Mr. Robert (Bob) E. Watson

He spent 30 years with Hewlett-Packard serving in many positions ranging from R&D Engineer to Lab Manager, Division Manager, Group Manager, etc. Most of his career was spent in directing "firsts" for HP (HP's first desktop calculator family, HP's first handheld calculators, HP's first LaserJets, and HP's first ink-jet products).Through the course of his career with HP, he was responsible for developing entire business strategies, including budgets, personnel, and schedules. He worked as a manager under Don Schulz on the HP 9100 project. Promoted by Bill Hewlett and Marco Negrete to Lab Manager in the new Calculator Products Division (CPD). He would work for a new CPD Division Manager, Tom Kelly, who had been the Loveland Division?s Marketing Manager. He had recognized that the next generation of desktop calculators would need bigger ROMs than the one used in the HP 9100 to accommodate more complex programming languages and more features. He also realized that the HP 9100?s pc-board ROM was a dead-end technology. It could not be made bigger technically and was already too expensive to manufacture due to poor circuit-board yields and the need to hand-select transistors for the pc-board ROM?s sense amplifiers. Integrated-circuit ROMs appeared to be a much better alternative. Since his early retirement from HP, he has spent much of his business time on various boards and education subcommittees for the State of Idaho.