The Hewlett Packard name

<blockquote><em><a href="#248545">In reply to skane2600:</a></em></blockquote><p>My first real job out of college was programming a corporate reporting system, written in MS-BASIC, on HP 125 (Z80, CP/M), HP 150 (MS-DOS, touchscreen, not IBM compatible) and HP Vectra (MS-DOS, barely IBM compatible). The 150 I had even had the built-in thermal printer in the top of the monitor. But the touch never really worked reliably on the ones we had. And, of course, it was all connected to an HP 3000.</p><p>And the prices! They made original IBM kit look cheap!</p><p>I can remember a 386 Vectra, with 20MB HDD cost around 4,000UKP by the time you had added a keyboard, mouse and monochrome display. (1988/1989)</p><p>The system had been written by Fortran programmers and maintained by COBOL programmers, none of whom, it seemed, had ever heard of BASIC, let alone read the programming manual. No For…Next or While…Wend loops, just:</p><p>20 LET A = 1</p><p>30 &lt;do something&gt;</p><p>40 LET A = A + 1:IF A &lt; 50 GO TO 30</p><p>I can still remember the last day of a project in Ilford, the client took us out to lunch, "forced" 3 pints of bitter down my throat and my boss had a 2 hour meeting with the client manager, before we drove back home (I was the passenger) . To fill in the time waiting, I wrote a quick-and-dirty version of Breakout to keep me amused, sitting in my small corner of the office on the HP 125.</p>