AP News, December 27th, 2006
For five months, Sun Microsystems Inc. owned a life-size painted cutout depicting the co-founders of its rival, Hewlett-Packard Co., the product of a zany, cross-country art project.
Sun snapped up the painting for $6,000 in August after HP refused to buy it for the company lobby, and the piece became a jocular fixture on Sun's Menlo Park campus.
Photos of the men appeared on the Web draped in a Sun T-shirt, posed in front of Sun products, and the piece eventually made its way to the men's alma mater Stanford University after numerous other stops in the San Francisco Bay Area.
But the weary travelers _ actually the likenesses of William Hewlett and David Packard _ appear to have finally found a permanent home: the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose.
Sun has donated the Global Positioning System-enabled plywood cutout _ known as H&P and featuring the two men sitting atop the garage where they founded the company almost 70 years ago.
Sun boasted on a company blog that it has "officially consigned H&P to history" and "is happy to have helped two of Silicon Valley's most cherished figures find a suitable and dignified home."
The piece is one of five portraits of tech titans created by a group of San Francisco-area artists as part of a cross-country art project called "Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight."
Sun said the museum is looking for benefactors to purchase and donate the other cutout statues for an exhibit titled "The Spirit of Silicon Valley."
