A Visit I Will Never Forget

I've long believed that if you are going to be a member of a profession, you should know something about the history of your field -- how it began, what some of the key developments were, where those developments took place, and who some of the important players were. Not everyone feels this way, but my thinking has always been that I would be better equipped to move my field forward if I knew at least something about how the current state of affairs had come to be. A related idea is that no matter what you may accomplish, you are in one way or another standing on the shoulders of those who came before. You should know who those shoulders belong to and where they hung out. ??

And so as a young person interested in science, I read a bunch of biographies of famous scientists and inventors. In college I took a class on the history of technology, where we read about Bell Labs and the invention of the transistor, and Xerox PARC and the innovations they pioneered (and famously failed to capitalize on). As my interests coalesced toward electrical engineering, I learned about important companies and their leaders, including IBM and Thomas J. Watson, Intel and Andy Grove, and Hewlett-Packard and its founders. Further to my HP learning, while we didn't have their gear in our labs at school, I did encounter some HP products at a summer job in Chicago. I also read quite a few articles about the company in various business publications. How Bill and Dave came together and that garage in Palo Alto really made an impression on me. Wouldn't it be something if I could see that place for myself some day?

Fast forward to March 1996, nearly 10 years into my career with HP. A colleague and I were in San Jose conducting usability testing of the oscilloscope that became the first Infiniium. We had about a year of development left, and believed we had a winner taking shape. But it was not without risk, because the product was so different from anything else then on the market. It used Windows rather than a real-time embedded OS, had no front panel softkeys, and featured a mouse and a more computer-like GUI. So we did two rounds of worldwide usability testing to validate the things users liked and change the things they didn't. The full story of the Infiniium's development (and its name, which was originally spelled "Infinium") is quite a rich one and can perhaps be the focus of a future article.

The usability testing was done with working engineers, so we held the sessions at 5:30 PM and 7 PM on two successive weekdays. We did a debrief on the first day's sessions that evening, and then met again the following morning to consider any tweaks in the test protocol. We made a few small adjustments and then found ourselves unexpectedly free for most of the afternoon. What do do? I suggested we go see the garage, as neither of us had ever been there. We found the address, got a map (no Google Maps or iPhone back then), and drove over. We couldn't go inside the building, but the historical marker was there, and we walked around the outside a bit, just taking in the scene and reflecting on the significance of the place. Then we talked about all that had happened in our industry and across the broader engineering profession since 1939. We hoped our new product could advance what Bill and Dave had started six decades earlier. It was a special experience for us, and we were both glad we made the visit.

Then we got back into the car and something remarkable occurred. I turned on the radio, and at that very moment the announcer broke in and said "Stanford University Hospital has announced that David Packard, co-founder of the company that bears his name and a Silicon Valley legend, passed away at their facility yesterday." We were stunned, and sat there speechless while the announcer went on to discuss the funeral plans. I turned to my colleague and said "I'm not generally a believer in such things, but it sure seems we were meant to be here at this place, at this time." It probably sounds strange, but for several years after that I wasn't able to articulate this experience to other people without getting emotional. My colleague said it was the same for him.

The next day the San Jose Mercury News published a special section about Dave and all he had done -- with Bill and their company, with his philanthropy, and with his public service. He was born and raised in Colorado and had made many impacts there, so those of us living in Colorado felt an additional connection to him. Many stories and recollections about him were shared by people from around the world. And I have to believe more than a few people found themselves reflecting anew on the garage and its significance for so many lives over the years. My colleague and I flew back to Colorado Springs, and resolved that since we were some of the many people who had inherited a few embers from Dave's torch, we would do everything we could to keep the flame of innovation in our field going. The whole team working on the new family of scopes pounded extremely hard on the remaining features and the extensive QA over the next several quarters. The products went to market the following year, advancing the state of the art, winning awards, and growing the business so we could reinvest and continue the cycle. We felt that Dave, and Bill, would be proud of the result.

I'll never forget my visit to the garage, and depending on your own professions, I'd encourage everyone to learn about and consider visiting some of the places that have played important roles in the development of your chosen fields. It might prove more meaningful than you would expect.