HPE in the NEWS

 Front page of the San Jose Mercury-News yesterday--News Flash, HP builds world's fastest computer!!!

Well, it didn't exactly say that.  It said that Lawrence Livermore Labs built the world's fastest computer, announced at the prestigious SuperComputer Conference in Atlanta by Robert Neely, head of LLL's weapons group.   In the fifth paragraph, it has this appealing (to me) sentence: "The $600 million behemoth, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise using chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is the latest chart-topper in the global race to build faster computers."

Well, doggone!   ACM and IEEE co-sponsor the Supercomputer Conference, and HP has exhibited for years there.   I've got many friends for whom this is THE conference, even more than SIGGRAPH.  And as an old ACM President, I always feel a certain bit of pride over the achievements ballyhooed at this event.  But, mygawd, HPE has just built the bestest of the best, AGAIN.  Wow.   

Here is the Merc blurb: https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?guid=939756d6-8601-45c8-8c49-0948f2f80343&appcode=SAN252&eguid=0553042f-3143-4b14-b8a5-6ec7f3312223&pnum=1#

Seems to be tho that someone at HP should be out shouting about this.   Have you seen anything?

Kinda seems like AMD and HP are missing a marketing try here, or have you heard that Intel is up for sale (gawd, can you imagine?), and NASDAQ took them off the list of top companies.  Have you heard that Nvidia stock is up 1400% in a year, and that HP capitalization is worth less than current revenue?

Let's put this in perspective:   Nvidia announced quarterly revenue and profits today, a whopping $35 billion up from $31 billion estimate, so the stock slid 3% to a mere $3.58 trillion in capitalization (some 25x current revenue).   Intel's current run rate (remeber that they used to build high-end computer chips?) is $50 Billion per year, and their capitalization is $103 Billion.  So Nvidia is valued 35 TIMES more than Intel.  Whew!

Of course, a current quarter of $13 Billion in revenue, with a LOSS of $18 Billion, might be driving this stock price.   Intel Cap/Rev = 2.0; Nvidia Cap/Rev = 25.0.  The news in Oregon two weeks ago was that 8 VPs of Software and 10 Intel Fellows were axed, AXED, which is a stunning disastrous denouement for Intel's pride.

AMD (recall they have been also-ran to Intel ever since Jerry Sanders got in the infamous legal battle with Intel over rights to second-source Intel forty some years ago) has a market cap of $223 billion, more than 3 TIMES Intel right now.  Their quarterly revenue was $6.8 Billion, with 14% net earnings.  Doing the numbers, AMD Cap/Rev = 10.

So, how about HPE? And, we might ask, IBM and even HPQ.   Recall that it was 2007, when HP hit $120B in annual revenue, and passed IBM as the biggest computer company on the globe?   You don't remember that?   Hummn.

HPE, the builder of this whizbang new "Fastest Computer in the World," had quarterly revenue of $7.8 Billion, and 15% net profit (unheard of profit per HP history), and a market cap of $27.5 Billion.   So HPE is valued at Cap/Rev = 1.0, the worst High Tech story out there for current investors.  What the 'ell?

HPQ market cap is $35 Billion, on quarterly revenue of $14 BIllion, 5% net profit.  So, they have an even worse investment profile than HPE, at Cap/Rev = 0.68.   These, you recall, are the printer and PC guys.

IBM?  Market cap of $198 Billion, just under AMD, and Nvidia is ONLY 17 TIMES bigger.   Their quarterly revenu is $15B, with Negative 2.2% profit.   So their ratio, Cap/Rev = 3.3.

We could go over the Dell and Cisco stories, with similarly glum results.  But, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and friends all seem to be doing okay.  Is there a moral here?  Gawd knows. I don't. 

Anyway, words to the wise at HPE.  TRUMPET YOUR SUCCESS.  Don't let it hide in the fifth sentence of someone else's story.

