u/evankirstel

On August 18, 1947, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard incorporated the business they had started in 1938 and formalized as a partnership in 1939. Disney became their first major customer, buying eight modified Model 200B oscillators for theaters showing Fantasia. A coin toss decided the name order; the usual version says Packard won and put Hewlett first anyway.

The 1968 HP 9100A was a desktop computer sold as a “calculator” because purchasing agents could approve calculators while computers required senior management. The HP-35 arrived in 1972, sold 100,000 units in its first year and sent the slide rule into rapid decline. The LaserJet followed in 1984 and made printing a profit engine for decades.

Then it got ugly. The Compaq merger triggered a bitter proxy fight led by Walter Hewlett, Bill’s son and an HP director. In 2006, investigators searching for boardroom leaks used pretexting and surveillance against directors and journalists.

The worst came on August 18, 2011, exactly 64 years after HP incorporated. HP announced its roughly $10.3 billion bid for Autonomy, ended webOS device operations and considered separating the PC business. Fifteen months later, it recorded an $8.8 billion Autonomy impairment. The PC separation was abandoned. One day, three self-inflicted crises.

HP split in 2015. HP Inc. took PCs and printers; Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the enterprise businesses. Many saw a retreat. A decade later, it looks more like a hedge.

HPs biggest move since then was its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The Justice Department sued to block it before settling, and the deal closed in July 2025. Juniper brought routing, security, data-center networking and Mist, its cloud-managed networking platform. Early results look promising, although the acquisition inflates recent growth comparisons.

HP has a simpler problem: “AI PC” is not yet a reason to replace a working laptop. Local agents that can work across private files may change that. Revenue rose 13% in HP’s latest quarter, but units fell 7%. Printing was flat, consumer printing fell 10%, and HP plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 positions by fiscal 2028

Two halves of one company at opposite ends of the same wave. HPE sells the infrastructure where AI runs. HP Inc. has to prove AI belongs on the desk.

Not bad for a garage.

Her thinking still shows up in every serious conversation about mission critical software.

During Apollo, hardware got the glory. Software was the new kid, and plenty of people didn't consider it real engineering. Hamilton did. She led the MIT team behind Apollo's onboard flight software and designed around an uncomfortable fact: machines, interfaces and people all make mistakes.

My favorite story involves her daughter Lauren, who often came to the lab on nights and weekends. Playing astronaut, Lauren selected the prelaunch program, P01, during a simulated flight. The simulator crashed and the navigation data vanished.

Hamilton wanted the flight software to guard against that exact mistake. The answer, more or less: astronauts are too well trained to do that.

Then Jim Lovell did it. Five days into Apollo 8, he accidentally selected P01 and wiped the spacecraft's navigation data. Hamilton's team worked out how to rebuild and upload it. After that, the protection went in.

Anyone who runs complex systems knows the lesson. If your design depends on users never pressing the wrong button, you don't have a robust design. You have a future incident report.

Apollo 11 was the bigger test. During the lunar descent the guidance computer overloaded and threw the 1202 and 1201 alarms. The software didn't freeze or reboot into oblivion. Its priority based architecture shed lower value work and kept the landing functions running. The computer was tiny by today's standards, but it knew which jobs mattered.

That challenge hasn't gone anywhere.

Future lunar and Mars missions will run as one distributed system: landers, habitats, robots, satellites and commercial platforms. Comms will drop. Radiation will flip bits. Components from different suppliers will behave in ways nobody saw during the PowerPoint phase.

AI will help with anomaly detection, planning, testing and autonomous navigation. But nobody serious wants a black box model freelancing during a Mars landing. Mission software has to be deterministic where it matters, observable when it fails, and able to recover without waiting for Houston to pick up the phone.

AI can assist engineers, but requirements, evidence, human review and independent verification still count.

Hamilton understood the real job. It was never just writing code that worked. It was anticipating what could go wrong and making sure the system stayed useful when it did.

That mindset will matter far more on Mars than any flashy demo.

IBM Simon went on sale 32 years ago today, on August 16, 1994. A May launch slipped three months while engineers fixed bugs in the cellular fax integration. BellSouth Cellular sold it across its 15-state footprint, so the first smartphone rollout was a regional affair.

Pricing was $899 with a two-year contract or $1,099 without activation. BellSouth later cut the contract price to $599. Roughly 50,000 units sold in six months.

