7 Fun Facts About HP You Might Not Know

HP Inc.

From its humble beginnings in a garage in Palo Alto in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression to printers that can print many of the plastic parts needed to manufacture printers, HP Inc. is a deep well of tech industry milestones.

It hasn't always been printers and PCs, though. In the beginning, the company focused on audio oscillators, instruments famously used by Walt Disney to test theater sound systems before the release of Fantasia.

It was success in that line of business that allowed HP Inc. to expand into personal computers, or desktop calculators, as they were called. Today, the company is not only developing leading-edge 3D printers, but PCs that can rightly be called "fierce."

Printer Within A Printer

File this under "the future is now." Almost half of the custom plastic parts for HP Inc.'s new Multi Jet-Fusion 3-D printer are printed by the printer itself. "The reason we are printing them is not because we can, but [because] we should. It actually makes economic sense for us to print them," said Stephen Nigro, president of HP's 3-D printing business.

The Garage

Some consider 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, Calif., the birthplace of Silicon Valley. More specifically, the garage at that address was where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started their company in the late 1930s with $538 and began building audio oscillators. The rest, as they say, is history. HP bought the property -- garage, house and all -- for $1.7 million in 2000 to preserve it as a museum. Today, it's officially a California Historical Landmark and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Coin Toss

While the garage was Hewlett's, he and Packard nevertheless tossed a coin to decide how the company would be named when they founded the­ firm in 1939. The toss resulted in the name Hewlett-Packard, as opposed to Packard-Hewlett. The company was incorporated in 1947 and went public in the late 1950s, meaning the two entrepreneurial engineers had gone to Stanford during the depression, founded the company in the aftermath, and incorporated shortly after WWII. During the war, the company worked on counterradar technology and artillery shell fuses for the U.S. Army.

Playing The Game

When HP refers to its machines as "rigs" and starts using words like " fierce," you know it's game time. "The OMEN X desktop was built for serious gamers who need ­fierce performance out of the box in a fully customizable chassis," HP said when the system was released.

The 'Desktop Calculator'

In some circles HP is credited with producing the­ first "personal computer." But that's not what Hewlett and Packard wanted to call it. Instead, they called the Hewlett-Packard 9100A a "desktop calculator" to avoid confusing customers who might doubt that it was a computer because it didn't look like an IBM. The machine cost about $5,000, and its keyboard looked like that of a scientific calculator.

The First Success

Hewlett and Packard's garage tinkering finally paid off with the development of an audio oscillator that was both more dependable and only one-quarter the price of competing oscillators. Famously, one of the company's ­ first customers was Walt Disney productions, which used HP oscillators to test theater sound systems developed for the movie "Fantasia."

Lab Work

In late July, HP sponsored the Panorama music and arts festival in New York. At the event, HP powered The Lab, which featured seven interactive installations by New York-area artists. The installations were immersive, and all combined art, design and interactivity. Artists Emilie Baltz, Future Wife, Dave & Gabe, Gabriel Pulecio, Mountain Gods, Red Paper Heart and Zachary Lieberman presented works created with HP technology.