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Hewlett Packard has been an image and printing powerhouse for 50 years, ever since the introduction of its very first camera — the 196B, back in 1962. Of course, back in those days, the term printer referred to an old-fashioned printing press, such as the kind which are (and have always been) used to produce newspapers. Back in the early days (when Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were no doubt still grateful for being able to move their operation out of a garage), printers were called recorders, because most of what they did was record information which a computer put together on the fly. Back in those days, storage was unbelievably expensive, so information was still largely stored on paper in the same kinds of filing cabinets that have been used for hundreds of years.
HP actually had a brilliant business strategy back in those days. Before the advent of the Internet, the storage of the information that businesses needed was done strictly through physical means. This simple fact (a vast difference from the world in which we live today) meant that film and paper were the only practical, useful media on which this information could be recorded. In essence, with products such as the 680 recorder, HP was enabling businesses to store the information that they needed, back when a few megabytes of storage cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and required a massive, delicate device, which most businesses were simply not prepared to invest in having.
Back in those days, just as today, Hewlett Packard products have been all about servicing the needs of businesses. No matter what kind of information you may need to store, HP pretty much has you covered. And even though data storage and transference has gotten infinitely more efficient than the days in which everything had to either be printed or lost, HP is about more than just heritage. They are about solid results.
