Nothing lasts forever

Our local weekly newspaper, the Yamhill County News-Register (think McMinnville, Oregon where the fabled Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' immense plywood seaplane, is hosted), had a Viewpoints column this week, from local historian Steve Dunn.  He begins with an interview of Don Vollum, the son of the Tektronix founder in 1947, quoting Vollum as lamenting the virtual death of the high-tech industry in Oregon in recent years.   Timely?   Intel Oregon announced this weekend that they were laying off 2,400 employees from their Oregon facilities, nearly two-thirds of their current worldwide purge (https://hillsboroherald.com/intel-layoffs-rock-hillsboro-2400-jobs-cut-across-local-campuses/.)

The thrust of the article is that 'big business' has changed the character of companies, to the detriment of local communities in many ways.   Vollum was teary over Tektronix being acquired and the headquarters moved from Oregon to North Carolina (c.f. the March announcement that the new owners of Tektronix would move the headquarters of Oregon’s legendary technology company from its Beaverton campus to Raleigh, N.C.). Here is Dunn's article (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=steve-duin-exodus-of-major-corporations-leaving-barren-wake-in-oregon--1752253563--52423--commentary

Vollum’s lament is shared widely.   If someone in 1990 had said that Ted would fail, and be moved out of Oregon, it’d be like saying HP would suffer a similar fate and leave Palo Alto, or Boeing, imagine this, would leave Seattle for Chicago.   And Palo Alto, and indeed the entire Bay Area, has become a rich-kids ghetto, where the local executives haven't got time or interest to become part of local service groups, and all of the service folk are completely priced out of the local housing markets, etc.

Dunn's article cites a dozen Oregon firms who started, thrived, and then were acquired and "folded" in terms of their local impact.   He doesn't tackle the question about the Willamette Valley wine industry (which we are loving), and the probable evolutionary path that it is on, thirty years behind Napa Valley.  Ahh, progress.   Maybe we'll get lucky in Oregon, and most of the high-tech jobs will disappear, and the consequent lack of wealth will save us from 'success.'

Certainly the stories of Mentor Graphics, HP Oregon, Intel Oregon, Sequent Computer, Floating Point Systems, and so many others (most of which Dunn doesn't even list) are cautionary tales.

For me, it is a bit personal.

HP has known Tektronix (Tek) "forever.'    Or I should say, Keysight (nee Agilent, nee 'the real HP'), knew them deeply.  The Colorado Springs division of HP, competed head-on with Tektronix for years, and their derivatives still do.   

Vollum and Jack Murdock founded Tek just after WW II, after Vollum interviewed with Dave Packard at Bill Hewlett's insistence.   Some of that story is told in my essay about Melville Eastham and General Radio that has been featured at both the GR and Tek museums   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257429741_You_Should_Meet_Melville_Eastham

Hewlett met Vollum at MIT in Bill's role as the Army liaison officer for new technologies,  Vollum had invented a major improvement for the Dumont and General Radio (GR) oscilloscopes of the day, a trigger circuit that would synchronize the signal in a repeatable way.  This allowed switching circuits to be viewed in operation analogous to the continuous wave communication signals for AM and FM radio.  

Packard and Vollum reportedly sparred; Vollum vowed to go set up his own company, and to beat HP, which was still a very small company itself, less than one-third the size of GR.  Vollum had done his thesis project at Reed College, a small liberal-arts college in Portland that would later enroll Steve Jobs briefly (that's where Jobs fell in love with calligraphy, which spurred his later interest in graphical Laser Writer products).

Tek's story, vis-a-vis HP, is told strongly in the book that Ray Price and I wrote, The HP Phenomenon https://www.sup.org/books/business/hp-phenomenon.   I won't bore you with the details here, but suffice to say that Tektronix made more actual profit dollars than HP for many years in the 1950s and 1960s on sales that were routinely about half of HP's total.

In 'scopes, Tek had something like 91% of the market when I joined that division in 1962--HP had 6%, and DuMont about 2% with Iwatsu in Japan at about 1%.   Dominant, in other words.

