Articles on Various Persons of Interest
related to Hewlett Packard
updated June 9, 2026
The following links are to oral histories, articles, and general information related to various persons of interest. Some of the links may be short lived. I check them from time to time to remove dead links and add new ones I find.
http://www.thoughtsandvisions.com/autobio/calif6new.pdf This is one chapter. There are other chapters on this site.
Mr. Hewlett
http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Oral-History:William_Hewlett William Hewlett, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1984 by A. Michal McMahon, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. This is an interview with Mr. Hewlett and has many interesting historical details.
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/news/2001_Jan_17.HEWLETT.html This is an article about the passing of Mr. Hewlett.
Art Fong
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/2005/2005_05_18.afong18.shtml This is an article about Art Fong who began employment at HP 1946 and developed many of the microwave products.
Bernard (Barney) Oliver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_M._Oliver
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morgue/community_pulse/1995_Nov_29.OBITS29.html
Ed Porter
No direct links found yet -- information included in other links. See various miscellaneous and HP history links.
Charlie Litton
No direct links found yet -- information included in other links. See various miscellaneous and HP history links.
Fredrick Terman
In the 1930's Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California and became good friends. They took electrical engineering courses under Professor Fredrick Terman who is well known as a great instructor and author of several textbooks on electrical engineering (I think I own a copy of every edition of every book he wrote. It is interesting to study the same books that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard studied. I consider the old textbooks to be vastly superior to modern textbooks in both depth of coverage and quality of presentation.). Professor Terman assigned Mr. Hewlett a project to investigate a new concept in the generation of sine waves. This project was the basis for the thesis Mr. Hewlett wrote for his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering,
A New Type of Resistance-Capacity Oscillator. This thesis is hard to obtain. The usual sources for academic papers do not have a copy as far as I have been able to determine. The only source I know of is the Stanford University library which you either have to visit in person or arrange for an interlibrary loan of the copy on file (Cat key: 2485315, Call number: 3781 S78 H, Author: Hewlett, William Redington, Title: A new type of resistance-capacity oscillator, Imprint: 1939, Library: SAL, Location: STACKS). I was fortunate to find a pdf copy of it on a temporary Internet site. The best way to find it is to search for the exact phrase,
a new type of resistance, on the advanced search option in Google. If you find it by all means download and print it - it is only 17 pages total and there is much you can learn from it. You will always find mentions of the paper - there will be no doubt when you actually find the real thing. It would be very appropriate for either the Hewlett-Packard Company or Agilent Technologies to post this paper on their web site along with the other history. I intend to inquire about that possibility.
http://www.smecc.org/in_memoriam____frederick_emmons_terman_1900-_1982.htm This page has internal links to several articles concerning Fredrick Terman who taught both Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard at Stanford University and encouraged them to start a company together.
http://www.smecc.org/frederick_terman_-_by_ed_sharpe.htm This is a biography of Fred Terman.
http://www.smecc.org/frederick_terman.htm This is another excellent biography of Fred Terman.
The following is a list of books written by Terman that are in my collection listed in order of publication. I frequently refer to the
Radio Engineering Handbook,
Electronic Measurements, and the fourth edition of
Electronic and Radio Engineering in my work. As far as I can tell, Terman wrote a total of eight books as listed below. He was co-author and editor of many other books.
- Radio Engineering, first edition, 1932, published by McGraw-Hill
- Measurements in Radio Engineering, first edition, 1935, published by McGraw-Hill
- Radio Engineering, second edition, 1937, published by McGraw-Hill
- Fundamentals of Radio, first edition, 1938, published by McGraw-Hill. This is an abridged version of Radio Engineering.
- Radio Engineering Handbook, first edition, 1943, published by McGraw-Hill
- Radio Engineering, third edition, 1947, published by McGraw-Hill
- Electronic Measurements, second edition, 1952. Frederick Emmons Terman and Joseph Mayo Pettit, published by McGraw-Hill. This is the second edition of Measurements in Radio Engineering with a more general title.
- Electronic and Radio Engineering, fourth edition, 1955, published by McGraw-Hill
The first book that included Terman as a co-author was
Transmission Line Theory, and Some Related Topics by William Suddards Franklin, ScD, and Frederick Emmons Terman, ScD, 1926, publisher unknown. This information comes from the book,
Fred Terman at Stanford as described below.
I am presently reading the book,
Fred Terman at Stanford subtitled
Building a Discipline, A University, and Silicon Valley, by C. Stewart Gillmore, published by the Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2004. This is a very detailed biography of Mr. Terman and is over 500 pages long with over an additional 100 pages of appendix, notes, bibliography, and index.
Miscellaneous links of interest
http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/stanford-magazine-founding_fathers.shtml
Links to other web pages on this site
https://www.kennethkuhn.com/hpmuseum This link takes you to the main HP Museum page.
https://www.kennethkuhn.com This link takes you to the main page of my personal web site where you can access a variety of information.