Last week, we had an opportunity to attend a media event at Hewlett-Packard's campus in northwest Houston. Formerly the site of Compaq's headquarters, the large campus is made up of more than a dozen buildings connected by enclosed walkways (jokingly referred to as "habitrails") to keep employees from roasting in Houston's swampy summer heat. In its heyday, Compaq used the complex as both its corporate headquarters and its main manufacturing plant; HP has sold off some of the peripheral buildings, but the company still uses the labs and large manufacturing spaces for some of its corporate and enterprise design and engineering work.

We spent the day touring a half-dozen specialized labs, including HP's software testing lab, environmental lab, materials lab, and electromagnetic lab. In these areas, HP engineers were busy torture-testing all manner of different products from HP's corporate lines—mainly PCs, laptops, and tablets. A number of the tests are designed to terminate in the products' failure (and no small number of engineers were understandably gleeful about having jobs that involved destroying things).

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Listing image by Lee Hutchinson