I led two groups, the Large-screen X-Y-Z displays group and the Logic Analyzer group, that bested Tek in the 1970's, and in the process I got to know some of the Tek folk pretty well.  I only knew Vollum from a distance, along with Norm Winningstad (Norm ran their displays business, then left Tek to set up a wide-word computer company, Floating Point Systems).

I got to know Oregon three ways--I wrote the 77 page Oscilloscopes chapter for Barney Oliver's tome on Instrumentation https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Measurements-Instrumentation-Inter-university-electronics/dp/0070476500, and worked with Tek engineers to do it; I used Portland wholesale nurseries to stock my first garden center; and I demo'd Tek's new 7000 scope at the New York IEEE show when their own sales folk didn't know what it did.  

As a consequence, I did get to know a number of Tek employees very well, including Murlan (Murle) Kaufman who helped design their 7000 series "do-all" 'scope; and Jack Grimes, who led their first computer entry, and then their graphics displays group.  Jack died a few years ago from leukemia, but his resume shows an outstanding contribution (https://www.roundtablegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JackGrimesCV.pdf).

I knew Bill Walker at Tek, Engineering VP, and Doug Strain (founder and CEO at ESI) very well.  And later I taught at OHSU Engineering School with Jack Raiton and Jim Huntzicker.  Jack was Tek's controller for awhile, and later CTO at Planar Systems.   I never worked at Tektronix, in fact I was probably their chief thorn, and that led Bill Walker to tell Gifford Pinchot III to meet me when I became HP's chief engineer in 1982.   That meeting led to the picture of the "Medal of Defiance" that Gifford published in Intrapreneuring.

Don’s article is timely.  Let's consider some of his points:

The idea that Tektronix, once the state’s largest employer, would leave Oregon is as daunting as the possibility that Nike, or Columbia Sportswear, would someday give up on its home.

That’s because the Portland-born founders of Tek, Don’s father Howard and Jack Murdock, were deeply rooted in Oregon when they created it in 1946, some 700 patents ago.  “Tek was in Portland because my dad and Jack Murdock were from here,” Don Vollum says. “It had nothing to do with economic development, lower taxes or a better work force. The same is true with Phil Knight [and Nike].”  Microsoft? “They were in Albuquerque, and [Bill Gates and Paul Allen] wanted to go home [to Seattle],” Vollum says. “Businesses begin in a place because they have a connection. The better question today is if and why they stay.    “That next generation of professional managers is when people look at education and taxes and workforce.”    And in Oregon, today’s view and tomorrow’s forecast are bleak.

“The combination of high taxes, poor services and poor schools isn’t a winning one, and that’s where we are,” Vollum says. “You put those pieces together and you have a place that’s not desirable for people if they’re starting or running a business.”   That’s not all you have.   You have Dutch Bros, the state’s second-most-valuable company, moving its corporate headquarters from Grants Pass to Phoenix.   You have REI closing its Pearl District co-op, Adobe abandoning its Southwest First Avenue digs, and KEEN Footwear shuttering its Swan Island factory.  You have a 35% office vacancy rate in Portland’s central city and its tallest ghost town, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, burning money.

You have door-maker Jeld-Wen — which founder Dick Wendt built into one of America’s largest privately held companies — moving its corporate headquarters from Klamath Falls to North Carolina after a change in ownership. And in May, Jeld-Wen announced it would dead-bolt its Chiloquin factory, adding another 128 people to the ranks of the unemployed in that Southern Oregon county.  You have distant, detached ownership of several of Oregon’s largest companies: PacifiCorp, Precision Castparts, Teledyne FLIR and The Standard.   You have Intel, currently Oregon’s biggest employer, on the ropes.

And you have Oregon ranked fifth in the nation for total tax burden. As ECOnorthwest’s Michael Wilkerson told the Oregon Legislature in April, the ongoing migration of high-income households out of Multnomah County alone has produced, year after year, “over $1 billion in income loss.”   That’s the equivalent of a cool 1,000 millionaires departing annually, leaving someone else to fund the Oregon Symphony and Preschool for All.

