It's hard to build an oscillator

Building an oscillator is "just" putting some gain around a large enough phase delay (>90deg). The challenge is in making the oscillator predictable and STABLE.

You want a frequency generator that oscillates with a constant period/frequency. Even an unbalanced oscillator can just be divided by two to provide uniformity. However, it turns out that building something that is not sensitive to any outside inputs (temperature, strain, voltage, time, etc) is really hard to do over a very wide frequency range (from ~DC to many MHz), but from that you can build a stable clock.

Look up Allan Variance, if you're looking for bit of a rabbit hole on clocks and oscillators and other sensors.

Exactly, all that you needed to do was "draw the rest of the owl".

>It's hard to build an oscillator

It took a long time, too, after the invention of the vacuum tube.

Finally one day they had some remarkable success using circuitry more reliable than ever before.

It seemed so promising that a startup really could be based on technology like that, so that's what was happening.

Unless you were intrigued by relatively high-voltage analog electronics, it was just another boring engineering company. Even though they were very creative, their little company was simply named after the founders like many others.

That's why they called their startup Hewlett-Packard.