HP, sad

Well people aren't buying their PC's. Just think, if Carly gets elected the USA will be in a deeper hole.

Cheers

One multi-gigabuck blunder was Itanic...

There is a dangerous, seductive lure to designing your own instruction set. HP did it before, with their HP3000 super-CISC, super-slow architecture. The Itanic super-RISC VLIW architecture was overkill in the opposite direction.

DEC somehow did it well, with the PDP11, VAX, and Alpha architectures. Pity they are all gone.

Yeah, Carly doesn't have an impressive record. Maybe her cabinet would fire her.

Bzzzt. The HP3000 was a transaction processing monster. That's what it was for. I doubt you'll find a database as powerful as HP Image today - especially the schlock Oracle sells.

One of the assistant profs where I went to school also developed the enrollment system, which cleared everything by the close of business on enrollment day. This was unheard of at the time.

Others made faster transaction processors but for considerably more money and more complicated installs.

Remember, sometime people use these things for real work. And I keep finding well-intentioned people who really should know the transactional model - especially firmware and FPGA guys.

They did fairly well, but I still have nightmares about the MicroVax I had to use with the Tektronics toolchain for 68000. A 286 PC was 10:1 faster...

Snerrrk.

--
Les Cargill

MicroVAX ** I ** ?? That was something they should never have sold, maybe just use in internally for software development. The MicroVAX II came out only a year later, with MUCH better perfomance, greatly reduced cost and complexity, etc. The MicroVAX II was about 90% of a VAX 780, the MicroVAX I was a dog!

Well, it didn't take PCs all that long to creep up on the MicroVAX II performance, but it took a LONG time for the X86 OS's to catch up to VMS or Ultrix (or your favorite U**x favorite flavor.)

Jon

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:45:12 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

No, idiot that is not what happened. They departmentalized the firm and created other firms in doing so.

Not dumped, dork.

No. That is the portion that retained the name.

Businesses are, idiot.

30,000 out of over 300,000 is like you getting rid of one.

You are what is sad. You are probably stupid enough to blame Fiorina for it as well.

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 20:43:44 -0400, Martin Riddle Gave us:

You're an abject idiot.

On Tue, 15 Sep 2015 20:56:54 -0500, Les Cargill Gave us:

Yep. Bzzzzt indeed.

Hehehehehe...

You tell 'em, Les. They ain't real bright though.

Starting to look dumber than Tripeson, in fact.

The big ones were just as bad! We had a 6200 cluster at work early ninetees, and to get any work done we had to 286/386 PC's as external number crunching units. The 386 did the same C code about 30 times faster.

Not at all. XENIX was available in 1985 and Linux started in 1992.

I have been running Linux on a 386 since december 1992 and I can assure you it ran big circles around our VAX 6200 cluster, not to mention the microvaxes. I used it as an X terminal for the VAX but in most cases running things locally was a much better solution.

They annoyed a fair proportion of their loyal customer base by dumping driver support for perfectly good kit on newer OSs. My otherwise excellent quality HP5300 scanner lost HP driver support with Vista.

I used to buy a new PC whenever the speed gain was 3x. That panned out at about every three years but lately it is closer to five years.

Agilent lives on although their stuff isn't as nice as HP once was.

The PC era is drawing to a close. Desktop PCs will return back to being exclusive tools for engineers and gaming geeks. All in one displays and smart TVs with compute power and thin client is making a comeback.

Everyone and their wife now has a smartphone and a tablet of some sort for consuming media content on the go (even me) and I am something of a Luddite where social media is concerned. I resisted smartphones for as long as I could coddle my Nokia 6303 battery into life.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

And now you may not need a tablet or a smartphone. Echo provides a quick response to queries garnered from the Internet. I was dubious about this but got one as a toy. Who knows where the technology will lead from here?

It has been split up yet again. Now the electronics test gear division is called Keysight.

Apparently they believe a brandname is worth absolutely nothing in that domain and that they can rename and rename without any impact on their markt presence. And probably they are right, this is not a naive consumer market.

That is probably also why the kept the HP name attached to the PC stuff. Not the market that HP traditionally was known for, but likely the place where the HP name was most difficult to replace.

(although of course they already dumped the Compaq name, and HP consumer stuff is not the favourite PC and accessories hardware for many)

Never a PC printer or scanner for me anymore, and probably no PC either.

^^ HP

Actually in some key markets a long established brand name and reputation is everything notably in Japan, Korea and China.

They already had Compaq which was arguably a better known PC brandname. I'm with John on this one - the slow demise of HP is sad.

I prefer separates. Space isn't an issue at home. I do have an all-in-one from Canon which lives at my parents.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

The 3000 was actually their middle klunky architecture. Before that, they invented the 2100 series, which was a clumsy attempt to make a

16-bit PDP-8. Page oriented, two accumulators, thoroughy ancient.

21xx, 3000, and (soon) Itanic, all gone. I don't understand why HP insisted on being a computer company, and dumping the stuff that they were good at.

What's sad is the staying power of x86.

Who gives a damn about the pop culture market crowd?

The useful offspring is doing great:

Right. Part of the downturn in PC sales is phones and tablets, but another big part is less frequent upgrades. Our old HPs still work fine, enough compute power for all but the strangest Spice calcs. Thay are 5 years old, now and we're replacing them. With Dells.

They have to fight the Rigols of the world. A $400 Rigol is all the scope many people need. So Agilent gets pushed up to super expensive cell phone protocol analyzers and such. And the medical/analytical stuff, which is really not electronic test gear.

Yeah, like timesharing again!

I suppose I'll have to retire my flip phone some day, but it refuses to break.

HP Inc. Outlook

HP Inc. will have about $4.5 billion in cash and $6.8 billion in debt as of Nov. 1, said Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak. The company

On Wed, 16 Sep 2015 10:11:43 +0100, Martin Brown Gave us:

Bullshit.

You simply do not have the cash to buy a new instrument, so you piss and moan that what you can't afford and know nothing about is worse than the old stuff you also could not afford. You have been tied to whatever parent company you work for decided to get.

an HP DL460 blade runs circles around practically ANY computer ANY of you could make and it is built like a swiss watch.

192GB RAM max. Dual Xeon. Hot swap SAS storage subsystem. 10GB/s optical com links. and 16 of those dual blade computers fit into one chassis with double redundant hot swap supplies. Practically a supercomputer in one half a rack. Way faster than the first Cray was.

You guys are clueless.