[SBE] HP Printers vs Canon

[Stu Casteel]

my time at HP bridged the end of Bill & Dave through John Young (i.e. back
when it was an engineering company - marketing was "the next bench" Saki
and Sushi would be presented as "Warm white wine & cold raw fish")

at the point when HP broke $10B - 1/10th of that was OEM Cannon Laser
printers (the type where you bring the rolls of paper in on forklifts) -
the only HP parts were the plastic case and English manual -
coincidentally that was about a year or two before HP introduced 4
different "PC's" within a few months of each other

the 9826 - an engineers wet dream, color vector graphics, a scroll wheel
on the keyboard (predating the mouse) and "mainframe" power

there was a unix based lunch pail "luggable" plasma screened PC with built
in Ethernet (coax) and a mini "thinkjet" - just the thing to hack banks

the calculator division got in to the act with a full QWERTY chicklet
keyboard with a nifty mag strip read/write (took a practiced hand)

and the last one was the "touch screen" (the infamous "caterpillar
butterfly commercials) originally only available with green phosphors -
the only application initially offered was a Rolodex that you could scroll
through and would dial your phone

there was no way to transfer a single byte of data between any of them!

around this time the MBA's started infiltrating (Stanford being literally
next door) and in time (after John Young - then Lou Platt) started to take
over and "the HP way" went out the door - I had one meeting with Carly and
 followed it out the door as well - loved my HP plotters and LJ1, had my
share of Compaq PC's and HP laptops but once Carly shifted the entire
corporate focus from core engineering & medical to consumer it has been
downhill ever since