“Why does this matter? That part seems to be missing for the political class, just what this is costing us,” Vollum says. “You see it in philanthropy. We don’t have the next generation or donors for the arts and our cultural institutions.  The older generations created a lot of wealth, and then gave a lot away, which supported all those institutions. There is not really a younger generation of wealth creators coming along behind them in Oregon, and some of the few who are promptly leave for other states, taking their charitable contributions with them.”

Vollum, co-founder of Vista Ridge Capital Partners, is well familiar with how philanthropy serves the region.  The estate of his father’s partner, Jack Murdock, launched the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which has given more than $1.4 billion to Northwest nonprofits since 1975.  And Vollum, over the years, has chaired the boards at OMSI, the Portland State University Foundation and the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and served as president of the Providence St. Vincent Foundation.

When you live in a city, be that Hermiston or Coos Bay, you are much more likely to invest your time, energy and discretionary income in the upkeep of the neighborhood. Oregon has struggled to attract major sports franchises over the years, but Portland landed an Indy car race in 1984 because Norm Daniels, CEO at G.I. Joe’s, and Bob Ames, president at First Interstate Bank, believed their hometown deserved the upgrade.

When Daniels died in 2021, his wife, Rickie, illuminated that connection. “He loved to work. He just loved the company,” she told The Oregonian. “It was his baby because he grew up there. That’s where he wanted to spend his time. But he also cared deeply about what the company could do to service the community.”   It’s one helluva lot harder to care about Oregon’s universities, museums, foundations or communities when company owners are parked in Texas, Omaha or Florida.

Carrie Hoops is executive director of the Miller Foundation, which provided $12 million in arts and education grants in 2024. Recipients included the Painted Sky Center for the Arts in John Day and the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Medford.   As Hoops notes, corporations accounted for just under 7% of charitable giving in the United States in 2023. But, she adds, there’s an “economic ripple effect” when a corporation moves on:   “Many employers encourage their employees to volunteer. When a corporation leaves, it can lead to job losses, which then affects individual donations. People are laid off, and those people don’t have the money to contribute to their favorite charities.”

The slow vanishing of Oregon-based companies may be picking up speed. A January 2025 report by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research & Engagement found that Oregon businesses are routinely recruited to expand outside the state, leading to a loss of “thousands of potential jobs and billions of potential private investments in the past five years.”

That two-thirds of those recruited businesses have reported “moving or expanding outside Oregon” isn’t surprising.

How much faith can one retain in the local workforce when Oregon’s fourth and eighth grade test scores for reading and writing are among the nation’s worst?

Ponder that for a moment. Even as spending per pupil has soared, Oregon’s test scores have bottomed out. The state is dead last in fourth grade reading and math scores and — thank heaven for West Virginia — the numbers are almost as discouraging at the eighth-grade level. Those scores are terrifying forecasts of economic growth and stability.

How does one recruit talented tech workers to Portland’s central city, where they will be forced to pay the highest income tax rates outside the island of Manhattan? And how long will entrepreneurs continue to believe Oregon is fertile ground on which to build or keep their companies?   “We have so many regulations [that] it is very difficult to do business here,” Jordan Papé, the president and CEO of Eugene-based Papé Group, wrote in an e-mail. “[We] need a public policy agenda that wants to lure, rather than lose, business investment.”

Our cultural institutions may not otherwise survive.

Is that panic in the wings?   “Panic? Panic is the wrong word,” Vollum says. “We’re long past the panic stage. We’re in the stages of grief.”

Denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression?   Cratering test scores. Self-defeating tax policies. Empty office towers. And the lingering exhaust fumes from the Oregon companies that are moving on.

"Can't happen here?"  That's what Palo Alto said about HP.   That's what Seattle said about Boeing.

HP Readership

Someone asked recently, "are you still doing that old HP blog?"    They could have looked it up,, but instead they just asked.  The answer, after some 17 years, is 'sort of, on occasion" 

"What occasion?", they asked.  And I sttruggled to mention that now it is more because one of my idols or colleagues has passed away, than some monumental breakthrough at our favorite company.

So this is a bit of a review for 'how it's done' over the years.

The blog started a bit in self-defense, when Ray Price and I were striving to finish our HP history tome, The HP Phenomenon, which finally published (after seven years) in October 2009.  I wrote twenty apologetic posts in 2008, another 40 in 2009, and 43 more in 2010.  No, I didn't put the whole book in the posts, but it might seem like it.

