HP has always had some outstanding people with some outstanding products, but this emphasizes the folly of spinning off Agilent when they did.

There went so many life science and industrial products, leaving HP as more of a PC and printer company which had registered outsized growth supplying offices and consumers during the boom. Setting the stage for smooth-talking financial manipulators to dominate the engineering culture like never before. Until it descended into more of an ink company than electronics for a while there.

So many of the brains had been at Agilent for a while by then.

IIRC the inkjet first became available in the HP3396 laboratory integrator (when most offices were still on DOS) as a built-in printer for full letter size sprocket-feed paper to print your scientific results, usually with real-time detailed graphics even if it was only black ink.

Before that, previous models used about a 4 inch wide thermal roll, the OS was outstanding and it was miniaturized like no other since HP used some of their custom application-specific chips for functions that competitive units at the time needed an entire circuit board for. Not too many times as big as a top HP calculator, the old ones had the look and feel of quality along with the performance.

Remember this is when HP was still capable of coming up with a new operating system every two years (that was more advanced than anything Microsoft had ever done).

But since the competitive integrators had a much bigger bench footprint they contained thermal printers for full letter-size output. Or 8.5 inches x more than just 11 inches on those thermal rolls or z-fold packs, since it was common to print things like long chromatograms, banner style much longer than 11 or 14 inches, resembling the output of an analog chart recorder on its rolls of graph paper. The expensive bench instruments which were well established were still all analog output which had originally fed into a dumb chart recorder. So many had a transition where the instruments were first starting to get hooked up to the analog-to-digital input of a device like this but the printouts needed to be handled in the filing cabinets (or faxed, 39 inches maximum page length) no differently than if they had come from the old chart recorders. Which were naturally maintained as backups or parallel recorders.

The little HP's could often be used as more powerful computational devices, but the printouts were more like thermal retail reciepts than the others.

So then the bigger HP3396 came out with its new inkjet doing the precision job on sprocket feed continuous letter-width "plain" paper, it was upsized with even more features. It looked so modern. Sprocket-feed was already advanced for dot-matrix with DOS computers for office work, but the inkjet on this thing really got your attention. If you were lucky you would have the optional digital storage (hard) drive which was bigger than the upsized integrator and would sit undeneath. Or maybe the less-expensive routine storage version with openings in the front for removable disks which were functionally equivalent to 5.25 inch DOS floppies, except the magnetic disk part was inside a miniaturized 3.5 inch, thin hard plastic cartridge shell thing which was not exactly flexible.

Next thing you know IBM PS/2 desktops started to appear in offices using these same type (single-sided) 3.5 inch floppies and eventually that's what PC's started to have before going double-sided.

But nobody dreamed it would be a good idea to format the disks for two different companies or usages like this in a very similar way whatsoever.

The integrators basically filled a niche before the PC's took over in the lab.

Eventually inkjets for the office and home took off, especially in color.

And the rest is history.