Logic Analyzer History revisited

 Should have mentioned in the last post that there is a fair amount of material out there, for the seriously interested (or demented?) folk who 'need to know'

For example, the HP 1600A and 1600S were our first “big” logic state analyzers.   Colorado Springs.   See https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/chuck_house/lsa_birth_03.htm 

There is a book as well, entitled "Permission denied--Odyssey of an Intrapreneur".  As noted in one on-line review, the original version wrongly maligned Biomation's CEO, mis-identifiying with another CEO of the same name who was later found guilty of serious crimes.

 https://www.google.com/search?q=permission+denied+chuck+house&oq=&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCQgBECMYJxjqAjIJCAAQIxgnGOoCMgkIARAjGCcY6gIyCQgCECMYJxjqAjIJCAMQIxgnGOoCMgkIBBAjGCcY6gIyCQgFECMYJxjqAjIJCAYQIxgnGOoCMgkIBxAjGCcY6gLSAQkyNDUzajBqMTWoAgiwAgE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Another review was much more enthusiastic, writing:  

Miles Kehoe

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovation the 'HP Way'

Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2014

Verified Purchase

This book gives a great view into the art of being an "intrepreneur', someone who works within a large organization to create skunkworks-type projects and products. It's also a great insiders view of HP when Bill and Dave ran the company, and specifically of the 'instrument divisions'. Chuck, awarded the Medal of Defiance by Dave Packard, talks about what it takes to build an idea into a project and into a successful product - and when it's time to stop.

Chuck introduces productivity and strategy grids to help guide the process. He also introduces the "Intrepreneur's Rulebook", spelling out the seven rules to follow.

Just because the book is aimed at innovation within the context of a large corporation, I think much of it applies to anyone interested in starting a project - or a product company - anywhere. Chuck was an integral part of the HP product divisions that funded all of what HP has become, just at the time when HP became recognized as one of the best managed companies in the world. If you're the least bit interested in innovating inside a large organization or for your own start-up, this book is a must-read.

Logic Analyzer question--Huh?

Atkelar, from Austria, posed the following to John Minck, the self-appointed guardian of the HP Archives first complied by Marc Mislanghe thirty years ago.

Atkelar wrote: "I try to make it short, but my idea is a bit hard to explain without abit of backstory. I recently got my hands on a µLab, HP 5036A, including the manual. Since I already have some other period correct test equipment (almost exclusively HP too) I wanted to make a little "documentary" style presentation of the set of tools and how the early digital days had ideas for tools that not all worked out. I found some info on how these tools were intended to be used, but I couldn't find out a "real reason" why some of these were not working out. It would be nice to have someone's input who "has been there". I am only almost 50 years old, so the 1970s didn't see me with much interest in the inside of electronics :)

I'd especially be interested in contacting somebody who had any hands on contact with "Signature Analysis", "Map Mode of the HP 1600A" - the two diagnostic aids that I assume ended up too cumbersome to keep around.   The logic probe set that includes 545A, 546A, 547A and 548A are also part of the video idea.   My videos have a slightly "different" presentation style, here's the µLab one for reference: https://youtu.be/wwUFyNjO8xA.     Greetings from Austria,

The actual primary question in my mind is: was there ever an official reasoning behind getting rid of "Signature Analysis" and "Map Mode"? My guess is that both of these would have led to quite intense documentation updates with every revision of a circuit and that probably wasn't worth the gain for diagnostics. Logic probes and test clips have most likely fallen victim to the speed of signals, so digital scopes pretty much took over as more versatile options.

I found this question interesting.   I penned, probably too quickly, the following answer:

Atkelar, thanks for your questions re some very old and almost unknown HP logic instrumentation history.   I haven’t thought about those issues in years to be honest.

You are quite right that these features had a high degree of documentation requirement, and it was ever-changing if the circuits were modified in even very simple ways.   But that was not the primary reason the features disappeared, in my view.

