What would HP have looked like, or dreamed up, if not for a choice it made 30 years ago? We found this quote out in the IT enterprise trade journal world.

HP had a campaign for its new Touchscreen desktops in the 1980s called "Imagine." It even had a cute butterfly. So your vendor is capable of letting its corporate hair down, more so now than ever.

But not when it mattered, at least back in the days when choices were being made like Bill Gates bringing on MS-DOS. Here's the story, one that Steve Jobs may not tell next week at MacWorld:

"So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.' "

With Apple's stock now trading at almost three times the cost of HP's, Jobs still hasn't gotten through college. I don't believe Bill Gates has, either.

Apparently there's an education to be earned in many places.