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.

Oops, must have hit a nerve

 The posts about "2nd largest corporate electronic network" in the Surface Mount Tech post yesterday, prompted a quick response from Walt Underwood, the original designer of that network.   Here's his pithy commentary:

I was the designer of the HP Internet. Chuck gave me some very simple parameters, like 12 months and $100k and told me to come back when I had a plan. 

Bert Raphael and Tony Fanning were tremendously useful because they'd come over from SRI.

Second largest private network (not just "corporate"), but the largest private IP network. I think the bigger network was the "DEC Easynet" at Digital, and that ran on DECnet protocols, not Internet protocols. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet#DEC_Easynet

Quite the story, from the designer who should have gotten the award.   But Walt's note prompted thinking along these lines, again this is a story from 40 years ago, so I had to 'research' some of this.

First, Bill Johnson (BJ), a senior VP at DEC, was a colleague I met at Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, in their pioneering Graduate College program, based on computer conferencing.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Behavioral_Sciences_Institute

BJ pioneered the DEC Easynet, based on the EIES system and I stimulated the Confer System at HP with the lightly structured 'instruction' for Walt Underwood described above.     BJ and I decided to run a joint experiment with our companies, can you imagine?   I cannot find BJ on the Internet today.  He left DEC in their 'crash and burn' phase circa 1990, and went to IBM where Lou Gerstner honored him as one of the 'new wild ducks' circa 1992.  That story should be findable, but I cannot find it right now.  BJ left IBM circa 2002 or so, and became Chancellor or President of an Eastern University.  I thought it was Rensselaer, but again, no luck finding him today.  Humnn, Roland Schmitt went from GE to President of Rensselaer -- ah, yes, I do recall that now.     BJ might have gone to Worchester Polytechnic, but I cannot find him listed there either.  Time plays hob with all of these wonderful deeds from yesteryear.

Some of the antecedent for all of this is reported in Ray Price's and my HP book, The HP Phenomenon, for example with this opening pair of paragraphs on p. 280 that goes on for five or six pages:

The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute (WBSI) created the first distance learning computer-conferencing system to support an alternative MBA in strategic studies in 1982. Attendees included Bill Johnson (B. J.) from Digital Equipment and Chuck House from HP, along with Dennis Hayes, founder of Hayes Modem, and Stewart Brand, who had profiled XeroxPARC for Rolling Stone magazine. House and Johnson agreed to install computer-conferencing software as an experiment and to share the sociological lessons that resulted.   An Industrial Research Institute membership starting in 1984 allowed House to form a virtual team with R&D leaders Roland Schmitt and Fred Geary of General Electric, Lew Lehr and Les Krogh of 3M, Ian Ross at Bell Labs, and Dan Stanzione at Bellcore. This became a loosely federated core experimental group wrestling with the import of and lessons from innovation in this “digital world.”33

It was experimental, not conceptual. As such, it was exploratory, adventuresome, and pioneering. Amid conflicting advice, the Corporate Engineering team—Bert Raphael, Tony Fanning, and Mark Laubach—brought five different e-mail systems together with an overlay interface, allowing all of the company’s people to communicate. They evaluated two leading university computer-conferencing systems, Confer and EIES, installing Confer to give discussion forum capability to HP employees. 

The Confer story is told nicely, in considerable philosophical perspective in an ACM article by Tony Fanning and Bert Raphael, presented at CSCW '86.   https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/637069.637109

And guess what?  The leading example they use for Confer is Surface Mount Technology.  Which was my attempt to get Femcor (and me) out of the cross-hairs described in the earlier post.

Why do you need a Passport?

 For reasons that escape me now, I found myself in Waltham, Massachusetts one day, speaking to an assembled crowd of designers and product marketing managers.   It might have been due to a scheduled Logic Analyzer talk, or it might have been a Corporate Engineering visit.   The former would have been circa 1978, the latter about 1982 or 1983.  I imagine that it was the latter.

Whatever the gist of it, I was 'on-stage' in front of 200+ folk, who had just learned that their division was being carved up, that Boeblingen would be allowed to enter the ICU monitoring business, since they had essentially defaulted on serving the European medical market. 

