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Six decades after Hewlett-Packard Co. opened in Loveland, Northern Colorado campuses face different futures
Sixty years after Hewlett-Packard Co. employees first began moving into Building A on the company's new Loveland campus in October 1962, the company that once grew to employ more than 9,000 workers in Loveland, Fort Collins and Greeley does not have the presence that it once did.
Today, HP's successor companies - Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE) and HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) - occupy 580,000 square feet in Fort Collins, with HPE employing 800 people. (HP Inc. did not respond to requests for information.)
But HP's legacy extends far beyond that footprint, from spinoff companies that continue to employ thousands of workers to the real estate that HP left behind.
Much of the Fort Collins campus is now owned by Broadcom, which essentially is a spinoff of a spinoff, i.e. HP's spinoff of Agilent Technologies Inc., which then sold its Semiconductor Products Group to an investment group, creating Avago Technologies Inc., which acquired Broadcom in 2015.
No HP employees remain at the Loveland site, where it all started, but another spinoff of a spinoff - Keysight Technologies Inc. (NYSE: KEYS), which grew out of Agilent in 2014 - maintains an operation there.
In Greeley, nothing remains of an HP operation that was once the center of the city's nascent tech sector.
HP's three Northern Colorado campuses have witnessed far different fates since the company began divesting local operations, and selling local properties, with tech remaining the driving force in Fort Collins, and tech and manufacturing enj oying a resurgence at what was the Loveland campus. Greeley, however, has seen demolition of the long-vacant HP building, with the bulk of the acreage transformed for residential, retail and other uses.
Loveland
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s history in Northern Colorado began in Loveland, but it almost didn't start that way. Loveland had to compete with Boulder for an HP expansion, but problems with potential Boulder sites - and a strong pitch from Loveland civic and business leaders - prompted Colorado native David Packard and other HP executives to select Loveland instead, according to an HP Computer Museum post on the history of the Loveland plant.
The plant - with a temporary building opening in 1960...