Look At All The Tech Hewlett-Packard - One Of America's Most Iconic Companies - Has Created

Seventy-five years ago (that would be 1939), Stanford University buddies Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched the original Silicon Valley garage startup.

On a shoestring budget, the friends invented a series of electronics gadgets sometimes using the Packard family oven to put on finishing touches. Walt Disney Studios was one of their first customers.

Flash forward to June 2014 and HP is one of the biggest tech companies in the world, employing over 330,000 people. HP is digging itself out of some hard times, implementing a multiyear turnaround that's involved laying off up to 50,000 since 2012.

And it's going back to its roots: inventing or advancing new forms of electronics. Earlier this month, HP Labs shows off an ambitious new kind of computer that it hopes will shrink a data center to the size of a refridgerator. The computer, code-named "The Machine," will require HP to invent a new kind of computer memory, perfect a new way to transfer data using light (i.e. photonics), instead of traditional copper wire, and invent a whole new operating system.

But HP is up to the task. It's been inventing hardware for 75 years.