Mad as hornets, they saw me as a 'corporate puke' at the moment, and I must have been part of the game to strand them!   Well, I knew nothing about this, but there I was, more or less unarmed and defenseless.  My first feeble attempt was to say that they, this very division, had taken my graphics program away from me in Colorado Springs because Dave Packard thought that they could sell displays far faster than we could.  He probably was right about that--in 1970, hardly anyone but the U of Utah and Alvy Ray Smith's NYIT thought displays for computers was a good idea.   

That didn't cut any ice with them, so I tried another tack.  I said, "what are your sales in the US, and what are they in Europe?"   The answer was that basically no one in the room seemed to know.  Later, I checked, and the sobering truth was that four years earlier, Waltham and Andover orders were $104M in the US, and $36.7M in Europe.  Now, four years later after lots of 'push' from Corporate to "do more" in Europe, the numbers were $183M to $49.8M.  Sales in the US had grown 76%, vs. 36% in Europe.

But I didn't know that at the time.  I had a simple question:  "How many of you have been to Europe this year?"  No hands.   "How many last year?"   No hands.   

"How many of you have a valid US Passport?"  Four hands.  Probing, I found that wo of them were only for vacations in the Caribbean; the other two were for international travel, but neither had done so fo more than three years.

I heard myself practically screaming, "I'm glad they took your charter and sent it to someone else.  You're not running your business as a worldwide business in any way."

It did not endear me to the crowd, needless to say.  But I did keep track, and in 1982, four years later (which is way too quick for a new division to gear up, and especially to invent something for the 'local market), the overall numbers were $308M to $74M.   The US sales up another 68%, Europe up 49%.  Getting slightly better.  Four years more, and the results were $421M to $152M -- now we're seeing 37% growth in the USA, and 105% in Europe.   

Vindication?  Yes, but it took almost a decade.  These kinds of business strategic decisions don't change things 'overnight' and my guess is that few, if anyone, in the room that day ever calculated the numbers a decade later, to say "Hummn, guess they had a point there."

But, for me, the question was: "How did I come up with that question about passports?  And was that the key to the puzzle?"

SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY

It's a forty-year old story, but the moral of the story is timeless.

I had moved into a co-ordination role for HP in 1982, called Director of Corporate Engineering.  You could define that narrowly as Director of a small group labeled "Corporate Engineering" which was in fact true.   You could alternatively define it broadly as Director of Engineering for the Corporation, which at times for various topics was also true.  Topics like control of worldwide Capital Equipment budgets for all 91 R&D centers, or design standards for such topics as co-ordinated Human Factors when new icons and varied meanings proliferated when CRT displays displaced analog meters and digital Nixie-tubes.   I found, for example, that there were something like 23 variations of HP Basic from like 17 divisions--which made a mockery of the HP Computer Group's broad claim of inter-activity for a synchronized Manufacturing floor.   We reduced it to 2 dialects, but could never get it to one--so the Fort Collins desktop computers and workstations never 'joined the party' for the Cupertino-based CPU networks.  And things like building a truly-networked corporation for the 15,000 design engineers--which we did,

One thing we were always on the lookout for was innovation in a single division, that might be helpful for other divisions if they simply knew about it.   So, how do you tell them?  To that end, we had a Corporate Engineering newsletter, called HP Network, surprise, and we built a leading-edge electronic network that we called HP Internet circa 1985.   I later got a couple of big awards for catalyzing that network, which at the time was cited  as the 2nd largest corporate network in the world (HP' was like the 60th largest company in the US, so hardly to be expected, right?). 

The citation was in Jessica Lipnack's and Jeffrey Stamps' book, The Networking Book, November 1986.  I'd met them and worked with them at the innovative mid-life crisis school, Western Behavioral Science Institute in La Jolla, CA from 1982-1984.  

https://www.amazon.com/Networking-Book-People-Connecting/dp/0710209762

They would go on to write the earliest and best books on Virtual Teams, and multiple Networking discoveries--some while teaming with the NJIT folk who had built EIES, the Electronic Information Exchange System that WBSI used for its innovative post-graduate college program.  More about EIES and its leaders, Murray Turoff and Rozanne Hiltz, are here:

https://computing.njit.edu/news/njit-research-1970s-became-vital-parts-todays-social-media-recipe

So, I got a head-start on interconnecting folk from these activities.  SME (Society for Manufacturing Engineers), a group I'd never been part of, gave me their 1986 Award for "International Contributions for Engineering and Scientific Communities Award:

Some years later, Smithsonian and MIT selected a set of 200 "Wizards and their Wonders" and this international network was key to my selection (being ACM President didn't hurt either).