Toward the end of 2010 (August), Mark Hurd resigned (I almost wrote "fired" but officially he was allowed to resign after the investigation of his conduct with Jodie Fisher turned up only " a few inaccurate expense reports").  Recall that the government chased Jimmy Hoffa for years, and only got him on tax evasion changes finally.  The mob got him on other grounds . . . . 

I don't think anyone admitted to the purported Hurd/Fisher sexual pictures that the HP pilots surreptitiously took, so that stayed out of the press.  My blog in august 2010 carried an epithet attributed to HP employees at the time (a nickname of Mark Turd) that got picked up by eastern journalists and boosted my blog page-count numbers considerably (like 40,000) for a few days.  I did see Mark the next spring at the Menlo School graduation where his son and our grand-daughter were graduating, but Mark didn't stay for conversation with me.

Anyway, the book did well, with plenty of speeches and hoopla, and even a few polite reviews.  Three years later, gigs both at Stanford Business School and via a Harvard/HP workshop generated new material, and another 155 posts occurred between 2013 and 2015.  And then only eleven posts in seven years--the story had gotten old, and HP with its multiple CEOs and corporate subdivisions were, if not the laughing stock of the Valley, close to it.

And then, 2024, and I had time to post a few updates and some reflective notes.  Nothing big, but certainy some nostalgia.  And a teary eye for some wonderful colleagues who now rest in peace (I trust).  The page count?  283,579 in the first sixteen years (to 4/1/2024).  If you back out the Mark Hurd spike, that is about 15,000 page views per year.  Over the past fifteen months, we're up to 315,928, which is an astonishing 25,000+ per year, higher than ever.  What?  Why?  Never mind, just write a few more.

Here's the blog-post graph for the HP blog, plus three others that I do (much less well-read).

Bill Atkinson gone also

 Okay I hope this trend doesn't continue.   First, notes about John Young passing.  Then a retrospective about John Doyle.   As I was about to close the computer for the day, John Markoff sent along his obit for Bill Atkinson, which is a very nice tribute to an incredibly inventive guy   https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technology/bill-atkinson-dead.html

Bill was 'bigger than life' in the early Apple days.   HyperCard was perhaps his biggest intellectual contribution from my standpoint; others loved QuickDraw and of course it and 'regions' enabled the entire graphical metaphor of the Lisa, followed by the MacIntosh.   

We got close to some of this work, for various reasons.  Despite the laudatory comments from Markoff, I believe that it is fact that HP, and in particular my Colorado Springs team, got the patents for pull-down menus for our logic analyzers circa 1976, long before Bill's more visible contributions.  Much later, 1990, our team at HP Sunnyvale, with HP VUE, "won" the Design Awards for icon designs rather than the Mac.  See the HP Phenomenon, p. 235

june 1, 1990, great falls, virginia: For the second time in two years, HP graphics artist and user interface designer (and leader of HP’s Corporate Engineering Industrial Design team) Barry Mathis got a letter from the Industrial Designers Society of America. This one opened, “It is with great pleasure that the jurors bestow the 1990 Gold IDEA to the HP Visual User Environment . . . with over 535 products, VUE 2.0 stood out.” The three-dimensional elements of VUE—called Motif—had won the year before, not long after the design swept the OSF Graphical User Interface (GUI) competition against forty-two other entries.50 BYTE magazine also selected Motif as its User Interface Software of the Year in 1990. Once again, HP had solid reason to be proud of the industrial design and human factors heritage begun forty years earlier. When Microsoft later embedded the “New Wave look-and-feel” of the Motif design widgets into Windows—Windows 3.1—it gave them near parity with Apple’s MacIntosh GUI, and ignited a patent suit filed by Apple against Microsoft and HP over intellectual property rights for industrial design.51 To many observers, it was a laughable suit—the common Silicon Valley view was that Apple itself had stolen the Xerox PARC GUI design shamelessly; to sue others for building an open systems software design tool was ludicrous.   in a fast-track decision, the judicial system agreed with HP and Microsoft that the suit was groundless, and the suit was tossed out.

