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The Hewlett-Packard Archive

The Hewlett-Packard Archive

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·June 16, 2025
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computator

The HP 185A oscilloscope[1], 500 MHz bandwidth, was $2000 in their 1960 catalog[2]. That would be $22,000 in today's dollars. (The brochure doesn't say MHz but uses MC meaning megacycles.) It would be fun to compare the specs to a cheap hobbyist level scope today.

[1] https://hparchive.com/Brochures/HP-185A-Brochure.pdf

[2] https://hparchive.com/Catalogs/HP-Catalog-1960-Short-Revised...

fmajid

The actual HP archive, held by Agilent, went up in flames during a California wildfire:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/loss-of-hewlettpackard-archive-a-w...

TruffleLabs

FYI they say "Computers and calculators are not the focus of this archive website."

adrian_b

While the HP computers and calculators were well documented and their design process was also frequently described in HP Journal or other HP publications, the most valuable HP publications were about their measurement instruments.

Many of the ancient service manuals for HP measurement instruments were much better for learning electronics engineering than most university manuals.