The history of HP

Before “Silicon Valley” existed, there was a wooden garage in Palo Alto. There, in 1939, two recent Stanford engineering graduates founded the company that would define the model for every startup that followed: Hewlett-Packard. This is the history of HP — from garage to giant, from the calculators that retired the slide rule to printers in every office, through disastrous mergers and the split that divided it in two.

1939: the garage and the coin toss

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started with US$ 538 and a rented garage on Addison Avenue — now a landmark recognized as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley”. The order of the names? Decided by a coin toss: Hewlett-Packard rather than Packard-Hewlett. The first product was the HP 200A audio oscillator, cheaper and more stable than the competition — and the first major customer was Disney, which bought eight units to calibrate the sound for the film Fantasia.

The “HP Way”

Over the following decades, HP grew by selling excellent measuring instruments — oscilloscopes, signal generators, analyzers. But its most influential export was cultural: the HP Way, a management style that was radical for its time — trust in employees, flexible hours, profit sharing, open doors, and the rule of “management by walking around”. Much of what Silicon Valley sells as its own culture was born there.

From calculator to computer

In 1968, HP launched the 9100A, a programmable “desktop calculator” that the press called a personal computer — possibly the first commercial use of the term. In 1972 came the death blow to the slide rule: the HP-35, the world's first pocket scientific calculator. That same year the company entered minicomputers with the HP 3000, and during the decade of the ’80 developed its own RISC architecture, PA-RISC, and its own Unix, HP-UX — which ran mission-critical workloads in banks and telecom companies for decades (and whose official end of life came only in the decade beginning in 2020).

1984: the ink empire

If HP made only printers, it would already be a giant. In 1984 it launched the LaserJet — the first successful desktop laser printer — and the ThinkJet, a pioneer of thermal inkjet printing. The “cheap printer, expensive ink” business model became one of technology's most enduring profit machines. For us Linux users, it left a curious and positive legacy: HPLIP, HP's official open-source driver, historically made HP printers the most penguin-friendly.

The 2000 decade: mergers, scandals, and disasters

The modern era was turbulent. In 1999, measuring instruments — the original soul — spun off as Agilent (now Keysight). In 2002, Carly Fiorina bought Compaq for US$ 19 billion in a merger opposed even by the founders' heirs. In 2006, a scandal involving spying on the company's own board brought down the chairwoman. And in 2011 came the year of chaos: HP killed TouchPad and webOS weeks after launch and bought Britain's Autonomy for US$ 11 billion — only to write down US$ 8,8 billion a year later, alleging accounting fraud. The case generated lawsuits for more than a decade.

2015: one HP becomes two

In November 2015, the company split in half: HP Inc. kept PCs and printers (and the historic HPQ ticker), while Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) took servers, storage, networking, and services. HPE continued buying heavyweights from the Unix/HPC world — SGI in 2016, Cray in 2019 — and today builds some of the planet's largest supercomputers (Frontier and El Capitan, the first exascale systems, are HPE Cray machines running Linux). On the HP Inc. side, ProBooks and Spectres remain among the world's best-selling laptops.

HP and Linux

No company in this series has such a divided relationship with free software. On one hand, HP spent thirty years defending a proprietary Unix that has just died. On the other, it is the manufacturer that treats Linux users best worldwide — for a reason nobody expects: the printer.

HP-UX and the sinking of Itanium

In the years after 1980 HP created the PA-RISC architecture and, on top of it, HP-UX — its own Unix, which supported banking, telecom, and ERP for decades. In the years after 2000, together with Intel, it bet everything on the successor: Itanium, a 64-bit architecture that was supposed to bury x86.

It did not. AMD64 won, Itanium became an industry joke — “Itanic” — and the platform languished for twenty years. The most famous battle was legal: in 2011 Oracle announced it would stop porting its database to Itanium, HP sued, Oracle lost in 2012 — the court required it to keep porting while HP sold the platform — and in 2016 HP won US$ 3 billion in damages.

Winning the lawsuit did not save the architecture. Support for HP-UX 11i v3 and Itanium-based Integrity servers ended on 31 December 2025. That ended HP's proprietary Unix lineage. What the company sells in servers today runs Linux — from rack-mounted ProLiant to exascale supercomputers.

Why HP printers are the ones that work on Linux

This is the practical part, and the reason HP has a good reputation among desktop Linux users.

Since 2001 HP has maintained HPLIP — HP Linux Imaging and Printing —, a complete set of printing and scanning drivers, open source (GPL, MIT, and BSD) and developed by the company itself. It is not a driver abandoned on an FTP server: version 3.26.4 was released in May 2026 and the package covers about 3.490 models of printers, scanners, and fax machines.

Compare this with competitors’ track records — outdated binary drivers, scanners that never worked, multifunction printers that print but will not scan — and it is easy to understand why the recommendation to “buy HP” has circulated in Linux forums for twenty years.

In practice, you usually do not need to do anything: the distribution already includes HPLIP and detects the printer automatically. When it does not:

# Debian e Ubuntu
sudo apt install -y hplip hplip-gui

# Fedora e RHEL
sudo dnf install -y hplip hplip-gui

# adicionar o dispositivo (assistente gráfico)
hp-setup -i          # modo interativo no terminal
hp-setup            # interface gráfica

# diagnosticar quando algo não vai
hp-check -t
hp-toolbox          # nível de tinta, limpeza, alinhamento

For scanning, HPLIP integrates with SANE — scanimage -L lists the device and any graphical frontend works. And for recent models, often even that is unnecessary: the IPP Everywhere standard makes the printer work without any driver.

ProLiant, iLO, and the supercomputer

On the server side, the Compaq legacy gave HPE the ProLiant line, present in practically every data center — and iLO, the remote management controller that set the standard competitors copied (Dell with iDRAC, Lenovo with XCC). If you have ever powered on a server over the network while it was physically off, thank that chip.

And at the top of the scale: the supercomputers Frontier and El Capitan, the first to cross the exascale barrier, are HPE Cray machines. Both run Linux, like practically the entire TOP500.

Timeline

• 1939 — Hewlett and Packard found HP in the Palo Alto garage; HP 200A oscillator (Disney buys 8 for Fantasia)
• 1968 — HP 9100A, the programmable “desktop calculator”
• 1972 — HP-35, the first pocket scientific calculator
• The 1980 decade — PA-RISC architecture and its own Unix, HP-UX
• 1984 — LaserJet and ThinkJet: the printing empire
• 1999 — Measuring instruments spin off as Agilent
• 2002 — Compaq acquisition (US$ 19 billion)
• 2011 — End of TouchPad/webOS; Autonomy acquisition (US$ 11 billion)
• 2015 — Split into HP Inc. (PCs/printers) and HPE (servers/services)
• 2016–2019 — HPE buys SGI and Cray
• The 2020 decade — HPE Cray exascale supercomputers (Frontier, El Capitan) running Linux

The legacy

For the Linux and infrastructure world, HP is everywhere: the ProLiant servers (a Compaq legacy) are in every data center, iLO set the remote management standard, and supercomputing today is practically synonymous with HPE Cray + Linux. But its greatest legacy may be symbolic: every startup that begins in a garage, with an engineering culture and flat management, is — knowingly or not — imitating two guys from Palo Alto in 1939.

Complete the chips and hardware trilogy with Intel’s history — HP's partner on Itanium —, the history of AMD, whose AMD64 won that contest, the history of NVIDIA and the history of Dell.