Simon ran on BellSouth's analog AMPS network. Email did not ride an always-on data connection. The device dialed a circuit-switched cellular call and pushed data through a 2,400 bps modem. Fax topped out at 9,600 bps. It skipped CDPD, the packet data technology carriers were just starting to deploy.

That gap showed up in the field. Voice worked wherever AMPS coverage existed, but data sessions choked on weak signals, interference and cell handoffs. A BYTE reviewer put the failure rate for cellular data connections at 10 to 20 percent. Every dropped session meant reconnecting, restarting the transfer and paying for more airtime.

The hardware was closer to a pocket DOS machine with a cellular radio than a phone. It weighed 18 ounces and packed a 16 MHz x86-compatible processor, ROM-DOS, 1 MB of RAM, flash storage and a PCMCIA slot. The 4.5-inch monochrome touchscreen handled calling, paging, cc:Mail, fax, contacts, calendars, notes and document annotation.

For executives, salespeople and service teams, that mix earned its keep. A user could take a page, pull up a customer record, check an appointment and fire off a fax without returning to the office. DispatchIt, one of the only third-party packages, turned Simon into a field-service work order terminal at $2,999 for the host software plus $299 per client.

The costs kept stacking. A larger battery was $78. An RJ-11 adapter for data over a phone line cost $119. PCMCIA memory cards ran $224 for 1 MB and $279 for 1.8 MB. Add cellular service, email infrastructure, support and spare batteries.

The NiCd battery gave about an hour of talking or data and 8 to 12 hours of standby. Typing on the small on-screen keyboard was slow, and using the organizer mid-call meant pulling the screen away from your head.

Simon failed for practical reasons: expensive hardware and service, limited distribution, unreliable mobile data, short battery life, a bulky design and almost no application ecosystem. Smaller, cheaper flip phones were eating the market from below.

Simon tried to cram the entire mobile office into one device. The next phase runs the other direction. Phones will keep managing identity, connectivity and security while work spreads across watches, glasses, vehicles and industrial devices. For enterprise teams, building a capable endpoint stopped being the challenge years ago. The real work is keeping applications, data and policy consistent as people move between devices and networks.

Apple badly needed a hit, and another beige box with slightly better specs wasn't going to change anything.

Steve Jobs and Jony Ive took a much bigger swing. The iMac was rounded, translucent and Bondi Blue. You could recognize it from across a room, which was unusual at a time when most computers looked like office equipment.

The handle on top was especially clever. The iMac was a heavy desktop machine, so the handle was never really about portability. It made the computer feel approachable. People understood immediately where to touch it and how to engage with it.

That friendly exterior took serious work behind the scenes. Apple had to rethink plastics, colors, tooling and manufacturing. Because the case was translucent, even the internal parts had to look orderly. The design team wasn't brought in at the end to make the machine prettier. Design shaped how the entire product got built.

The choices inside were just as bold. The floppy drive was gone, familiar ports disappeared and USB became the standard. Plenty of critics predicted disaster. Instead, Apple sold around 800,000 iMacs by the end of 1998, cemented its comeback and kicked off a run of products that reshaped the company.

Anyone building a physical product can take something from this. Good design isn't a coat of paint applied at the end. It reaches into engineering, manufacturing, usability, marketing and the feeling someone gets when they pick up the finished object.

A lot of today's products are beautifully made and strangely forgettable. Phones are nearly identical glass slabs. Laptops are silver rectangles. Cars are becoming large touchscreens surrounded by bodywork. Appliances have shed their buttons, their character and in some cases their basic ease of use.

The iMac proved people will form a real attachment to a well-designed piece of technology. Nearly three decades later, physical products could use a little more of that courage and a little less gray. The hockey-puck mouse, though, can stay in 1998.

#TechHistory #ProductDesign #IndustrialDesign

On this day in 1906, Wilbur and Orville Wright were granted U.S. Patent 821,393 for their "Flying Machine." 120 years later, it still reads like one of the most consequential engineering documents ever filed in Washington.

What set the Wrights apart was never just getting an aircraft off the ground. By 1903, plenty of inventors had managed brief hops, glides, and uncontrollable powered lurches into the air. The hard problem nobody had cracked was control. The Wrights solved it.

Their machine could roll, pitch, and yaw in a coordinated way, which meant a pilot could actually steer it, hold a heading, and recover from upset instead of just briefly surviving gravity. Wing warping for roll, rudder for yaw, forward elevator for pitch. That three-axis system is the conceptual ancestor of every flight control architecture in the air today.

