{"id":704,"date":"2026-09-06T15:22:57","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T18:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-hp\/"},"modified":"2026-09-08T08:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T11:29:11","slug":"a-historia-da-hp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.linuxpro.com.br\/en\/2026\/09\/a-historia-da-hp\/","title":{"rendered":"The history of HP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mascote<\/p>\n

Before \u201cSilicon Valley\u201d 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<\/strong>. This is the history of HP \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

1939: the garage and the coin toss<\/h2>\n

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard<\/strong> started with US$ 538 and a rented garage on Addison Avenue \u2014 now a landmark recognized as the \u201cbirthplace of Silicon Valley\u201d. The order of the names? Decided by a coin toss<\/strong>: Hewlett-Packard rather than Packard-Hewlett. The first product was the HP 200A audio oscillator<\/strong>, cheaper and more stable than the competition \u2014 and the first major customer was Disney<\/strong>, which bought eight units to calibrate the sound for the film Fantasia<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The \u201cHP Way\u201d<\/h2>\n

Over the following decades, HP grew by selling excellent measuring instruments \u2014 oscilloscopes, signal generators, analyzers. But its most influential export was cultural: the HP Way<\/strong>, a management style that was radical for its time \u2014 trust in employees, flexible hours, profit sharing, open doors, and the rule of \u201cmanagement by walking around\u201d. Much of what Silicon Valley sells as its own culture was born there.<\/p>\n

From calculator to computer<\/h2>\n

In 1968<\/strong>, HP launched the 9100A<\/strong>, a programmable \u201cdesktop calculator\u201d that the press called a personal computer<\/em> \u2014 possibly the first commercial use of the term. In 1972<\/strong> came the death blow to the slide rule: the HP-35<\/strong>, the world's first pocket scientific calculator. That same year the company entered minicomputers with the HP 3000, and during the decade of the \u201980 developed its own RISC architecture, PA-RISC<\/strong>, and its own Unix, HP-UX<\/strong> \u2014 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).<\/p>\n

1984: the ink empire<\/h2>\n

If HP made only printers, it would already be a giant. In 1984<\/strong> it launched the LaserJet<\/strong> \u2014 the first successful desktop laser printer \u2014 and the ThinkJet, a pioneer of thermal inkjet printing. The \u201ccheap printer, expensive ink\u201d business model became one of technology's most enduring profit machines. For us Linux users, it left a curious and positive legacy: HPLIP<\/strong>, HP's official open-source driver, historically made HP printers the most penguin-friendly.<\/p>\n

The 2000 decade: mergers, scandals, and disasters<\/h2>\n

The modern era was turbulent. In 1999<\/strong>, measuring instruments \u2014 the original soul \u2014 spun off as Agilent<\/strong> (now Keysight). In 2002<\/strong>, Carly Fiorina bought Compaq<\/strong> for US$ 19 billion in a merger opposed even by the founders' heirs. In 2006<\/strong>, a scandal involving spying on the company's own board brought down the chairwoman. And in 2011<\/strong> came the year of chaos: HP killed TouchPad and webOS<\/strong> weeks after launch and bought Britain's Autonomy for US$ 11 billion<\/strong> \u2014 only to write down US$ 8,8 billion a year later, alleging accounting fraud. The case generated lawsuits for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

2015: one HP becomes two<\/h2>\n

In November 2015<\/strong>, the company split in half: HP Inc.<\/strong> kept PCs and printers (and the historic HPQ ticker), while Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)<\/strong> took servers, storage, networking, and services. HPE continued buying heavyweights from the Unix\/HPC world \u2014 SGI in 2016, Cray in 2019<\/strong> \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

HP and Linux<\/h2>\n

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 \u2014 for a reason nobody expects: the printer.<\/p>\n

HP-UX and the sinking of Itanium<\/h3>\n

In the years after 1980 HP created the PA-RISC<\/strong> architecture and, on top of it, HP-UX<\/strong> \u2014 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<\/strong>, a 64-bit architecture that was supposed to bury x86.<\/p>\n

It did not. AMD64 won, Itanium became an industry joke \u2014 \u201cItanic\u201d \u2014 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<\/strong> \u2014 the court required it to keep porting while HP sold the platform \u2014 and in 2016 HP won US$ 3 billion<\/strong> in damages.<\/p>\n

Winning the lawsuit did not save the architecture. Support for HP-UX 11i v3 and Itanium-based Integrity servers ended on 31 December 2025<\/strong>. That ended HP's proprietary Unix lineage. What the company sells in servers today runs Linux \u2014 from rack-mounted ProLiant to exascale supercomputers.<\/p>\n

Why HP printers are the ones that work on Linux<\/h3>\n

This is the practical part, and the reason HP has a good reputation among desktop Linux users.<\/p>\n

Since 2001 HP has maintained HPLIP<\/strong> \u2014 HP Linux Imaging and Printing<\/em> \u2014, a complete set of printing and scanning drivers, open source<\/strong> (GPL, MIT, and BSD) and developed by the company itself. It is not a driver abandoned on an FTP server: version 3.26.4<\/strong> was released in May 2026 and the package covers about 3.490 models<\/strong> of printers, scanners, and fax machines.<\/p>\n

Compare this with competitors\u2019 track records \u2014 outdated binary drivers, scanners that never worked, multifunction printers that print but will not scan \u2014 and it is easy to understand why the recommendation to \u201cbuy HP\u201d has circulated in Linux forums for twenty years.<\/p>\n

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

# Debian e Ubuntu\nsudo apt install -y hplip hplip-gui\n\n# Fedora e RHEL\nsudo dnf install -y hplip hplip-gui\n\n# adicionar o dispositivo (assistente gr\u00e1fico)\nhp-setup -i          # modo interativo no terminal\nhp-setup            # interface gr\u00e1fica\n\n# diagnosticar quando algo n\u00e3o vai\nhp-check -t\nhp-toolbox          # n\u00edvel de tinta, limpeza, alinhamento<\/code><\/pre>\n
For scanning, HPLIP integrates with SANE \u2014 scanimage -L<\/code> lists the device and any graphical frontend works. And for recent models, often even that is unnecessary: the IPP Everywhere<\/strong> standard makes the printer work without any driver.<\/p>\n
ProLiant, iLO, and the supercomputer<\/h3>\n
On the server side, the Compaq legacy gave HPE the ProLiant<\/strong> line, present in practically every data center \u2014 and iLO<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n
And at the top of the scale: the supercomputers Frontier<\/strong> and El Capitan<\/strong>, the first to cross the exascale barrier, are HPE Cray machines. Both run Linux, like practically the entire TOP500<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Timeline<\/h2>\n