50 Years In Tech: When HP Led Desktop and Mobile Computing – Info News

by Jean-Louis Gassée

One upon a time, HP rose to dominance in the world of desktop and mobile computers. I was lucky to join the company just as it started its ascent. This was the beginning of 50 happy years in the amazing tech world.

“Great, we’ll get back to you.”

With encouraging smiles, my two bosses-to-be, HP France CEO Pierre Ardichvili and Sales Manager Gilles Bastien, concluded the job interview.

I had a better idea:

“Why don’t I step out in the hallway while you discuss your decision and then call me back in?”

The hard-core door-to-door sales experience I described in the previous Psychosocial Moratorium Monday Note had taught me to never take a dilatory answer. It paid off; my impudence was met with a pleased chuckle:

“Boy, you’re salesy! … Awright, call Gilles at 4pm…”

Two weeks later, I was in Geneva for product training. The HP 9100A was an engineer’s dream:

As I sat in the training room, I contemplated the convergence of opportunity and preparation (a.k.a. luck) that had brought me to this tech industry trailhead.

After my escape from the hospitality industry, I landed in a Paris suburb just down the street from electronics giant Thomson-CSF. The local newsstands, which carried hard-to-find professional magazines such as Electronique Industrielle were heavenly reading rooms for this long-time geek.

One May 1968 day, I saw a tiny ad in Le Monde (Frances’s NYT). Hewlett-Packard was looking for sales people to introduce a “revolutionary” product to the French market. Hewlett-who? I doubt Le Monde readers knew anything about the company at the time — but I did. The stories and ads in Electronique Industrielle had prepared me well.

My picaresque schooling didn’t include résumé writing. Instead, I sent a two-page letter to HP explaining why they should hire me — and scored an interview. To this day, I marvel over my good luck and the impact it has had on the following fifty years of my family’s life.

I inhaled everything about the 9100A, its technology (which was quite strange in retrospect, especially its two ROMs), the programming techniques, the applications. I started reading manuals in bed on Saturday mornings, a habit that served me well with colleagues and customers.

Kléber Beauvillain, a senior measuring instruments sales gent, took me under his wing as he visited some choice customers. These customers, who treated Beauvillain as a friend, were equally enthusiastic about the machine and showed me ingenious techniques to overcome the 9100A’s limitations with its mere 196 program steps and 16 storage registers. (Years later, Beauvillain became the head of HP France, a position he held for close to twenty years, and, in 1991, he helped secure our first investor at Be.)

I quickly put together a sales team of like-minded techies who pitched the 9100A to engineers, mathematicians, and physicists across France. As part of my standard sales pitch, I completely disassembled the product and then put it back together as I lovingly described each component. (Years later, I used this fun and effective demo technique for the Mac Portable introduction.)

Our prospective customers loved it… but sales weren’t always easy. The French government’s Plan Calcul drove public funds towards native computing technology and prevented state-subsidized entities from buying our products. But, as the saying goes, impossible n’est pas Français: French culture sees laws and regulations as mere challenges to creativity.

For example, the techies at Nord Aviation, an Airbus precursor, couldn’t be seen using the forbidden machine, so they ordered a set of parts that, when re-assembled, looked remarkably like a “genuine” 9100A. When I came to visit the happy rule-breakers, they led me to a toilet, unlocked a mysterious door, and, laughing at their cleverness, showed me their “homegrown” machine, sitting atop a commode filled with plaster (of Paris, naturally).

When I visited the home office, it didn’t take long to see that HP France had developed its own libertine version of the gentle, civilized culture so accurately depicted by co-founder David Packard in his 1995 book The HP Way. In the turbulent, post-1968 times, where the law of the day was Forbidding Is Forbidden, HP France was what we’d now call a “den of fraternization”. I’ll have to censor myself, as I did for the memories in the previous Monday Note, but I will recall the farcical situation in which a woman, her lover, and her mother-in-law sat at adjacent desks in an open space office. Or how a crying spouse waved a pistol (unloaded, we later found out) at the receptionist, demanding she return the husband she had stolen. Just one problem: It was the wrong receptionist. The intended target was enjoying a relaxing “lunch break” in a nearby hotel.

I had my own caper. Desperate to land the job at HP, I had suggested that I had completed my military service when, in reality, I merely had a deferment. When pressed to return to the Army, I used the pharmacological knowledge I had acquired as a drug “detailer” to create symptoms that got me into the psychiatric ward of Paris’ Val-de-Grâce military hospital. It was an interesting scene where inmates covertly look at one another trying to assess who was really crazy and who was merely trying to duck their military obligations.

After a short time in a padded cell, I was free to walk around the hospital where I received visits from my boss Gilles Bastien (who was silently impressed by my canard) and from team members who brought me my mail. Thanks to a mock doctor’s sticker on the windshield that fooled the guard, my wife was able to deliver my Peugeot 504, allowing me to leave the grounds, attend an important trade show or visit a customer, and be back, saluted by the guard, in time for the evening roll call.

After a while, the docs decided that the Army didn’t need another troublemaker, recommended I seek therapy, which I did a few years later, and set me on my way. I was free — and not fired for my misdemeanor, one of the many reasons for my gratitude to Gilles.

Just as I was getting out, HP’s personal computing business exploded.

In 1970, HP had made the bold decision to use discrete logic in the 16-bit instruction set for its desktop machines (no 16-bit microprocessor back then), and proceeded to roll out a trio of industry-shaking devices. In 1971, the 9810 followed the key-per-function of the 9100, with important improvements such as plug-in modules and considerably more storage. In 1972, the 9820 surprised everyone with a full algebraic language, a powerful incitement to write clever, impenetrable one-line programs, a geek’s delight. The 9830, a machine running Basic, came later the same year, sporting a better printer and magnetic storage. A hard disk was also on the horizon.

Covering three distinct computing styles and price ranges, HP completely obliterated its competition.

That wasn’t all.

Soon after the 9100A introduction, Bill Hewlett insisted on a handheld version that would fit in an engineer’s shirt pocket. The high-pressure development yielded the HP-35, a machine that surprised everyone, HP included, when it sold about ten times more than forecasted. General Electric alone ordered 20,000 machines. You had to be there to experience the HP-35 shock.

HP promptly and hungrily set out to conquer the product category, creating an obscenely successful financial version, the $395 HP-80 (which is said to have contributed to the majority of HP’s profits in the difficult early 70’s) and the programmable HP-65 with its magnetic stripe reader for external storage.

Mobile computing and desktop machines…by 1974, HP was king of Personal Computing. (See the lovingly curated hpmuseum.org for an epic list of HP machines.)

Buoyed by my enthusiasm for the product and my sales team’s good numbers, late 1973, I was promoted to a sales management position at HP’s European HQ in Meyrin, Switzerland. I came to regret the upward move. As opposed to the colorful field life I enjoyed in France, this was a mundane bureaucratic position that left me bored and distraught. The constant travel to other HP offices precipitated the end of an already problematic marriage.

Fortunately, it was at this time that an HP alumnus put me in touch with a Data General VP who was looking for someone to turn around the company’s French subsidiary…food for a future Monday Note.

Next week, I’ll attempt to explain HP’s fall from its pinnacle.

— JLG@mondaynote.com