Two guys running a bicycle shop in Dayton solved one of the hardest engineering problems on the planet, and they solved it with discipline any modern aerospace engineer would instantly recognize

When their early gliders produced only about a third of the lift predicted by Otto Lilienthal's published tables, the Wrights did not assume their math was wrong. They assumed the data was wrong. So they built a six-foot wind tunnel in the back of the bike shop, designed their own force balances from hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes, and ran controlled tests on roughly 200 model airfoils through the fall of 1901. They walked into 1902 with the most accurate aerodynamic dataset on Earth, and the 1903 Flyer was designed off those numbers.

Most people remember Kitty Hawk. The real story is four years of crashes, recalculations, broken propeller shafts, and engine rebuilds that made the twelve-second flight inevitable.

The patent then triggered a decade of legal warfare, most famously against Glenn Curtiss, whose ailerons the Wrights argued were just wing warping with extra steps. The courts mostly agreed. Early aviation was not all barnstormers and grass strips. It was lawsuits, injunctions, and a brutal scramble to define who owned the future of flight.

Now look at what that patent set in motion. Commercial aviation, air cargo, military airpower, spaceflight, and a chunk of the modern global economy all trace back to two brothers, a wind tunnel made of scrap, and a stubborn refusal to trust anyone else's numbers.

Not bad for a Dayton bike shop.

In 1974, Kildall built CP/M, the first widely adopted operating system for microcomputers. Until then, every machine lived in its own walled garden, and software had to be rewritten for each one, which made scale nearly impossible. Kildall introduced a layer between hardware and software so that a program written once could run across many machines. Developers stopped duplicating effort, and computing began to behave like a platform instead of a pile of incompatible boxes. Intel saw an early demo and passed.

By the late 1970s, CP/M had become the standard, powering business computing across banks, offices, and early startups. Kildall didn't fit the mold of a future tech titan. He was a computer scientist with a PhD from Washington who taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, and he preferred flying his Piper to negotiating contracts. He wrote early versions of CP/M in a workshop behind his house, sometimes accepted hardware in lieu of cash because invoicing bored him, and in his spare time co-hosted Computer Chronicles on PBS. His wife Dorothy McEwen ran the business while he focused on the code.

In 1980, IBM came looking for an operating system for its new personal computer. The meeting at Digital Research stalled over a one-sided non-disclosure agreement, and IBM left without a deal. They went back to Bill Gates, who didn't yet have an operating system to offer. Microsoft acquired 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, a system whose structure and commands closely mirrored CP/M, rebranded it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM.

When the IBM PC shipped in August 1981, PC DOS was the only operating system available. CP/M-86 arrived six months later at $240, while PC DOS sold for $40. One survey found 96 percent of buyers chose the cheaper option. When Kildall later examined PC DOS, he was incensed by the similarities, but his lawyer told him software copyright law was too unsettled to litigate. He settled for having CP/M-86 listed as a pricier option, partly because he didn't believe the IBM PC would amount to much. The system that had defined the category was sidelined almost overnight.

The philosophical gap had been visible all along. On a panel together, Kildall argued the operating system market was huge and could support many companies. Gates cut in: "No. There will always be one company." Kildall built the technical foundation. Microsoft built the business model that scaled. The outcome wasn't about who wrote better code. It was about distribution, licensing, and pricing discipline. The company that controlled how software reached customers ended up controlling the market.

The personal computer revolution wasn't just built on code. It was built on how that code reached the desk. CP/M made personal computing viable, and MS-DOS made it ubiquitous.

Fifty-one years ago, Micro-Soft’s first product was not a computer. It was Altair BASIC, an interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800, a machine that many people still remember as toggle switches, LEDs, paper tape, and a lot of patience.

What I keep coming back to is how strange and consequential that choice was. Gates and Allen did not try to build the next hobbyist machine. They picked the layer above it. They saw that affordable hardware was about to create a new problem: these machines needed to become useful to ordinary builders and programmers.

The famous part of the story is the bluff: they told MITS they had a BASIC interpreter before they actually had one, built and tested it through an 8080 simulator, and only ran it on real Altair hardware at the demo. But the more important part may have been the licensing decision. By keeping the agreement non-exclusive, Microsoft positioned itself as a software layer that could move across machines rather than as a contractor for one hardware company.

That feels like the big retrocomputing lesson to me. Hardware opens the door, but software decides how big the room becomes. Altair BASIC was not just a language port; it was an early proof that software could be a product and eventually a platform in its own right.

Curious how others here see it: was Altair BASIC the real inflection point, or was the Altair itself still the bigger breakthrough?