I don’t know about any “official reasoning” for getting rid of Signature Analysis (SA) or the HP 1600A map mode, but neither sold very well, and usually that determined the fate for some of HP’s instrument features disappearing.    With respect to Signature Analysis, this was an end-run by Santa Clara division when the Colorado Springs Logic State Analzyers proved more popular than Santa Clara’s Logic Analyzer.   The CS machines, aside from the HP 1645A, were focused on parallel logic, while Santa Clara’s were either node-only or serial data stream analysis.   This at a time that 8 and 16-bit microcontrollers and then microprocessors were becoming popular, which put a premium on a designer understanding parallel data streams.  In fact, although the Santa Clara team would not admit it probably, the Signature Analysis technology was pioneered in my Colorado Springs logic lab by Dan Kolody, whose first product for us was the HP 1620A (see my memoir for a picture of that box, which also sold in very modest quantity).   At the time, Santa Clara’s logic probes and clip were selling somewhat better, and the two divisions were in a bit of a skirmish for ‘charter’.   The prevailing history was that C Springs was an oscilloscope division, getting its brains beaten by Tektronix on a daily basis for nearly two decades, and HP top management wanted them (us, meaning me and my team) to stay focused on Tektronix, never mind the digital world.   And Al Bagley, division manager for Santa Clara, was vocal about his division being the “RIGHT” place for all things digital, but he had already lost the argument for hosting the first Desktop Calculator, and he was adamant that he should have the Logic instrument business.   

The “charter fight” answer by Bill Terry, HP’s VP for instrumentation, was to get HP Labs involved in two aspects—one, choosing the correct letters to portray in the Signature Analysis probe (so if any element of an LED seven-segment display failed, the character would not be mis-recognized), and two, choosing which division should build it.   HPL chose FUCHPL, although they never wrote it that way until we pointed out the clever arrangement of the letters.   And we graciously gave the Signature Analyzer charter to Bagley and team because we concluded it was almost irrelevant to the way test requirements were going to unfold after we modeled the Desktop Calculator ’signatures’ and found out how much work it took to get them node-by-node when no one had time to do that any longer.  So, I don’t think SA ever sold more than a handful of units.   This was at a time that Gate Minimization (Kline-McClusky techniques) were still being taught, and algorithmic design was quite novel and hardly taught anywhere).

The map was invented for the HP1600A, and carried along for several years.   It was a great tool for mapping the issues around memory chip utilization, which for a brief period was an issue when solid-state memory chips were first available, and relatively expensive (i.e. a penny per memory cell, or $10 for a 1,024 bit memory chip).   But the chip memory wars soon produced “free memory” and designers had little need to optimize chip utilization cell-by-cell.  The other thing the map could easily do was portray system execution pathways, which was sometimes valuable when a machine crashed, and you didn’t know what error sent it in the weeds.  The map could indicate, if you had captured it during run-time, the point at which the execution path deviated.    But break-point triggering, especially multiple-depth triggering that soon appeared on the HP 1610A and HP 1615A was a much more effective way to find such issues, so the map was also rendered irrelevant.

I always loved the map, but somewhat as with SA, few people used it, and the “maps” produced were so arcane and obscure in their specificity that very hew designers ever attempted to use them.  We did produce one or two Application notes about their use, but almost never got questions from customers about the mode and its value.

I hope this helps answer the questions you posed.

I dont’ know who could answer this better for you, but I will suggest that Sam Lee, Dan Kolody, or Tom Saponas at HP Colorado Springs would have some information.   All three are still alive, but I don’t have current contact information.    Gary Gordon at HP Santa Clara, one of the most brilliant engineers I've ever known, could also shed light on this, as might Webb McKinney.   I am copying Webb on this, and he may have contact info for some of the others.

Late Life Listening

 Penned on September 17, 2024 after a dinner party with my family

Gordon Bell RIP

Paul Ceruzzi forwarded the NY Times obituary widely, on Thursday May 23 (today).   https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/technology/c-gordon-bell-dead.html

Gordon Bell, 2nd design engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of the Computer History Museum, passed away last Friday, May 17, aged 89.  Paul's addendum note mentioned Bell's work with CHM: (Among other accomplishments, Gordon was an early supporter of the Computer History Museum, which started at a DEC building, and began with pieces of the Whirlwind computer rescued from scrap (correct me if this is wrong).) 

