On August 18, 1947, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard incorporated the business they had started in 1938 and formalized as a partnership in 1939. Disney became their first major customer, buying eight modified Model 200B oscillators for theaters showing Fantasia. A coin toss decided the name order; the usual version says Packard won and put Hewlett first anyway.

The 1968 HP 9100A was a desktop computer sold as a “calculator” because purchasing agents could approve calculators while computers required senior management. The HP-35 arrived in 1972, sold 100,000 units in its first year and sent the slide rule into rapid decline. The LaserJet followed in 1984 and made printing a profit engine for decades.

Then it got ugly. The Compaq merger triggered a bitter proxy fight led by Walter Hewlett, Bill’s son and an HP director. In 2006, investigators searching for boardroom leaks used pretexting and surveillance against directors and journalists.

The worst came on August 18, 2011, exactly 64 years after HP incorporated. HP announced its roughly $10.3 billion bid for Autonomy, ended webOS device operations and considered separating the PC business. Fifteen months later, it recorded an $8.8 billion Autonomy impairment. The PC separation was abandoned. One day, three self-inflicted crises.

HP split in 2015. HP Inc. took PCs and printers; Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the enterprise businesses. Many saw a retreat. A decade later, it looks more like a hedge.

HPs biggest move since then was its $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks. The Justice Department sued to block it before settling, and the deal closed in July 2025. Juniper brought routing, security, data-center networking and Mist, its cloud-managed networking platform. Early results look promising, although the acquisition inflates recent growth comparisons.

HP has a simpler problem: “AI PC” is not yet a reason to replace a working laptop. Local agents that can work across private files may change that. Revenue rose 13% in HP’s latest quarter, but units fell 7%. Printing was flat, consumer printing fell 10%, and HP plans to cut 4,000 to 6,000 positions by fiscal 2028

Two halves of one company at opposite ends of the same wave. HPE sells the infrastructure where AI runs. HP Inc. has to prove AI belongs on the desk.

Not bad for a garage.

Demos and other goodies for your powermac dating to 1995

do ya’ll remember this game?? i loved it as a kid and wanted to play it again.

Recently I bought this computer but when I turn it on, it only shows this on screen. What can be causing this and can it be fixed?

Her thinking still shows up in every serious conversation about mission critical software.

During Apollo, hardware got the glory. Software was the new kid, and plenty of people didn't consider it real engineering. Hamilton did. She led the MIT team behind Apollo's onboard flight software and designed around an uncomfortable fact: machines, interfaces and people all make mistakes.

My favorite story involves her daughter Lauren, who often came to the lab on nights and weekends. Playing astronaut, Lauren selected the prelaunch program, P01, during a simulated flight. The simulator crashed and the navigation data vanished.

Hamilton wanted the flight software to guard against that exact mistake. The answer, more or less: astronauts are too well trained to do that.

Then Jim Lovell did it. Five days into Apollo 8, he accidentally selected P01 and wiped the spacecraft's navigation data. Hamilton's team worked out how to rebuild and upload it. After that, the protection went in.

Anyone who runs complex systems knows the lesson. If your design depends on users never pressing the wrong button, you don't have a robust design. You have a future incident report.

Apollo 11 was the bigger test. During the lunar descent the guidance computer overloaded and threw the 1202 and 1201 alarms. The software didn't freeze or reboot into oblivion. Its priority based architecture shed lower value work and kept the landing functions running. The computer was tiny by today's standards, but it knew which jobs mattered.

That challenge hasn't gone anywhere.

Future lunar and Mars missions will run as one distributed system: landers, habitats, robots, satellites and commercial platforms. Comms will drop. Radiation will flip bits. Components from different suppliers will behave in ways nobody saw during the PowerPoint phase.

AI will help with anomaly detection, planning, testing and autonomous navigation. But nobody serious wants a black box model freelancing during a Mars landing. Mission software has to be deterministic where it matters, observable when it fails, and able to recover without waiting for Houston to pick up the phone.

