Bill Hewlett (1913-2001)/Dave Packard (1912-1996)
Bill Hewlett (1913-2001)/Dave Packard (1912-1996)
| Hewlett and Packard MADE IT to their destination! White balloons are cell tower locations, red balloons are actual GPS locations. HP would not allow them into the building, so Hewlett and Packard were retrieved and brought to Julie's garage. H and P are now SOLD and starting a new journey. See page 4 of travelogue for details. |
Sculpture by Jim Pallas |
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COLLABORATION + COMRADERIE
These two smart fellows five years out of Stanford, established Hewlett-Packard corporation and won the bid for an audio oscillator to test the sound equipment for Walt Disney's "Fantasia", and their fantasia became historia. Perhaps that is why today one finds a sculpture of California-colonizing Father Junipero Serra in the pose of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" Mickey Mouse from the Disney movie, along Interstate 280 about twenty miles north of Stanford. Their company's 1968 Hewlett-Packard 9100A was the first personal computer, but they marketed it as a "desktop calculator" so as not to evoke images of IBM. They developed the laser printer, the single unit printer/copier/scanner/FAXer, and a bunch of other stuff. In the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, their Ohio office shipped militarily useful tech to Iraq. By 2000, a series of corporate buyouts and acquisitions made H-P the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers. Beyond the generous foundation giving, to causes that included human rights, Hewlett and Packard begat a corporate culture that gave a semblance of family-friendly stability in a changing world. It sought to create a working mother-friendly workplace. Did recent CEO Carly Fiorina understand that? The garage myth was re-energized (and craftily exploited) by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the 1970s. In my 1991 muralized interactive kiosk "Collaborationation" I limned the myth of the garage, as applicable to my own fruitful forms of collaboration, garage bands and even community murals. My dad understood the collaboration of the laboratory or academia, for his sole publication was co-authored with two others. Yet my mom always said "Don't collaborate! You should get full credit for your ideas!". I too am an only child, but I welcome the spark of creativity shared and built upon together in a team. In 1972 HP came out with the pocket calculator, soon developing programmable and alphanumeric ones. In 1980 my slide rule-generation dad was so enamored with his calculator, if I brought a girlfriend home he'd whip it out, "Ever seen one of these?" References consulted: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/ |
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| Travelogue by Julie Newdoll
The Travelogue is getting quite large for one page. You will see when you get to the bottom that I continue into August 9 on a new page. Juicy pictures of the insides of Lick Observatory on the next pages. Thanks for all the great pictures and stories, everyone! July 13 2006: Hewlett and Packard was shipped without a GPS unit to Julie Newdoll's art studio. They will be wired and launched August 5 from the printer cartridge section of an Office Depot in San Jose. Jim took these photos before they were shipped out to California near his studio.
August 5: Julie took Hewlett and Packard to the Office Depot on Blossom Hill Road in San Jose, as promised. H and P first went inside the store to visit the printer section and see their initials all over the place. They were kicked out in short order, but not until some photos were taken by two freelance writers/photographers, Sarah Mitchell and David Phillips who are working with Fine Art Registry. They were not welcome in front of the store, either, so they had to be content off to the side by a beautiful red motorcycle. Perhaps Ashlee Vance was right, we should have gone to Fry's (see his article in The Register). The nice man at Home Depot who helped us carry out a bag of stucco to weight H and P down told us we had better not leave them there overnight. It was a hangout spot for Saturday night skateboarding and partying. We asked Jim Pallas about this and he thought we should leave it there, anyway. |
| Julie Could not resist taking a few parting shots at the carousel across the street. A person waiting to have their tires changed offered us his guitar for a shot. |
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| Photo inside of Office Depot by David Phillips. Classic! |
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| Here they are, off to the side
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| August 5 evening: Julie gets an email from a person by the name of Jim Maurer. "Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett are spending the night at my house. We didn’t want them to be picked up when the parking lot at the Office Depot is cleaned and just thrown in the trash. Don’t know where they want to go to next. I’ll let them decide in the morning. They have a lot of catching up to do." Hurray, they have been picked up, and by someone that cares about them! We are relieved. Jim Pallas says, "I check on these guys in the A.M. even before I have my coffee. . . I never realized what happenin' guys Bill and Dave are. I think it's great that they've been ignored by HP corp. and kicked out of Office Depot." Jim was talking about the fact that Julie phoned HP to tell them that Hewlett and Packard were coming, and would they like to have them around for a while. They replied that they did not know what they were supposed to do with this information. They have nowhere to put them, not even in their old garage. Sorry H and P - guess you are not on the board anymore. |
| August 6: Heard from Maurer, who has Hewlett and Packard right now. What a generous host! He writes, "Well, as you can see from the attached photos, they were able to do some sightseeing today. First, a snapshot of me with Bill and Dave. I’m the one on the right. | ) |
| Next, they just fit in the back of a PT Cruiser with the seats folded. |
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| First stop was the Computer History Museum, but it was closed. I hope they make it back there and see the exhibit about them. | ) |
| Of course, they had to stop off and see the old home and get a few snapshots taken.