Len Shustek augmented the note with several more:                      https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-celebrating-35-years/        https://computerhistory.org/blog/len-shustek-a-man-with-a-vision-for-a-museum/         https://d1yx3ys82bpsa0.cloudfront.net/atchm/documents/Personal_Reflections_on_the_History_of_the_Computer_History_Museum_09-26-14.pdf                                https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/out-of-a-closet-the-early-years-of-years-of-the-computer-x-museums/  

The NY Times article was well-done, citing Bell's continual battles with the dogmatic overbearing Ken Olson, including a near-fatal heart attack in 1983 on a ski trip.   The second corrected article listed his first wife, Gwen, and noted accurately that she and he had co-created the predecessor to the Computer History Museum.

I thought back to the first time I met Gordon, which was on an interview trip to DEC in January 1965, courtesy of a Stanford classmate.   I was unimpressed by the old building, the PDP-8 they showed me, and in fact by Gordon and Ken themselves.   And I was very unimpressed at the time by their very small revenue base--they didn't share the numbers other than to boast that they expected to clear $10M in revenue when the books closed on 1964.  Years later, the number is known--$10.9M.  1965, with the PDP-8 selling, was just $14.98M.   Computers?   They had delivered less than 200 (actually more like 125) machines in eight years, selling just over one per month prior to the PDP-8.   True, they'd had some success with a run-time controller (PDP-5), but they didn't themselves consider it a computer.

I was working for HP Colorado Springs, the oscilloscope division of HP--the doormat of HP, with the slowest growth rate, lowest profit, and hardest competitor (Tektronix), and our revenues for 1964 were $10M, while HP totals were $128M (and Tektronix $75M).   I was quite willing to walk away from the 'scope business, but not into another flailing organization.   So, with ZERO foresight, I passed on DEC.

And then, circa 1975/76, our HP Logic Analyzers were "kickin' butt" and Gordon wanted to talk about them in Maynard.  The result was that I put five designers in Maynard for several months, to debug a new design with "Virtual Address eXtension, which debuted in 1978 as the DEC VAX-780.   The nub of the question was, with HP now firmly in the computer business, what were five HP designers doing in the DEC R&D Lab, helping debug a machine that would compete heavily with HP?   I had to get permission from HP's Board of Directors and Executive Committee to do this act of seeming treason.   Gordon had to do the same with his Board, swearing that the HP guys were not spies for the HP computer group.  The argument that I used was that we were Instrument folk who needed to measure the best and most innovative computer designs anywhere, and if we had to be at HP competitors, so be it.  Winning hand!

So, that re-kindled our connection, and a year later, Digital decided to bring a division to Colorado Springs.  Gordon and I met in the Springs, and he liked our 'story', so the Disc Drive division came to town, and I got to see him periodically.   

The NY Times mentioned Gordon's 1983 heart attack in Colorado--it was while skiing, not in the Springs.  I had suffered a much less severe heart attack in Salzburg while touring about Logic Analysis in 1977, so again we had something in common to discuss.  In retrospect today, we each have gotten four+ decades that easily might not have been ours to enjoy, so much to be grateful for on that account alone..

I mentioned (ironically just two weeks ago) in a post about Bill Johnson at DEC, that he and I conspired to do joint experiments with DEC and HP about Virtual Computer Collaboration.  The two VPs that I told the HP Exec Council that I knew, did not include Gordon, since he quit DEC for good after his heart attack.  I knew Bob Glorioso, who had taken his place, plus of course, BJ.

