Hello, and welcome to my blog! I’m Anna Mancini, and I’m Hewlett Packard’s corporate archivist. That means that I track the history of HP, and do my best to share HP’s exciting story with employees, customers, and the rest of the world. I thought a blog would be a good way to communicate the “aha” moments I have, since I usually have them when I’m alone at my desk or in the “back room” of the archives.

HP has had a corporate archives since 1987. It started the way a lot of corporate archives do – the company had an anniversary (its 50^th) coming up, and the communications department thought, “Uh-oh, we have to celebrate our history—now what?” They very wisely chose to hire two archival consultants, who came in and created a collection out of what was reportedly a big mess. Apparently they were shown about 50 boxes stacked up in a room, some of which were labeled “may be historical.” From those boxes, they created a collection of HP’s most important products, photos of the founders, and crucial documents. After the anniversary year was over, the communications folks found the collection so useful that they decided to keep the archives, and it has been growing ever since.

What is the oldest thing in the HP Archives? Well, it’s the prototype of our first product, the Model 200A audio oscillator, that Bill Hewlett built when he was a graduate student at Stanford University. Here’s a photo of it on our virtual museum: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/earlyinstruments/0007/index.html

On that same page you can also read about how it was discovered in the basement of a dormitory at Stanford—almost 50 years after Bill Hewlett built it!