Okay, so on with the story.  As the Corporate Engineering Director, my job, among other things, was to visit each of the 91 divisional R&D (mostly D) labs and 25 research groups in HP Labs once a year.  When Dave Packard outlined that expectation to me, I whistled--"whew, that's a lot of travel.  What do I say to them?  I'll be so busy traveling that I won't have time for much else."  

His laconic answer: " Just tell them what you learned at the last place you visited."

Well, first of all, I did indeed do a lot of travel.  I didn't make every spot every year, but probably more like every 18 months or so--became an easy "million-miler" for United Airlines among others.  "Join the Navy, see the world" and "IBM = I've Been Moved" were two mottos I could now appreciate better.

But, the fateful day in McMinnville, Oregon, at a tiny acquisition (Femcor) with maybe 70 employees basically 'off-the-radar' in the Medical Group, I was shown superb NEW technology called Surface Mount Technology.  Wikipedia informs: Surface-mount technology, originally called planar mounting, is a method in which the electrical components are mounted directly onto the surface of a printed circuit board. An electrical component mounted in this manner is referred to as a surface-mount device.  

I liked it.  And it was nowhere else in the HP pantheon, so I couldn't wait to describe it in our newsletter, which we did in the next issue.  (I cannot find a copy today, but might when I tackle the stacks of boxes in the garage).   

Recall what Femcor did: "Medical, industrial and portable X-ray systems, field emission X-ray and electron beam tubes, pulsed X-ray and electron beam systems, cardiac resuscitation systems."  Not exactly the center-weight for an increasingly computer-systems oriented corporation, for which Femcor accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent of HP revenues.

And soon enough, I got an from the general manager at Femcor, mad as hell.   It seems he had been inundated with calls and visitors from around the HP loop.   He said, with some vehemence and invective that I cannot repeat verbatim, something like: "we've had four times as many visitors as we have employees.  The first two were great, and then it got bothersome, and now we cannot get a damn thing done because of your damn article.  CALL OFF THE DOGS."

I'd had a somewhat similar experience with an Analytical division in Karlsruhe, Germany, which made liquid chromatographs with great 3D pictures that I extolled for better informational content.  But Karlsruhe was 55 miles east of Böblingen, where HP's German efforts were concentrated.  The nearest town was Baden-Baden, known for its thermal baths--impressively remote for most potential HP visitors.  And 3D images were much less in vogue than potential packaging technology for computers.

So I didn't get much push-back from the Karlsruhe team, but the lesson stuck from the Femcor folk.

The lesson: Not everyone appreciates shining a bright light on them--notoriety is not necessarily good.

HP's pygmy divisions and groups

 So, the last post was a bit chatty about Femcor, and 'our roots in McMinnville'.  But in truth, HP McMinnville didn't get a lot of play in HP history.   Mike Malone's 'Bill 'n Dave' book (2007, Portfolio Press, Penguin Books, 438pp.) doesn't mention any of the 'pygmy divisions or groups' (Medical, Analytic, Components), nor does Burgelman, McKinney's, and Meza's 'Becoming Hewlett-Packard' (2017, Oxford Press, 390 pp.).   Ray Price and I covered them moderately well in 'The HP Phenomenon'. (2009, Stanford Press, 638 pp.), but Femcor didn't get singled out.   The books about Carly Fiorina's reign (is that the right word?), both Anders' Perfect Enough and Burrows' Backfire don't mention any of these activities, but in fact the divestiture of the Instrument Groups had just been completed, so why bother?

Might be worth at least 'sizing' these groups, first from, say 1976-1978 and then from 1996-1998, two decades later.   Here's the early data for both revenues and profits by group:

So the earnings profile (using a standard 50% ratio from Operating to Net) was 12.1% for Test and Measurement including Components, and 8.0% for computers and the pair of Analytic and Med.

