HP Boise and storage nostalgia

[#1]

By Calvin Zito, @HPStorageGuy  

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic today for a few reasons - 

1. Earlier in the week, Ray Smelek - the man that brought HP to Boise - died at the age of 78.  I didn't know Ray personally but in my early days of working in HP Storage, I was in reviews with Ray and did meet him several times.  I also often saw him driving to or from work as we lived on the same side of Boise.
2. I was at the HP Boise site earlier today and saw an article about an HP disk drive manufactured in Boise that was introduced in 1986.  Not many people know that HP Storage used to be centered in Boise.
3. While at the HP Boise site, I also saw HP's first laser printer (the HP 2680A) that I used to work on when I worked in the field for HP and was also designed and manufactured in Boise.

These all have had a major impact on me personally and are very much related so I wanted to touch on each. 

Ray Smelek - HP tech giant in Boise

In the mid 70's, Bill Hewlett asked Ray to start a new printer business and find a location to do it.  Ray visited several locations in the U.S. and settled on Boise as the place.  You may not think of Boise as a tech hub of the U.S. but along with HP, Micron Technology and several other high-tech companies are here.  Also, both Boise State and the University of Idaho responded to the influx of technology companies by offering engineering programs.  If not for Ray, none of that would have happened and I wouldn't live in Boise today. 

Ray was the general manager of the printer business in Boise for over 10 years but then later became the GM of the Mass Storage Organization, which is how I got to meet him while I was working a six-month assignment in Germany when I introduced HP's first disk array to Europe back in 1992. 

The local news did a story on Ray earlier this week and former HP VP Rich Raimondi (who used to work in HP Storage and is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet) talks about Ray and bringing HP to Boise.   

1986 - HP introduces a 300 and 500MB "disc" drive

There's an area at the HP Boise site where  you can see products and memorabilia from HP's 35 plus years in Idaho.  What caught my eye was an article from the local newspaper from 1986 titled "HP unveils generation of disc drives - products called faster than predecessors".  HP was a disk drive manufacturer at the time - this was before there was RAID or array systems - and the HP 7936 and 7937 were sealed disk drives that replaced older disk drives that had removable disk platters.  I worked on these disk drives and remember installing many of them during my time as a Customer Engineer in Fullerton, California. 

Rich Raimondi managed marketing for our Disk Memory Division and is quoted in the article talking about these drives.  In 1986, the 571MB HP 7937 list price was $17,600.  Funny that today you can't give away a 500MB USB stick!  The 7937 was also just a tad bit larger than a USB stick - probably about half the size of a dishwasher.  The article also talks about HP's revenue in the first three quarters of 1986 (November through July) was $5.17B.  My, how things have changed!

HP's first laser printer, the HP 2680A

I was a Customer Engineer (the guy that fixed hardware) when HP first shipped the 2680A.  I remember going to a training class in Cupertino to learn all about it.  The 2680A had a print resolution of 180 dots per inch and a top speed of 45 pages per minute. It printed on A/A4-size fanfold paper rather than cut sheet paper. The 2680A took almost five years to develop and was the start of what has been an enormously successful partnership with Canon.

These beasts required regular preventive maintenance (PM) - and as a customer, it didn't have a toner cartridge that you could pull out and put in a new one - so when your print quality wasn't looking so good, you called your friendly CE (namely me). 

I worked at my PM's and got them down to a science.  I could get it done in about half the time as others took.  The downside of my approach was that the toner - yes, that black stuff that gets laid down on a page and fused onto the paper - would get everywhere.  I ruined more shirts doing PM's on the 2680A than I do eating spaghetti (and that little fact would surprise my wife). 

But the worst part was (sorry, this is going to be a little gross) that I would blow black toner out of my nose for a couple of days after doing a PM.  That drove me to look at doing something different at HP - I ended up going to Cal State Fullerton where I got my MBA and before I had my diploma, I moved to Boise where I've worked in HP Storage ever since. 

It all comes together

So today as Ray's memorial service starts (literally as I'm typing this), I'm thankful that Ray brought HP to Boise and that I got tired of ruining dress shirts because of the ink and toner stains - and I found my way to Boise, Idaho and HP Storage. 

[#2]

$5.7B ? pfft..

My father told me he remmebers when HP hit their first $50M (or was it $100M) revenue year (or quarter.. I forgot he mentioned it years ago). He used to fly on those corporate jets with the big wigs at HP in the early days. I don't think he was ever really a big wig himself, HP was just a smaller more personable company back then I think. He worked for them for about 30 years I think.

I too did not realize there was so much HP in Idaho, I worked with a guy who came out of HP Idaho about 12 years ago, he had a lot of horror stories to tell, such as getting in a lot of trouble for downloading a Debian ISO image when HP had all sorts of internal chargeback policies for things like bandwidth(he blew through a month's worth of bandwidth in an afternoon). It's pretty crazy how much the market, and as a result HP has changed over the past even 25 years.

When a VMware rep contacted me a year or two ago their signature in the email said "3495 Deer creek road", that address was burned into my soul as being HP for so long I instantly recognized it even though I hadn't heard/seen it in at least 15 years.

I think my father started out as an engineer somewhere in HP but later went on to sales, and lots of traveling around mexico/south america and later Asia, it's how I ended up in Beijing and Bangkok for a few years. He begged, pleaded with HP for what he said was at least a decade to open an office in Thailand, and when they finally did they offered it to him, and he ran it for a few years till the stress got to his health and he had to retire (he retired in Thailand and still lives there today).

HP had the luxury (I guess) of treating people much better "back in the day", these days not so much, I just saw a message on LinkedIn from a sales guy I know in Portland, apparently worked in the Autonomy group (I thought that was doing well?) "I was an unfortunate victim of the latest HP RIF. I am actively looking for other opportunites...."

Sad..

Despite my father working for HP for so long, we didn't get our first computer until I want to say I was about 13, maybe 12. It was an HP Vectra 286/12 with 4MB RAM, 40MB HD and HP DOS 4.0 (oh what a horrible memory hog "PAM" was, I still remember Executive Memo Maker, wrote a lot of documents in that thing, don't remember much else though).

[#3]

Oh and another bit of info, I went to high school with the grandson of the Hewletts, we were friends, well I was only in Palo Alto for my freshman year before I went back to Thailand. Never stayed in touch, writing letters was a PITA. I'll never forget what he told me when I asked him why was he taking Japanese when everyone else was taking Spanish (because it was easier). He said "My father says it's the business language of the future".

I guess a lot of people believed that back then much like many think Chinese is the language of the future. China is certainly doing it's part in trying to encourage that belief!

[#4]

Hey Nate -

I've often found myself complaining about the HP of the old days and now.  I remember being in our Fullerton office in the late 80's and they took donuts away. I was not happy.  But it was a smaller company - I think HP was less than 75,000 people when I started. 

That said, the world changed, economics changed, technology changed, investor expectations changed.  Some change at HP was needed or it would have died 15 years ago.  I think some of the previous CEO's (Mr. Hurd, Ms. Fiorina) did more damage to the culture than good. 

All that said, the bottom line for me is that it's still a pretty great place to work; in fact HP recently offered an early retirement program that I qualified for AND I got a call from a competitor asking me to come work for them but I said no because I'm really excited about the potential at HP.