The next time Gordon and I crossed paths was another seven years, when he and his wife Gwen got the original Computer History Museum underway in Boston, and I was conscripted to help.  In fact, I wound up as HP's token member of the second "Computer Trivia Bowl" as a teammate with Bill Gates in 1990, who later penned a small monograph about it.  And, indeed, there is a video (I did a perfectly awful job that night).  https://www.google.com/search?q=computer+bowl+2&sca_esv=2d1299fed1ffcbfc&biw=2425&bih=1294&sxsrf=ADLYWIL96UPrCMQh6DJ_XV06qqr2S_iAew%3A1716564271240&ei=L7FQZryoDtqt0PEPzLmY8Aw&ved=0ahUKEwj8-_uczKaGAxXaFjQIHcwcBs4Q4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=computer+bowl+2&gs_lp=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_CAggQABgWGB4YD5gDAJIHBDE0LjGgB66pAQ&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:3576871f,vid:GJbtdrMbPK4,st:0 

Nonetheless, Gwen invited me to join their Board, which lasted over two instantiations and 28 years, an incredible privilege.   Gordon was a peripatetic and omnipresent board member throughout.  So, in a sense, I've worked with Gordon over nearly 60 years--hardly seems possible.

The sequel to all of this was that Gwen, serving as ACM President Emeritus, beseeched me to consider running for ACM President in 1996, and despite my employer's voiced dissent, I ran and won, which opened doors and avenues for my later life that I could only have dreamed, let alone imagined.  So for the two of them, my life has been HEAVILY impacted.    Gordon remarried fifteen years ago; Gwen, severely ill for years, is still living to the best of my knowledge.  

THANK YOU, GORDON, and RIP

Oh, those early Internet days

 Walt Underwood has been a long-time reader of this blog, and has graced us with a couple of comments for recent posts.  See 'comments' at the bottom.   I used to be able to 'see' these comments without extra steps, but apparently now you need to click on them.

Anyway, Walt was the original designer for what became the HP Internet in 1985, recruiting Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning, who had been managers of the SRI Arpanet node before they joined HP.  Bert, in fact, managed Doug Engelbart and his merry band, and sold them all to TimeShare which in turn was bought by McDonnell-Douglas.   I had purchased rights to that system for HP prior to the work we started.  

Walt shared this morning that "When they (Bert and Tony) presented at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work Conference, the folks there didn't quite know what to do with them. All the other papers were research systems and they were reporting on actual use!

"The best paper on the beginnings of the HP Internet was only published in an internal HP conference in 1987 (European Software Engineering Productivity Conference, Böblingen). Luckily, I have a copy. Here it is.  This particular paper is by T.W. Cook and Walt Underwood, with the opening shown below the citation.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/e5zi4807u353wmpr8ipwr/hp-internet.pdf?rlkey=r8phrssu9rbu4lctspy1pts4b&st=p1c38rio&dl=0

Another backgrounder for all of this that is a 'blast from the past' was noted in my HP blogpost from February 2010:  https://hpphenom.blogspot.com/2010/02/cisco-day.html 

I did an article in 2016 for the Computer History Museum magazine, Core, pp. 46-51, about Sandy, but I don't mention that HP was their first customer in it:

https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/core-2016.pdf

Turns out that Bert told me about this little company, Cisco, which had a cool router, and we should look at it.  Also turns out, we looked, and I signed the first commercial order for Cisco Inc.   Moreover, HP was Cisco's only commercial customer for 27 months, until Boeing signed in (and that, I believe, was instigated by Dave Packard, who was on the Boeing board for years).   There is a cute story about how Bert got to know the Cisco folk--it wasn't through either SRI or Stanford, but instead through his wife's travel agency (which Bert helped with), because Sandy Lerner and Len Bosack used them for travel, and. on occasion had some 'interesting requests'.  

Bill Johnson and Gifford Pinchot III

 A few days ago, I was musing about Reflections.   Wow, some just come roaring back.

In early 1982, I was promoted into a new role at HP.  Instead of a Divisional Manager with a Profit-and-Loss division 1,000 miles from HP's Palo Alto headquarters, I was named Corporate Engineering Director with an office next door to Davd Packard himself.  The send-off from Colorado Springs, where I'd worked for 18 years, featured a set of gag gifts--among them, a certificate entitled Medal of Defiance

The certificate was laying atop a bookcase--not inconspicuous, but not really on display.  A fellow named Gifford Pinchot had come to interview me for a book about corporate innovation, sent my way by R &D VP Bill Walker of Tektronix.  I'd been in the US Forestry during college, so I knew the Pinchot name.  Indeed, his grandfather started the US Forest Service for Teddy Roosevelt. Espying the certificate, he whipped out a Polaroid camera, which is the only reason I can describe the award today.  I figured it was indeed a gag gift, and tossed it a few weeks later.