And here's the later revenue data (HP didn't show the 1998 earnings contributions, but the company earned $2.945 Billion).  Estimates I've heard were T&M still around 12.0% net; Med and Analytic about 8.0% net, and computers about 5.9% net.   Within computers, Peripherals were close to 9.0%, and CPUs and Systems were around 3.0%.    

So those numbers are 'telling'.   In 20 years, the Computer Groups grew from $761 Million to $39.4 Billion, while Medical and Analytic together grew from $261 Million to $2.374 Billion.   Test and Measurement (plus Components) grew from $740 Million to $5.22 Billion.  Growth rates per annum were thus 9.0% compound for T & M;  11.7% for Med and Analytic; and 21.8% (the historic rate for the entire company from 1947-1987) for the computer groups en totale.

Not too hard to figure out why the divestiture, and why most books ignore this 'sidebar' of HP.  On the other hand, there were some wonderful stories and products and 'making a difference for the world' contained within those instrument arenas.

There are 'memoirs' and anthologies about divisions and product groups within HP, again few that I know of with respect to any of the Pygmy divisons and groups.   Loveland and the Voltmeters, and later origins of the Desktop Calculators (really, early PCs), Colorado Springs, Boise Laser Printers, Corvallis handheld calculators, HP Labs in Palo Alto, and the South Queensferry, Scotland Division all have been recorded, some in considerable detail.   And the computer divisions, as a group, make the news for Malone and the Oxford Press book

Here, for example from The HP Phenomenon is the one sentence that mentions that such a group existed: p. 127.  "By 1975, the Medical Group had been fully formed, with two divisions in Massachusetts (Waltham and Andover), one in Germany,  another in Oregon, and an operation in Brazil."

The segment goes on to describe an issue that led to establishing the German Medical Division: "The grup quickly found that medicine had regional and local idiosyncratic methods that needed to be considered in product features as well as sales and marketing."

One might wonder just why authors haven't done more justice to these groups, and I'd commend any readers interested in that question to read our book from pages 126-130 closely.   The three pygmy groups built great products that enhanced HP's reputation amongst scientist and engineers and doctors worldwide--but the revenues and growth rates were swamped out by the more established instrument lines and then by the rampaging computer divisions and fierce competition.

Thus, stories such as the three that follow in the next three posts never made it into 'the books' and in most cases, not even into the lore.  But, now that I've spent a couple of wakeful nights rehashing the events and the take-aways from them, I feel compelled to put them into a written form.  Stay tuned.

FEMCOR

 Well, life sometimes has surprises around the corner.   We attended a small rally the other day at our daughter's home, meeting some neighbors.  We've just moved from SE Portland (near Reed College, Steve Jobs' alma mater), to McMinnville, Oregon, about forty miles SW of where we were.  

McMinnville is somewhat famous these days because the local aviation museum has the fabled Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' plywood 'flying boat' from WW II--essentially the largest plane in the world for a long time.  Its total flying time is something like 26 seconds at 135' off the ground, covering one nautical mile, with Hughes at the controls, and some 35 others on board.   Incidentally, the wood used was mostly Birch, not Spruce.   Maybe it's apocryphal, but employees who built it were said to call the plane the Birch Bitch rather than the Spruce Goose.

So, one neighbor welcomed us warmly, and asked 'where are you from?'    We replied, something like "we've lived lots of places, but we're Californians by birth and most years that's where we've lived."

"Where?" she pressed.   Jenny's laconic reply, "Well, Bay area mostly, but Chuck is Southern Califonria and Jenny Sacramento."

"How do you like living in a small town like McMinnville?" she queried.

And I instantly had a flood of thoughts.   FIRST, I worked in McMinnville for HP forty years ago, when it was 10,000 people instead of 40,000.   That stopped her cold.  She had no idea HP'd ever been here.

Second, Palo Alto was the same size as McMinnville is today, when I went to work for HP, and Cupertino had only 3,400 people when we rented an apartment there, PERIOD.   All cherry orchards.   I skipped telling her that when my younger brother was born in Phoenix, that it was not much larger than McMinnville today, and when I moved as an HP designer to Colorado Springs, it too was not much larger than McMinnville is now.   Yesterday seems SO FAR AWAY.

