There is a shrine inside Hewlett-Packard’s headquarters in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley. At one edge of HP’s research building, two interconnected rooms with worn midcentury furniture, vacant for decades, are carefully preserved. From these offices, William Hewlett and David Packard led HP’s engineers to invent breakthrough products, like the 40-pound, typewriter-size programmable calculator launched in 1968.
Hewlett-Packard will take a big step toward shaking up its own troubled business and the entire computing industry next year when it releases an operating system for an exotic new computer.
The company’s research division is working to create a computer HP calls The Machine. It is meant to be the first of a new dynasty of computers that are much more energy-efficient and powerful than current products. HP aims to achieve its goals primarily by using a new kind of computer memory instead of the two types that computers use today. The current approach originated in the 1940s, and the need to shuttle data back and forth between the two types of memory limits performance.
This morning on an investor call, Hewlett-Packard officially addressed its plans to split into two companies, HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.
The split came as a slight surprise to investors. In 2011 when the company first considered dividing into two companies, CEO and President Meg Whitman said breaking the company up didn’t make sense.
Hewlett-Packard, a pioneer in business computers, plans to break into two parts as it separates its personal-computer and printer businesses from its technology services.
As early as Monday, the tech giant plans to announce the breakup, first reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by other media and a person familiar with the matter. CEO Meg Whitman, who has led a multiyear restructuring, would serve as chairman of the PC and printer business and CEO of the separate company, which would be chaired by HP's current lead independent director Patricia Russo, according to several published reports.
A new kind of three-dimensional display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen, and viewers can walk around them and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like walking around a real object.
The screen is made by modifying a conventional liquid-crystal display (LCD), the same kind of display found in most phones, laptops, tablets, and televisions. Researchers hope these 3-D systems will enable new kinds of user interfaces for portable electronics, gaming, and data visualization. The work, carried out at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, relies on complex physics to make 3-D displays that are as thin as half a millimeter.
