Bye Cupertino!

As many remember, in March, the town of Topeka, Kansas, was renamed Google for a whole month. The city went to this to attract the attention of Google, which at the time was collecting applications for participation in a pilot program for laying fast opto-fiber in the United States.

But whatever the motives of the adventurous Kansas, the authorities in the city of Cupertino in California now have far more reasons to rewrite the signs at the entrance. From 2012, Apple will become the largest landowner in Cupertino, doubling the current area of ​​its campus and thus occupying approximately 3% of the city’s area. As you can see on the map to the left, walking along Pruneridge avenue , you will be surrounded by Apple from all sides.

Why am I writing about this on the Hewlett-Packard blog? And because Apple bought the site and the buildings on it for several decades belonged to HP. By 2012, 3,000 of our employees who are still working at this location will move to a brand new modern building on the main HP campus in Palo Alto. But before that, let me tell you a little about what footprint HP will leave behind in Cupertino.


As you know, a computer company with an apple on its logo was founded in this suburb of San Francisco in 1976. But long before that, this part of the future Silicon Valley was famous for real fruits - apples, peaches and, most of all, apricots. Technology companies, which in the 60s began to actively buy land from private farmers, were built literally in the middle of orchards, which can be clearly seen in historical photographs . Thus, the fact that Skolkovo’s “innograd” will occupy the territory of the Agricultural Research Institute near Moscow can be called a repetition of history if desired.
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Hewlett-Packard, which by that time was noticeable worldwide as a manufacturer of electrical measuring instruments, was unexpectedly “dragged” (in the words of David Packard) into the computer business in 1966: they began to buy an automatic microcontroller for measuring instruments HP 2116A separately from them in order use it as a stand alone minicomputer. The core of the development team of this microcontroller was a group of just 4 electronic engineers.

And by 1969, the volume of this line of business and the number of people employed in it grew so much that the company had to buy a large plot in Cupertino and build a separate building in its place, which Apple also buys now. In this building, in particular, were developing a full-fledged 32-bit computer project "Omega". And although this project was not completed (out of concern for Bill Hewlett that the company did not have enough resources to immediately win competition with IBM mainframes), many successful solutions from it formed the basis of the HP 3000 - the first minicomputer that came with a full-featured operating system. a system in which several users could simultaneously work in several applications written in different programming languages.


View of the HP Campus in Cupertino while celebrating the shipment of 10,000 HP 3000 in 1982 (clickable)

Unlike the then minicomputers, which were intended for any one specific task, the HP 3000 was able to offer businesses the possibility of a “big” computer at an affordable price — less than $ 100,000. At about the same time, the HP calculators began to conquer the market and sent it back into history. slide rules and mechanical calculating machines for personal use. All this, perhaps, can be called a psychologically important point for the computer industry - people have become ready to think of computers as an everyday tool for various tasks.

As a result, by the beginning of the 80s, the computer business began to bring HP a tangible share of revenue. But in those days, life was still much simpler than it is now. When Queen Elizabeth II visited the campus in Cupertino in 1983, almost the entire production and sales cycle of the HP 3000 took place right there - from developing new semiconductor elements to soldering circuit boards, assembling computers and demonstrating them to customers. Today, to see the process of creating a regular server, Elizabeth would have to pretty much travel around the world!

Then, when production began to move smoothly outside the United States, a demo center and a number of consulting departments were left on campus. But all this time and still the place of interest is a small fruit grove and a barn left from the time when there was a garden on this site - as a reminder.

Steve Jobs said that Apple intends to demolish the old buildings on the acquired site and build "something nice" there. But for the grove you can not worry. Real estate in Silicon Valley today is very expensive, and Apple could spend money much more efficiently if it found a plot elsewhere. But it was important for the company to remain “a company from Cupertino,” so the history of the place there will most likely be taken care of.

And the moral is probably the following: it's good when people remember the past, and it's good when there is something to remember.