This was back in the late 1980s, perhaps early 1990s, they were still
making real electronic stuff - I had an HP line-analyser thingie and so
forth in the tool collection - as well as computers and peecees and
bits[1], and they had a strangle-hold on office printing with the
LaserJet, then the rot set in.
Thinking more about it, it was probably around the time of the release
of the Spectrum boxes that they started losing the plot. I recall
advising our customers (and ourselves) not to purchase the
bottom-of-the-line model as it could not be usefully upgraded, the next
model up was a much better buy[2]. Turns out they'd built lots of the
"loss leader" and couldn't move them, at least here in Oz, and HP
couldn't supply enough of the useful one. Lots of contracts where HP
agreed to buy-back the waste-of-space at 100% of initial cost when the
good box was delivered. :-)
Cheers,
Gary B-)
1 - I recall the release of the Nighthawk SCSI disk drive, an engineer
came out on stage swinging it around on the end of a cable, and pointed
out that the other end of the cable was plugged into the machine on
stage, which was talking to the disk. Quite an effective demo.
2 - HP salesdroids got really antsy when people said things like, "I was
talking to so-and-so from $ORK", some of the lies reported back to us
were hysterical!