Moreover, my wife Jenny and I moved from a small (like really small) town in Central California four years ago to Oregon.   We managed a horse ranch and stable for a decade in Elderwood, CA (pop. 158), 23 miles northeast of Visalia, on the last public road affronting both Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.   We were 19 miles (on CA State highway 245, a twisty two-lane road, with signs suggesting that RVs 'skip it') south of another small town, Badger (pop. 140).  Here's a picture of our ranch, with the majestic Kaweha mountain range (think 5 miles from Mt Whitney). and a ranch part way to Badger.  Yes, there are STILL remote parts of California.

To give you an idea, Woodlake on this map, at 7,800 folk--an agricultural town--Jenny and I added 14% to the total of postgraduate degrees in the entire town when we moved to 'suburban' Woodlake in Elderwood.  Backwoods.  Note the other towns nearby -- Seville (pop. 411); Yettm (pop. 108); Lemon Cove (pop. 498); Lind Cove (pop. 236).   Park City, Utah when we moved there before their first Winter Olympics was 2,800 when we first bought there.  So, we had to laugh with this woman who thinks McMinnville is "small".   

But YES, HP did have a plant here in McMinnville.   As we drove yesterday back into Portland, both Jenny and I recalled it (she worked at HP in a different group and saw HP in many ways that I did not, and vice versa).   She knew it only as an HP Division, but I knew it as the company that the Medical Group bought in 1974.  I couldn't remember the name, but came up with initials FMIR as we drove--Field eMissions Infra Red--was what I was imagining.  But on the way home, it hit me--it was FEMCOR which stood for Field EMissions Corporation.   And just outside the airport where the Spruce Goose 'lives' today (a great visit, by the way), I Googled FEMCOR and got nothing.  Then I Googled HP McMinnville and found a squib describing Femcor, started in 1958, and bought by HP in 1974, and then 'moved' somewhere undisclosed in 1997.  The reason for the article was to describe the remediation efforts to clean up a 100 acre tract for later use.   The address was given as SW 1700 Baker Street, which in turns out is still vacant land just east of the Albertson's and Roth markets where we shop today.   And Linfield College owns the ground, and is six blocks west (this is all right on highway 99W going through town), and moreover there is a building (or auditorium) at Linfield named the "HP" building, according to our daughter last night.     https://www.deq.state.or.us/lq/ECSI/ecsidetail.asp?seqnbr=207

So, both Jenny and I have 'older roots' in this particular small town than darn near anyone here.

Go figure.

Geezers at AMW 50

 In another blog recently, I got on a roll about "reflections" -- as in trolling through old memories.  And, honestly, old guys sometimes do this (often around grandchildren, who {truth be told} sit quietly and appear to listen, but if you could monitor their thoughts, they're of the form 'when will the old geezer shut up?').

I just attended the 50th anniversary of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop (AMW 50), and true to form, they (and me) trotted out a series of old stories and pictures of much younger folk who had hair.  This fun went on for quite a while the first day, while thanking half the audience for 'being new with us' and 'glad to have you'.   This was one of those hybrid events that COVID foisted upon us--and presently in the Chat part of the remote viewers, a message appeared, to the effect of "when are these old geezers going to shut up??'

I'd been thoroughly enjoying the folderol, but I suddenly imaged my grandchildren, and I thought, "These designers are here to talk about what the new Nvidia chips with AI can do, and we're wheezing about what it was like to have a new 8008 from Intel with a bootstrap loader."    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8008

The Intel 8008 had a whopping 3,500 transistors, 50% more than the ground-breaking 4004 from Ted Hoff two years earlier in 1971, running in 'fast mode' at 800 KHz.   The Nvidia RTX (Real-time eXperience) 3070 chip introduced six years ago has 5,888 computer 'cores' onboard, with a clock speed of 1.73 GHz, and as one industry observer said at the time: 

"It is not an exaggeration to say that NVIDIA CUDA technology could well be the most revolutionary thing to happen in computing since the invention of the microprocessor. It's that fast, that inexpensive, and has that much potential."  Less than $500.   CUDA means (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and represents (estimate ~ 500,000 devices EACH)

So the geezers are 'out to lunch' and I had a ball showing off our new ENLIVENZ displays from AstroVirtual, where we run up to 100 Virtual 30 foot diameter screens in Real-time Pixel-streaming mode for 'next-to-nothing' in cost, and full 1080 graphics mode--like $100 per month for viewing and intercting with 100 interactive screens.  See our website https://www.astrovirtual.com/

But for us old geezers, it was fun to see AMW folk again, and reminince--we could have dwelled on the fact that old HP folk started and ran this thing for most of its life, but that'd take us down another rathole.