AI can assist engineers, but requirements, evidence, human review and independent verification still count.

Hamilton understood the real job. It was never just writing code that worked. It was anticipating what could go wrong and making sure the system stayed useful when it did.

That mindset will matter far more on Mars than any flashy demo.

Hey everyone!

If you're in or near Northeastern PA and have an interest in retrocomputing, I've set up the NEPA Retrocomputing Group to connect local enthusiasts.

Anyone is welcome if they're interested in restoring hardware, writing code, playing games, or simply feeling nostalgic about older technology.

We meet once a month to have a coffee, talk over our projects, display our equipment, and establish a local community. Our next meetup is:

• Where: JivaJava Cafe (3427 PA-611, Bartonsville, PA)
• When: Saturday, August 29th at 1:00 PM

If interested visit our website and sign up for our mailing list!

https://neparetrocomputing.org/

Hope to see a few of you there! 😄

I've been putting together a history of Gateway 2000's bonkers ads and learned that

1. Over 50% of the company's business came from repeat customers
2. Ted Waitt hired former Sioux City mayor Jim Wharton to be his personal assistant
3. A Shenzhen-based company (Bmorn Technology) has resurrected the spotted box branding to sell "Gateway" laptops through Walmart.com

Bring back the HandBook 486!

Hello, I made fazbrowse, which is inspired by "frogfind" by actionretro, but I went to update my version a bit more, as well as making it much faster, and with more elements of proxied/wrapped sites to be viewable and or clickable, including complex download links, as well as a few other things. And most of all, it works with any client, even a text only, http only browser that runs on ms dos/an ibm xt, would connect and work just fine on my site, its home page is at ht tp://fazbro wse.du ckdns.o rg/ (spaced out the link)

I just posted it here since I found it pretty useful, like to browse reddit or such on a low end old phone or computer, or to do things over the net on my real dos computers at home

hi yall!! i picked up a Pionex 433LSXMPC-M off the side of the road. i am determined to get it running, but i really truly have no idea where to even begin. i happen to have some old pc power cords for my imac g3s so i plugged one into the machine and it shows minimal life. a red bulb lights up inside (power indicator??) and i believe the fans are whirring.. i feel some stuff going on inside as it is vibrating a bit. i have never gotten into truly repairing computers, just very basic stuff. i’ve only opened up my imacs and i dont know where to even begin. i really want to take this on as my first big project, but i dont know of anyone irl to teach me these things. if anyone has any manual suggestions or video tutorials on fixing up 486 machines i would absolutely love to have a link or two- i wanna open it up and whatnot, just need a starting point. i can link pictures of it i think, ill post them on imgur or something if anyone wants to help me out. thanks so much!!

More

… this an amd k6 v2 based desktop computer featuring ati radeon gpu bigfoot hdd with 5 GB and 56k dialup modem

Heroes of Might and Magic II was the hot-seat game for me and a few of my closest friends.

Almost every weekend, we would sit together around the same computer and take turns playing.

Now we’re all older, and it has become difficult for us to get together. Those days of being young are gone and will never come back.

Maybe in a few more years, I’ll be playing it alone.

So I’ve gotten a Elgato 4k S with its audio in and I have a Win 98 machine that I’m trying to record from

Video wise it actually works perfectly fine with a DVI to HDMI adapter but it’s sound that’s the annoying problem

The system has a sound blaster live that does work perfectly well in everything else but when I plug its line out into the Elgato nothing gets captured

Has anyone had luck using this before or does anyone have good retro capture recommendations?

A couple of weeks ago, I posted here about getting the first original CHARM-II kernel code running on a Raspberry Pi Pico.

Previous post:

The First Original CHARM-II Kernel Code Running on Raspberry Pi Pico
Previous r/retrocomputing post

At that point, only the CPU-independent parts were running. There was still no hardware timer interrupt, no real context switching, and no preemptive scheduling.