I had worked with Doug Engelbart starting in 1966 because of my novel (for the day) graphics box, and we put a lot of user-interface design thought and time into these areas over many years.  It is from this 'first-hand' perspective that one could really appreciate the work and genius of Bill Atkinson.

David Smith, now at Croquet Corp, had a nice squib a few months back about Bill that adds to Markoff's 'regions' story: A very interesting story is that when Bill Atkinson was watching the demos of dragging windows he thought he was seeing the actual window being moved and the screen being updated dynamically. That was not what was actually happening though - they were using a much faster to draw outline and then the screen refreshed after the drop. But Bill, not realizing it was a very good magic act, decided he needed to figure out how they did what they hadn't actually done. The result was Bill invented "regions", perhaps one of the most beautiful concepts in computer graphics ever realized. It, more than anything enabled the Macintosh user experience we first saw. A quick aside was that Dan Ingalls, who gave the demo to Atikinson and Jobs - invented BitBlt, which was the foundational element of the Smalltalk/Alto graphics engine and how it was able to do so much. I actually wrote the first realtime 3D adventure/shooter for that first Macintosh. I was actually able to use regions for most of the rendering and bitblt for updating the screen. Did you know that the first 128k mac enabled page flipping? And just like on the Alto, the screen ate all the memory - actually on the Alto, the memory would eat the screen...

Smith himself is a major contributor to this space, and we cited Smith's work in filing for our AstroVirtual patents several years ago.   I cannot help but think that this era is drawing to a close--Atkinson was one of the giants who defined it all.

Czatch-up on previous news--John Doyle

 A year ago, I posted a small note about John Doyle's passing (c.f.  March 20, 2024)

And I vowed to pen a few words in that note, but time intervened and that never happened.

Given the recent passage of John Young, I thought about that, and I found Doyle's obituary notice   https://www.mercurynews.com/obituaries/john-l-doyle-portola-valley-ca/

John, as the obit notes, was an engaging, incredibly smart, curious, adventuresome sort.   Like, the one-liner about becoming a outside window washer on the 19-story Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.  

Nor did it mention that his sponsor in America was George Young, in Omaha, NE, which among other things led to George's son Richard and daughter Nancy both working for HP at various times.  So, irony--Richard Young and Nancy Young each consulted for HP CEO John Young (no relation).

I first met John when he came to Colorado Springs along with Bill and Dave and Barney Oliver to review what became the Logic Analyzer line, circa 1971.   John had just returned to HP after leaving to become CEO of a Hexcel Corporation division launching a new ski and a line of ski equipment.   The experiment didn't last long, and Packard offered John a 'new products' overview role to return to HP.   Later, he became HP's VP of Personnel, and then still later the VP of HP Labs, where he was instrumental in hiring Joel Birnbaum and launching the RISC computer architecture.   Still later, he became VP of Computing Systems before retiring.  His obit omits all of these titles and roles, simply saying "HP provided John the chance to wear many hats as engineer and manager."

In 1978, I got a phone call at HP from "John Doyle" who did not introduce himself (assuming that I remembered him from years earlier), but asking "are you the Chuck House who signed the cairn at the top of Hunewill Peak in the Sierra?"    Which, yes I was, and I'd done so twenty years earlier while working as a wrangler in Bridgeport, CA (population 324).   We 'bonded' over mountain climbing stories.  It also turned out that John and his family had stayed at the Hunewill Ranch multiple times over the years, and it was just total coincidence that he had climbed that mountain and found my name.  Four other names had been entered in the intervening twenty years--not exactly as popular as Mt. Everest.

Still later, I moved to Palo Alto to start Corporate Engineering, working directly for John, one desk away.  It was a fabulous learning experience, from a sagacious fun-loving 'graybeard by then (at HP, turning 50 was 'ancient' but John never let that slow him down).  Our start date was April 1, 1982, a date that I objected to, but he said, "NO, NO, that's the day the Royal Air Force (Britain) was founded."

I got to know John a bit differently as well.  I had married Nancy Young, mentioned above (met her when she consulted with HP Colorado Springs), and when we separated, John offered me time to 'settle' by moving into his Portola Valley guest home, which was wonderful because I got to know his wife Judy as a result.   The two of them were a wonderful couple, and they were very supportive at a tough time.