Update from John Minck

 I asked John re comments on the last two posts, and he graciously replied.

Hi Chuck,

 

I was not aware that you have a blog for your book, that was many years ago.

 

Yes, I suggest a few edits. We are up to 43 HPMemoirs now. You could use two links, one to the index page for the 43 Memoirs. 

https://hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/company/memories_home.htm

 

Then another link to the home page and instruct to click on Timeline on the dashboard, which offers the HP memories plus HP People Stories plus Other HP Writings. All three are employee recalls of old times.

 

John

A few more sources for HP info

 I mentioned John Minck's work in the previous post, but I only touched on a few things

Here is the link to Mark Mislanghe's original work, still being furthered by John, plus Kenneth Kuhn and Glenn Robb.    http://hparchive.com/.    The three are described within the document; their yeoman service on behalf of HP history is outstanding.

That site is rich with materials about many products, periodicals, etc. including the following:

More interesting for many will be the 'memoirs' of many folk, which are sort of 'buried' in the main website.   Here is a link to 37 HP memoirs, plus many HP France memoirs, plus other 'outsiders'

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/ressources/resrc_contrib_01.htm

And here is the 'main site'

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/index.htm

For a more complete listing of the memoirs, try this

https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/company/memories_home.htm

A long hiatus--sorry

 I was quite active with this blog for a number of years, and it has garnered many viewers and comments in the fifteen years since I began it.  Nearly 300,000 views, WOW!   Granted, a big chunk of them (nearly 15%) came around the brouhaha with a disgraced and illicit Mark Hurd's denouement as CEO.  Couldn't have happened to a more fitting individual in my view.  (Whew, still vindictive?)

But HP, the "OLD HP", did not disappear just because of  Mark Hurd--it took the combined efforts of several 'leaders' -- e.g. Carly Fiorina, Leo Apotheker, even Meg Whitman-- but especially because of a shift in focus and ethics that seems almost like Greek tragedy.

And, truth be known, I moved on also to other pursuits.

Of late, though, Ive been drawn back through several events.   People, key people, and people who were my idols, have been leaving the scene.  John Doyle, for example, in mid-January this year.  John was perhaps best known for coining the term "Management by Wandering Around" but his influence was long and strong for many facets of "The Old HP".   I'll do an epistle about him directly.

Another is that belated honors, such as awards and citations, are being sought for key contributors.  Chuck Tyler picked up the cudgel for John Vaught, to be nominated for the Inventor's Hall of Fame.   Tyler rounded up sixteen supporting letters, from old-time stalwarts including Bill Terry, Dick Anderson, Byron Anderson (no relation), Dana Seccombe, Ned Barnholt, Jim Hall, Gary Gordon, and Ed Karrer among others.  Fitting, I must say--shoulda happened years ago.  And not just for Vaught--there are so many worthies that contributed to HP's long-term success.  Maybe I could grab some of these stories and give them just a bit more illumination.  

Gary Gordon, just to pick one, got the Barney Oliver award from Agilent (in one of its incarnations), and was subsequently honored with a video interview at the Computer History Museum.  Which is somewhat incongruous, given that CHM has mostly eschewed HP as a pretender in computing (so it goes when most of the early board were DEC and IBM folk, and the newcomers are mostly software folk).

Oops, grouse, grouse, grouse.

And I MUST mention the yeoman work that John Minck has continued, in furthering Mark Mislange's fabulous work after Mark's early demise.  Here's a link to John's own story  https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_hp_00.htm.  

And here's a link to the sizable collection he has curated for a decade now: https://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/memories.cgi

If that doesn't keep you busy for awhile, I'd be surprised

Don't hold your breath on me doing another post.  After all, this is three years since the last one.

Chuck