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| I let them off in downtown Palo Alto, in Lytton Plaza at the corner of University and Emerson, at about 11:20 am | ) |
| August 7: Ron Pottol picked up Hewlett and Packard. He has quite a novel story, "I saw this story (the one in The Register), and didn't think about getting involved, until I saw that Shockley was close to my house. So I drove over, only to realize that he was in a garage, and thus unreachable. My wife Rachel said that I should go to PA and get Dave and Bill, so off I went. They are big, I had to fold down the seats in my minivan to get them in. I took them home, took a shower, repacked the van, and in the evening, the family took off to give them a little bit of a tour. We took them to Apple (founded by HP employee Steve Wozniac), drove around a bit, and though I had been thinking about dropping them at the main Fry's (theme: history of electronics), but decided that for a pair of guys who started with test equipment and instrumentation that HSC (Halted Specialties Company in San Jose) would be a better place, the owner and employees would have some respect for them. So that is where we left them at about 7pm." It appears that this is becoming a sort of GPS treasure hunt for the pioneers. Julie does not know if this fits in with Jim Pallas' "abandonment" scheme. "Hey, Jim, get over it. This is the noughties." |
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| Later that same night, Julie gets a call from Richard Harrington. He was going to HSC (Halted Specialties Company) to buy a Peltier Cooler, when he ran into Hewlett and Packard in front of the store. He recognized them from The Register article as well. He went inside and told the man behind the counter that he should not leave them outside, because someone might steal them. "That is the whole point," said the helpful salesman. "They are meant to be taken." So he did.
Richard is an engineer at Lockheed, and has a lot of HP test equipment. He promises to send us a picture of an HP spectrum analyzer or a digital volt meter, and some other things. We will post his photos when they come in. Tomorrow, his wife is going to take him to UC Santa Cruz. I wonder if she will get a picture of them holding a banana slug (the UCSC mascot). |
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| August 8: We get a call from Mary, Richard's wife, from her office at UC Santa Cruz. She says, "Gave Hewlett and Packard lodging for the night and a ride to UCSC to hob-nob with the banana slugs and the ITS staff. Before we could find any (slugs or more staff) slithering out of their hide-a-ways, the HP boys jumped ship and are on their way back "over-the-hill"....Guess we'll know where, when they come to rest. . . P.S....Love your art, Julie!" (That Mary is my kind of person.) She had a co-worker that was so excited about our project. She brought them in for him to see, but alas, he did not come to work today (hope he didn't play hookey). Before she knew it, someone took H and P, and she has no idea where they are. So sorry for her co-worker. | ) |
| August 8 afternoon: Hey, Mary's co-worker, you may have another chance! We just got an anonymous phone call saying they took H and P to Lick Observatory and dropped him off. This is one of Mario's, the engineer on this project, favorite spots! Photos to come. Unfortunately, we are no longer getting a signal. Probably no cell phone towers up there to send us the signal. It will be hard to tell if it is worth a trip to go up there and get him. I have a call in to the gift shop, but no word yet. Oh, Hewlett and Packard, please come home! Enough people have carted you around, so maximum profit shares will be accomplished if the next person to grab them take them to their destination. My nerves! You know how it is, though, once bitten by the travel bug it is hard to settle down again. |
Go to HP Travelogue page 1 2 3 4 |
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Before
Palo Alto's punky garage band the Donnas, the myth of the garage was established
by William Hewlett and David Packard, founding a company building electronic
test and measurement equipment on $500 capital. )
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