John and I continued to meet long after we had both retired from HP, and he and Bill Terry were the two most thorough readers of the 2009 book that Ray Price and I produced about HP (The HP Phenomenon).  He offered pages of corrections and amplifications, including that "Personnel" was really "Human Resources" which has an altogether different ring to it.  His last note to me, just a newsworthy catch-up note, was lengthy, hand-written, about six months before he passed.   Indeed, an elegant man.

John Young accomplishments outside HP

 Previous posts noted points about John Young's HP career, but the obituary accurately and appropriately mentioned his work on the national stage as well;

"John's impact extended well beyond the corporate world. Appointed by President Reagan in 1983, he chaired the President's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, uniting leaders across sectors to enhance U.S. innovation and economic strength. He later founded the Council on Competitiveness to continue this vital work. He also co-chaired President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology and helped establish both the Computer Systems Policy Project and Smart Valley, Inc."

"John served on the boards of numerous global corporations, including Chevron (and ChevronTexaco), Wells Fargo, GlaxoSmithKline, Lucent Technologies, Agere Systems, Affymetrix, and Novell. He was also active in the Business Council and Business Roundtable."

Ray and I debated whether to include the passages in The HP Phenomenon about John Young's discouragement with George Bush Sr.'s ignorance about technology, and Young's subsequent role in helping to get Clinton elected,, but after watching the horror show in Washington today, and the greedy toadies who masquerade as thoughtful leaders in Silicon Valley today, I am thankful that we included pages 376-379 describing John's singular efforts and the unfortunate aftermath with David Packard.   Not one of Packard's more sterling moments; certainly one of Young's most salient efforts.

Bay area residents probably have little appreciation for another role.   The obit mentions that John was "a passionate outdoorsman.  He was an avid fly fisherman who traveled the world and frequently returned to Alaska and Idaho's Teton River. He was also a skilled pilot and enjoyed pheasant hunting each fall."  This outdoor perspective played out for the Bay area.  John and Rosemary contributed heavily to the Peninsula Open Space Trust, this note from Rosemary's obituary: "Rosemary was a natural philanthropic entrepreneur and enjoyed being active in the community. The Peninsula Community Foundation was a small organization with a part-time executive when she joined the board. She became chair in 1971, hired a full-time director, and then helped to build a robust organization to raise awareness and funds that were matched with community nonprofits that needed support. The Peninsula Community Foundation merged with a similar community foundation in 2006 to form the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, now one of the largest in the country. Rosemary was an early and enthusiastic supporter of women’s causes. She volunteered to help start the Center for Research on Women as an independent institute at Stanford in 1974. Using her network and fundraising skills, the institute was launched, and its innovative approach was quickly successful and became fully endowed. Rosemary always had a special interest in open spaces and the outdoors. She was a founder and the first Board chair of the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) at its creation in 1985. An innovative organization that raises funds to buy important parcels of open space as they became available. Thousands of acres have been preserved for everyone’s enjoyment."

John Young accomplishments at HP

 This list, VERY abbreviated in my view, is taken from the obituaries published this week about John (see the previous post).

Legacy of leadership at HP: John's tenure as CEO was marked by groundbreaking strategic initiatives.

- Computing innovation: Spearheaded the development of the HP 3000 minicomputer, UNIX-based systems, personal computers, and the PA/RISC architecture.

- Printing revolution: Led HP's successful entry into the laser printer market with innovative microprocessor integration.

- Quality and Manufacturing: Launched the ambitious "10x quality goal" in 1980, driving a company-wide focus on excellence.

- Global expansion: Established local leadership around the world, making HP a truly global enterprise.

- Time-to-Market: Accelerated innovation cycles to meet rapidly evolving industry demands.

Throughout these changes, John upheld and evolved the "HP Way," blending innovation with an enduring culture of respect, ethics, and technical rigor.

I could add much to each of these stories, and in fact, our book (Ray Price and Chuck House, The HP Phenomenon, Stanford Press, 2009) does so (some even say ad nauseum,  but I think that is a chary description).

