Hewlett-Packard's Fort Collins, Colo., facility was built in the mid-'70s when David Packard and Bill Hewlett, both being enthusiastic outdoorsmen, decided they wanted to build a company plant near: a) an excellent engineering school (Colorado State University); and b) one of their favorite hunting, fishing, skiing and vacation places, the Rocky Mountains. When the Fort Collins Division was established in February 1977 an hour north of Denver, it became the desktop computer division. It has since morphed into the workstation headquarters for the company and thus, the world. HP leads the mobile workstation market worldwide with 41.8 percent share and leads the combined workstation category with 46.2 percent share, according to the Q2'12 IDC Worldwide Workstation Tracker released in August. HP's Z-series workstations are used to design everything from running shoes and race cars to animated characters and deep-sea submersibles. They are also used to manage research labs, mission-critical IT environments and billions of dollars of financial securities. HP workstations are used in compute-intensive industries, such as animation, film/video editing, graphic design, CAD, architecture, photography, high-definition video, manufacturing, finance, health care, scientific imaging, and oil and gas exploration. At the beginning of the 21st century, four major players manufactured high-end computer workstations: Silicon Graphics, Sun, IBM and HP. Today, HP is the only surviving and thriving workstation vendor of those four. This slide show illustrates a tour of the HP facility taken on Oct. 11, 2012.
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