The manuscript arrived three years later to HP Public Relations, who blew a headgasket--taking the name of our founder in vain.  They showed up at my desk with a sheaf of paper--Chapter 1, of a proposed book named Intrapreneuring.  Nonplussed, I thought--ut-oh, here goes my job--but I said, "Maybe Dave is in, let's ask him."

Packard was in, and as I intoned something like "You probably won't remember this incident, since it was 15 years ago or more" he grabbed the papers, and scanned the front page.   Turning to me, he jabbed a finger at me and said, "Young man (I was 45), you're in a job now that you can stop lots of good things from happening.  Make sure that you don't."  He then handed the sheaf back to the hapless PR folk, and said, "Print it."

Pinchot's book garnered a New York Times article, a Time magazine story, and a spot on Jane Pauley's The Today Show, but Pinchot needed a compelling example.   He came back to HP, who turned him down cold, even though Robert Waterman and Tom Peters' book In Search of Excellence had come out (1982).

HP leaders had a long history of ducking the limelight.  Both founders eschewed press coverage; their approach was decidedly stealth mode.  We all knew the drill--no surprise.  HP PR did call me to say that Pinchot had asked, and that they'd declined, thanks.  And by the way, if he tries to go around them, don't.  I understood, perfectly.

HP's Management Council, 22 folk plus Dave and Bill who were now semi-retired, met once a year, in 1985 at the tony Meadowwood resort in St. Helena, CA.  The group had never before studied any competitor, but this time a facilitator launched the two-day meeting by handing out DEC's annual report.  He asked us to skim it, and then turn to the back page with the list of board members and officers.  He said, "I will go around the room, and I want each of you to describe who on that list you have met, and had a conversation with, and give us the context."

I was 21st to answer, and the first who had met any.  I knew two, both engineering Vice-Presidents.  Asked to describe how well I knew them, I asnwered, "Well, one of them (Bill Johnson) slept in my master bedroom last Saturday night."  That stopped the clock!   

The discussion with the facilitator was desultory--the group as a whole didn't think of DEC as a worthy foe.  We moved to other topics.  The group, it always seemed to me, preferred tactics to strategy, and evolutionary tactics at that.

The next morning, COO Dean Morton was given a phone message.  Do you remember those pink message slips that receptionists scribbled before cell phones?   Morton read it, blinked and then groaned.  Usually calm, he interrupted the speaker demanding, "What the hell is going on?  Forbes, Fortune,and the Wall Street Journal have canceled attending our annual press conference on Wednesday; they're each going to Apple's instead."

HP had just posted its best year ever, with CEO Young chairing a new Council on Competitiveness for President Ronald Reagan.  With $6 Billion revenue, four times that of Apple or Intel, HP was far and away the biggest high-tech company in Silicon Valley.  Sun Microsystems was a puny $38 Million.  Cisco an Oracle didn't yet exist.  Totally exasperated, Dean said, "What is this crap with Apple?  Don't we have anyone exciting like that noisy guy?"

I don't know what compelled me, but I heard myself exclaim: "I just got called by Time, the New York Times, and The Today Show, but Corporate pulic relations turned them all down."

Morton turned purple, then bellowed:  "Call them back.  Get on those programs!"

Serendipity often plays a huge role.  I booked the gigs, before Morton asked why they wanted me.  The NY Times and the Time magazine article were good, but not show-stoppers.  But when Jane Pauley featured Gifford and me on the Today Show, all bets were off.  The program aired around the world, re-running for years.  Michael Schrage did a story about it for the Harvard Business Review 25 years later, citing it as the poster-child for corporate innovation, for intrapreneuring, a word that stuck.

And while I owe it a lot to Pinchot, and to Packard's grace at a pivotal time, I also owe Bill Johnson a debt of gratitude for sleeping at my place when he and I decided to experiment with DEC and HP network ideas.