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.