HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and fairly large companies, including customers in government, health, and education sectors.

The company was founded in a one-car garage in Palo Alto by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939, and initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment.

The HP Garage at 367 Addison Avenue is now designated an official California Historical Landmark, and is marked with a plaque calling it the "Birthplace of 'Silicon Valley'".

The company directly marketed its products to households; small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprises, as well as via online distribution; consumer-electronics and office-supply retailers; software partners; and major technology vendors.

[13] One of the company's earliest customers was Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer for Walt Disney Studios, who bought eight HP 200B audio oscillators (at $71.50 each) to be used in the animated film Fantasia.

At the end of 1968, Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in the incoming Nixon administration.

As early as 1977, HP began production of the HP856x spectrum analyzers to complement its RF power meters and sensors capable of measuring signals in excess of 20 GHz.

Agilent's spin-off was the largest initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley,[30] and it created an $8 billion company with about 30,000 employees, manufacturing scientific instruments, semiconductors, optical networking devices, and electronic test equipment for telecom and wireless, research and development, and production.

[33] In 1997, HP started selling its products in Iran through a European subsidiary and a Dubai-based Middle Eastern distributor, despite U.S. export sanctions prohibiting such deals imposed by Bill Clinton's 1995 executive orders.

In January 2005, following years of underperformance, which included HP's Compaq merger that fell short[44] and disappointing earning reports,[45] the board asked Fiorina to resign as chair and chief executive officer of the company, and she did on February 9, 2005.

[47] Robert Wayman, chief financial officer of HP, served as interim CEO while the board undertook a formal search for a replacement.

"The transaction still requires EDS stockholder approval and regulatory clearance from the European Commission and other non-U.S. jurisdictions and is subject to the satisfaction or waiver of the other closing conditions specified in the merger agreement."

[65][66][68] At HP, Hurd oversaw a series of acquisitions worth over $20 billion, which allowed the company to expand into services of networking equipment and smartphones.

[72] His appointment sparked a strong reaction from Ellison,[73] who complained that Apotheker had been in charge of SAP when one of its subsidiaries was systematically stealing software from Oracle.

[85] Weeks later, HP announced that a review had concluded their PC division was too integrated and critical to business operations, and the company reaffirmed their commitment to the Personal Systems Group.

Whitman said: "We are gradually shaping HP into a more nimble, lower-cost, more customer and partner-centric company that can successfully compete across a rapidly changing IT landscape.

"[98] During the June 2014 HP Discover customer event in Las Vegas, Whitman and Martin Fink announced a project for a radically new computer architecture called The Machine.

Based on memristors and silicon photonics, it was supposed to come into commercialization before the end of the decade, and represented 75% of the research activity in HP Labs at the time.

The split, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by other media, resulted in two publicly traded companies on November 1, 2015: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.

Its European offices were in Meyrin, close to Geneva, Switzerland,[107] but it also had a research center in the Paris-Saclay cluster 20 km south of Paris, France.

[130][better source needed] In an April 2010 San Francisco Chronicle article, HP was one of 12 companies commended for "designing products to be safe from the start, following the principles of green chemistry".

[137] HP played a key role in work toward the December 2010 FTC report "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change".

It is believed that the reason why the incident was not immediately reported was due to confusion resulting from the shock of passengers and the loud noise from the open door.

[149] When the co-pilot came back to close the open door, passengers apparently attempted to explain what had happened but the message was not understood due to the noise.

[150] On September 5, 2006, Shawn Cabalfin and David O'Neil of Newsweek wrote that HP's general counsel, at the behest of chairwoman Patricia Dunn, contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists to identify the source of an information leak.

[164] On June 15, 2011, HP sent a "formal legal demand" letter to Oracle in an attempt to force them to reverse its decision to discontinue software development on Intel Itanium microprocessors[165] and build its own servers.

[82][83]: 3–6  External observers generally stated that only a small part of the write-off appears to be due to accounting mis-statements, and that HP had previously overpaid for businesses.

In August 2014, a United States district court judge threw out a proposed settlement, which Autonomy's previous management had argued would be collusive and intended to divert scrutiny of HP's own responsibility and knowledge.

[182] In 2015, the Human Rights Commission of Portland, Oregon, requested to place Caterpillar, G4S, HP, and Motorola Solutions on the city's "Do Not Buy" list.

[184] The SEC's order found that HP's subsidiary in Russia paid more than $2 million through agents and various shell companies to a Russian government official to retain a multimillion-dollar contract with the federal prosecutor's office; in Poland, HP's subsidiary provided gifts and cash bribes worth more than $600,000 to a Polish government official to obtain contracts with the national police agency; and to win a software sale to Mexico's state-owned petroleum company, HP's subsidiary in Mexico paid more than $1 million in inflated commissions to a consultant with close ties to company officials, one of whom was funneled money.