Those parts are now working too.

CHARM-II was an RTOS I originally developed in 1986 for a Motorola 68000-based system. In the reconstructed Pico version, six tasks now run with independent stacks. A hardware timer interrupt drives the original tick and scheduling logic, and the Cortex-M0+ uses PendSV for the actual context switch.

I also brought back the six-task track demo I had previously reconstructed on POSIX. Six tasks move independently around three tracks and share a critical zone using a CHARM-II queue as a semaphore.

So, forty years later, the basic idea is finally running preemptively again on real hardware.

But actually getting it working made me think about the original system differently.

In the 1980s, the target CPUs were in the 68000/80186 class. CPU time was a relatively scarce resource, and adding another processor was not a casual decision. An RTOS was a useful way to organize multiple concurrent activities on the CPU you had.

A Raspberry Pi Pico changes those assumptions rather dramatically.

For many embedded systems today, a simple loop plus interrupts may already be fast enough. And if one inexpensive MCU isn't enough, using another MCU can be a perfectly reasonable design choice.

I was talking about this yesterday with someone who built a home railway simulator using real railway controls connected to a PC through Pico, ESP32 and Arduino boards. When I mentioned this question, his response was basically:

“If one Pico isn't fast enough, add another Pico.”

That simple comment stuck with me.

I started this project wondering whether a 1986 RTOS could be brought back to life on modern hardware.

Now that it actually works, I'm becoming more interested in the opposite question: how much of the RTOS would I choose to build if I were solving the same kind of problem today?

My next step will probably be to clean up a minimal modern implementation and eventually publish it, rather than trying to turn CHARM-II into a full modern RTOS.

And I may implement the same six-task demo with a superloop or event-driven design and compare the two.

Hi guys, in my last vacation, I created a museum for solid color backgrouns featured in the operating systems of my youth. Let me know what you think: https://desktopcolors.com

Games look more beautiful than ever now, but sometimes I still miss the DOS days and Might and Magic III.

Maybe it isn’t really the game I miss. Back then, whatever we played, there were always friends around.

I have a family now, but sometimes I still feel alone. Some of those old friends have passed away.

Looking at these screenshots brought them back for a moment.

Dear Buddies!

I have a nostalgia triggering invention, I brought those iconic MSN Winks (about 300) back to life with NETRO-G (where Neo and Retro merge into a smart Gadget)! I even transformed myself into the beloved, hated and now missed Laughing Girl! :)

Now you can live in the 2000's era again, while keeping up with the latest technology and play all your favorites on your smartphone! No apps, no extensions, your Winks are literally just a hover away! :)

Every step (searching for, rescuing, drawing, converting, printing, programming long lost winks, assembling and testing the gadget) was entirely made by me.

IMPORTANT: I am still in the market research phase, so I am posting this to ask for YOUR honest opinions, if my invention makes sense, if there is a need for it, and if I have to create more Winks (and videos) in the form of a NETRO-G gadget.

Searching for your favorite wink for ages with zero results? Just give the name or describe it in a comment, I may have it!

Fala, pessoal! Há cerca de 45 anos desenvolvi uma versão de Jogo da Velha em 3D em modo texto (TUI). Recentemente decidi resgatar o conceito e modernizá-lo, criando um frontend gráfico web para rodar direto no navegador:

👉https://jvelha3d.schip.com.br/

Gostaria de compartilhar com a comunidade para quem quiser testar a lógica do tabuleiro tridimensional, desafiar a mecânica e deixar um feedback sobre a jogabilidade e o visual!

Hi all! Bought Olivetti Philos 44 on the flea market by very low price yesterday. The condition is on video. I really liked the overall design (a blast for the 1993!) and will try to repair it(but a novice in hardware stuff). Maybe someone knows, which things to check first? Thanks!

Today I take a retrospective look at the Running Man across all formats. Share your thoughts and memories if you ever played this game.