39 inches maximum page length) no differently than if they had come from the old chart recorders. Which were naturally maintained as backups or parallel recorders.

The little HP's could often be used as more powerful computational devices, but the printouts were more like thermal retail reciepts than the others.

So then the bigger HP3396 came out with its new inkjet doing the precision job on sprocket feed continuous letter-width "plain" paper, it was upsized with even more features. It looked so modern. Sprocket-feed was already advanced for dot-matrix with DOS computers for office work, but the inkjet on this thing really got your attention. If you were lucky you would have the optional digital storage (hard) drive which was bigger than the upsized integrator and would sit undeneath. Or maybe the less-expensive routine storage version with openings in the front for removable disks which were functionally equivalent to 5.25 inch DOS floppies, except the magnetic disk part was inside a miniaturized 3.5 inch, thin hard plastic cartridge shell thing which was not exactly flexible.

Next thing you know IBM PS/2 desktops started to appear in offices using these same type (single-sided) 3.5 inch floppies and eventually that's what PC's started to have before going double-sided.

But nobody dreamed it would be a good idea to format the disks for two different companies or usages like this in a very similar way whatsoever.

The integrators basically filled a niche before the PC's took over in the lab.

Eventually inkjets for the office and home took off, especially in color.

And the rest is history.

I have actually physically assaulted several HP products since then. Literally nothing but aggro.

However, on the more profitable inkjet side of the business we've been doing a lot of R&D and I don't think we've sold a single vacuum cleaner.

Agilent took the heart & soul of HP. Then it split further (Keysight et al)

HP took the printers, which at least used to be a good business.

HPE is the wretched refuse that's left.

In the early 90's when I was just starting out in IT, their brand was very highly regarded, especially their laser printers which phenomenal workhorses.

And so it's painful to read all these stories about how the HP Way is dead dead dead, about how the company founded by Bill and Dave has been trashed, et cetera. In fact, the company founded by Bill and Dave isn't quite dead. It just donated the HP name -- and entirely too many unfortunate employees -- to this now-completely-different company that has since been run into the ground.

Agilent, as far as I know, is still chugging along. Unlike this thing-now-known-as-HP, it still makes test equipment, descended from the test equipment that Bill and Dave built in their garage. I suspect that, in true HP tradition, its products continue to be fairly expensive, culturally distinct, equipped with voluminous and sometimes mysterious documentation, occasionally quirky to the point of hysterical laughter, and utterly indispensable in their particular niches.

HP might not have been a printer company, but they built a strong reputation early on for workhorse printers, and the driver software wasn't usually too bad, either. My first job in the tech industry was in the data processing department of a good-sized East Bay school district. We must have printed tens of thousands of pages per month on an HP LaserJet 4. Never had so much as a hiccup from it.

I knew less about their computers at the time, but if memory serves, they had a good reputation there, too.

But there was this sort of gradual degradation in every single one of their product lines. The best thing I can say about their chintzy-as-hell newer printers is that the printers themselves aren't quite as bad the software. The software is terrible, and it gets worse every year, not better. In some cases, you can't install HP's driver software for two different-but-similar models of printer on the same computer; the software interferes with itself.

Their computers are a joke. We've found a lovely variety of manufacturing defects and design flaws. There's a guy on eBay doing a decent business manufacturing and selling aftermarket copper pads for graphics processors for HP laptops because their thermal pads are notorious for shrinking away from the aluminum heat sink. We've had several laptops that have seriously had every single major component replaced -- motherboard, screen, hard drive, memory -- and these aren't abused or old laptops.

And their support is just as bad. We, at one point, spent almost 40 hours in a single week on the phone with HP support for one client or another. 40 hours of lost productivity; 40 hours of cost for at least three parties; an entire work week, poof. I wish I could say the support was any good, but it wasn't.

We do our best to steer all of our clients away from HP. If they do genuinely get out of the consumer market, I can only hope that we'll see a net increase in worldwide productivity.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be Hewlett or Packard and see that happen to the company I built.