I'd argue that their excellent test equipment and printers allowed this to happen; anyone who made generic shit would have been quickly killed by all the blunders they made.

They sort of still do!

It's just HP and HPE split up. HPE took all the nice enterprise stuff, plus the supercomputing business (they own Cray). HP took the consumer stuff, and proceeded to milk as much as they could.

No, wrong decade and wrong split - the test & measurement equipment and scientific equipment was long gone from HP at the time of the HP -> HP inc + HPE split. It ended up in Agilent (1999) and from there Keysight.

HP semiconductors went HP -> Agilent -> Avago, now broadcom.

Interesting, had no idea they used to make proper lab equipment

I've got two garages full of 80's and 90's HP lab equipment, and most of it even works. In that era, HP had the best hardware design/production capability in the world.

Unfortunately, in the same era, their software was almost always complete crap. I think the same rigid processes and controls that allowed them to make great hardware were the reason their software was awful. Their rigid processes made changing the software difficult, so it was harder for the devs to improve (and they usually didn't bother).

The spinoff for lab and scientific equipment (Agilent, 1999) happened long before the HP/HPE split (2015).

And great technologies as well, HP-UX (Vault was one of the first UNIX containers), Modula-3 (Olivetti/Compaq became part of HP), ...

Those HPUX machines were hot!

No, seriously, sometimes they caught on fire.

Interesting, I used HP-UX across a few years, but never heard of heat moments that would require using an extinguisher on the server room.

I only ever heard of HPUX workstations catching fire. No idea about their servers.

This was during 1999-2002 and 2004-2006, HP-UX 10.x and 11.

Rome once ruled the greatest empire on earth. Vs. look at the last few centuries of Italian history. Regression to mediocrity seems an inescapable part of human endeavor.