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Bleeding Edge TV 262: HP Garage tour video
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Full Episodes, Gizmatic, Features, Home Entertainment, PC / Laptop, Podcasts, Videocasts,
The HP Garage is recognized as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. We got the rare opportunity to get inside of the Garage (thanks to our sponsor HP) to bring you a look at an important piece of tech history. Be sure to also check out our HP Garage photo tour. We also have a bunch of images in our HP Garage photo gallery.
We give you a peek at the rich history behind HP - if you are into tech, this is definitely one to watch. We get the story of how two men took HP from your average startup, to what we see today.
A big thank you goes out to HP and Verizon FiOS for sponsoring this episode.
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HP Garage photo tour
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Features, PC / Laptop,
We had the honor of getting invited to tour the HP Garage, considered almost universally to be the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.” In a nutshell, the HP Garage is a literal 12’ x 18’ wooden garage. This is where Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett founded the Hewlett-Packard company, way back when in 1939. Yes, even HP was a struggling, bootstrapped startup.
The Gear Live crew, along with Xavier from Notebooks.com, Michael from Hardware Geeks, and Rob from Windows Now, got a fantastic history lesson from HP Archivist Anna Mancini. If you are a geek like we are, you would have had a blast hearing all the interesting tidbits that Anna shared. For example, did you know that the company name was decided by the flip of a coin? Had the coin landed different, the company would have instead been named Packard-Hewlett, and would no doubt have been nowhere near successful. That’s how those things work, right?
Another interesting fact is that the bread and butter of HP was their line of audio oscillators, which they actually made by hand. They even baked the metal slabs in their kitchen oven. Way to save cash, eh? After Disney ordered eight of them to use in conjunction with the release of Fantasia, HP was well on its way to the big time.
We’ve put together an HP Garage tour photo gallery, featuring a good 26 images that Xavier Lanier graciously hooked us up with. Check it out for a fantastic glimpse into the history of consumer electronics.
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