HP Garage on National Register of Historic Places 68
An anonymous reader writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, Bill Hewlett's famous garage is now on the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places. It's not clear what exactly this will do for the structure, since it's already owned by HP and it already very well restored to its original glory. Anyway, for history fans and HP fans alike, this is exciting news, akin to saving the original Edison or Marconi labs. 'At my user group's museum, where David Packard actually worked for a while when it was a military base, our collection features an HP-300A Harmonic Wave Analyzer. That's a generation or two removed from HP's garage years, but it's still fun to appreciate the connections between their first products and the computer revolution.'"
Re:Worst Comparison Ever (Score:5, Informative)
Having the first handheld programmable calculator, and the first symbolic calculator didn't hurt either.
Re:Worst Comparison Ever (Score:1, Informative)
Umm.... no. That was Joseph Swan. Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan [wikipedia.org]
I am amazed at:
a) what Americans consider is history. I live in Dollis Park, Finchley, in the road where Flower built Enigma, the first computer. There is no mark, indication or any other memorial. It's just not old enough.
b) what Americans think they invented. For some reason the Americans think they are good at science and technology - they actually seem to be very bad at blue-sky thinking. What they ARE good at is technical development of someone else's idea, marketing it and making money. Microsoft, for example, is a classic American company.
However, Americans continually lie to themselves about this; and , indeed, most other aspects of their history. They even make money out of this - here is an example: http://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everyt
Mind you, if I had the kind of history the Americans have, I wouldn't be so keen to publicise it!
Re:Worst Comparison Ever (Score:2, Informative)
- You obviously don't know much about HP. They started out making precision measurement equipment, not PCs and printers. This measurement equipment played a very important role in the development of electronics, and so behind the scenes contributed a lot to the state of electronics as it is today. The printers and PCs came much later. HP was also instrumental (heh) in the development of early calculators.
- Regardless of how much revernment you reserve for the light bulb, this is a technology that is on the verge of becoming extinct, just like the cathode ray tube. The CRT has already progressed quite far, but solid-state lighting technologies will do exactly the same to the light bulb in the next 10-20 years. There is already talk of banning incandecent bulbs (Australia, California) due to the low efficiency. In not too long, Edison's invention will join the steam engine as inventions that did mean a lot in the past, but are completely irelevant to current technology.