But let's add some points here.   Yes, many of those computing innovations happened under John's tenure.  There were of course others who played key roles

1. John did spearhead the HP-PA RISC program, and he did drive the entry (over Packard's vote) to enter PC's, although it was a long struggle.   The original HP 3000 and HP UNIX machines owed little directly to John, IMHO.  The handheld calculators weren't mentioned, and John was not involved with them to any degree.

2. Dick Hackborn gets full credit for the HP laser printing success, along with unsung heroes at HP Labs including Don Hamond (and Hewlett's own role with Canon).   John was a skeptic for a very long time, feeling that HP was just 'fronting' for Canon and the partnership might not work.  It did work, to the tune of several hundred billion dollars for HP, and John did of course support that.

3. Quality.   This was one of John's unique contributions, commissioning Craig Walter to lead a 10x campaign that was brilliant, and made HP stand out.   One wishes that succeeding CEOs had understood this aspect, which has in places tarnished considerably by now.   John brought the idea from a Stanford study group, and he was one of very few US CEOs who appreciated this topic before Kanban and Kaizeen and Deming and the Baldrige award became buzz-words.

4. Global expansion.   The insight and original leadership here was Bill Hewlett.  John was supportive throughout, but was not to my knowledge ever a key leader on this one.  The company was, however, as HP was one of the first US companies with operations in the UK, western Europe, and Japan, and then later in India and Mexico among others.

5. Time-to-market.    John grabbed the "Return Map" ideas that we intro'd in Corporate Engineering, and trotted them first to HP Accounting, and then to Fortune Magazine, and even got Ray Price and me into the Harvard Business Review.   John's enthusiasm for this was unparalleled, and without his bold encouragement, it would never have happened.  The net was roughly a 2x speed-up in product introductions while maintaining or improving quality/cost.

Those who knew the 'inside skinny' would probably also note that John and I had a quite complicated relationship.   He often winced at some of my insouciant comments in speeches, sometimes saying later that I was "the Loyal Opposition ".   But my respect and reverence for his perspective and leadership is second only to my admiration and awe about Bill and Dave themselves.   What a privilege it was to work with him so long and so closely.  

End of an era

 The San Jose Mercury-News this morning carried John A. Young's obituary.   93 years old, married to Rosemary for 67 years until she passed in 2021.   Wonderful obit in terms of generosity about John, and his many accomplishments.   It is available fairly widely, at Legacy.com and other places.   https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/heraldandnews/name/john-young-obituary?id=58523462.   See for example, the Klamath Falls, OR newspaper (where John and Rosemary grew up)   https://www.heraldandnews.com/john-young-obit/article_ebc6845e-a4db-4fd5-9fa1-d6bae0509936.html

The opening speaks for the man: "Visionary leader, technology pioneer, dedicated public servant, John A. Young, who succeeded founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard as CEO of Hewlett-Packard . . . .   A transformative force in technology and business, John helped shape the trajectory of Silicon Valley, modern computing and U.S. industrial policy. As CEO of HP from 1978 to 1992, he led the company through extraordinary growth - transforming it from a pioneer in test and measurement equipment into a global computing powerhouse. During his tenure, HP's annual revenue grew from $1.3 billion to $16 billion."

"John also served as chairman of President Reagan's Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, playing a key role in strengthening America's position in high technology sectors. He was widely respected for his integrity, humility and even-tempered leadership."

After earning his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, John began his career at Hewlett-Packard as a marketing planner in the microwave division. His steady confidence and visionary leadership saw him rise rapidly through the company: regional sales manager, marketing manager, vice president of the Electronic Products Group, and executive vice president of the Instrument, Computer, and Components groups. In 1977, when founders Hewlett and Packard retired, they selected John as their successor. True to form, John downplayed the moment, telling reporters, "Three letters - CEO - moved from Hewlett to me. That's all."

Ernie Arbuckle, long on HP's board, had a nice statement about John that rings true for me:

"His character left a lasting impression on all who knew him. "John is the kind of person everyone would like to work with-someone who keeps his promise, is easy to get along with, shows good judgment, and tries to see the other person's side of things."