Other Web Sites Related to HP History
updated May 14, 2020

The links listed below are to other web sites related to HP History. Some of the web links are moving targets. I check these from time to time and find some of them dead only because of a subtle change in the URL when a website was reorganized.


Here are some direct internal links to the Agilent web site

Bill Hewlett biography

Dave Packard biography

Company time line

Agilent Technologies and Communications: Six Decades of Measurement Solutions This is an excellent 35 page article about many of the classic pieces of equipment developed at HP. It has a lot of history and is required reading. There are a few errors that should be noted as follows. I was not looking for errors but these stood out to me as I am familiar with these.

  1. The opening picture showing David Packard (standing) and William Hewlett (with slide rule) in the garage is mirror imaged. Proof that the picture is mirrored is obvious by looking at the audio oscillators and noting that the output jacks appear on the left instead of their correct place on the right. The same picture on the HP site above is correct.
  2. On page 18 the upper frequency limit of the HP500A frequency meter should be 50 kHz instead of 100 kHz. I own an HP500A and am quite familiar with it.
  3. On page 20 the model number of the VHF generator in the picture should be HP8640B. This is a simple transposition error in the caption. I own one of these units so I am quite familiar with it.
  4. On page 22 the year HP entered the oscilloscope market should be 1956 instead of 1958 (product development actually began in 1955). The March, 1956 (Volume 7, #7) issue of the Hewlett-Packard Journal describes the introduction of the HP130A oscilloscope which had a 300 kHz bandwidth. The April, 1956 (Volume 7, #8) issue of the Hewlett-Packard Journal describes the introduction of the HP150A oscilloscope which had a 10 MHz bandwidth.
  5. On page 28 the description of the HP4815A impedance meter should show an upper frequency limit of 108 MHz instead of 500 MHz. I own an HP4815A and am quite familiar with it.

Other web sites with a variety of information:  Some of these are deep links and others may only be available temporarily. If the web page is not found, try backing up by deleting pages from the end until you connect to something. A reorganization of the web site may have changed the address.

http://www.antiqueairwaves.com/ This is a great site if you are looking for information about old radios and electronics.  There are numerous links here to just about everything involving old electronics.  You could spend hours looking at all this stuff.  A related site by the same owner is http://www.stevenjohnson.com/ and you can find even more information including schematic diagrams, etc.

http://www.philbrickarchive.org/  "This site is a free non-profit repository of materials from GAP/R George A. Philbrick Researches, the company that launched the commercial use of the Operational Amplifier in 1952." (quoted from the site) 

http://www.xcvcorp.com/Electronics%20Museum%20HTML.html

http://www.jvgavila.com This is a site in Spain and features a personal museum and information about HP and a variety of other equipment manufactures.


A few articles concerning the HP-Compaq merger

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2001/11/19/hpmerge.DTL  An interesting article written during the controversy over the Compaq merger.  I voted my HP shares against the merger as it made no sense to me.  I had owned Compaq stock for many years and dumped them at a huge profit in 1999 when it looked that Compaq had no place to go but down.  I was right.

http://www.forbes.com/2002/02/14/0214malone.html  This is a very good article by Michael S. Malone concerning the HP Compaq merger.  Click on the skip the welcome screen in the upper right.


Links to other web pages on this site

http://www.kennethkuhn.com/hpmuseum This link takes you to the main HP Museum page.

http://www.kennethkuhn.com This link takes you to the main page of my personal web site where you can access a variety of information.