In which city is this company headquartered that uses the HIL bus to connect keyboards, mice, trackballs, digitizers, tablets, barcode readers, rotary knobs, touchscreens, and other human interface peripherals to their workstations?
Palo Alto, California
Hewlett-Packard
The Hewlett-Packard Company (commonly referred to as HP) or shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California.
 It developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components as well as software and related services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises, including customers in the government, health and education sectors.
HIL bus
The HP-HIL ("Hewlett-Packard Human Interface Link") is the name of a computer bus used by Hewlett-Packard to connect keyboards, mice, trackballs, digitizers, tablets, barcode readers, rotary knobs, touchscreens, and other human interface peripherals to their HP 9000 workstations.
 The bus was in use until the mid-1990s, when HP substituted PS/2 technology for HIL.
 The PS/2 peripherals were themselves replaced with USB-connected models.
Synaptics
Synaptics describes itself as a human interface solution developer.
 Synaptic makes computer hardware such as: display controllers, touchpads, capacitive touch controllers, fingerprint sensors and more.
 Synaptics sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for applications including smartphones, tablets, notebooks, automobiles, wearables and PC peripherals. IBall (company)
iBall is a privately held consumer electronics company headquartered in MIDC Andheri Mumbai, Maharashtra, India, that imports computer peripherals, smartphones and tablets from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
 iBall started operations in September 2001, initially selling computer mice.
 s of 2011 , the company sold consumer electronics products in 27 different product categories. Barcode reader
A barcode reader (or barcode scanner) is an electronic device that can read and output printed barcodes to a computer.
 Like a flatbed scanner, it consists of a light source, a lens and a light sensor translating optical impulses into electrical ones.
 Additionally, nearly all barcode readers contain "decoder" circuitry analyzing the barcode's image data provided by the sensor and sending the barcode's content to the scanner's output port. USB human interface device class
In computing, the USB human interface device class (USB HID class) is a part of the USB specification for computer peripherals: it specifies a device class (a type of computer hardware) for human interface devices such as keyboards, mice, game controllers and alphanumeric display devices. Konica Minolta
Konica Minolta, Inc. (コニカミノルタ , Konika Minoruta ) is a Japanese technology company headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo, with offices in 49 countries worldwide.
 The company manufactures business and industrial imaging products, including copiers, laser printers, multi-functional peripherals (MFPs) and digital print systems for the production printing market.
 Konica Minolta's Managed Print Service (MPS) is called Optimised Print Services.
 The company also makes optical devices, including lenses and LCD film; medical and graphic imaging products, such as X-ray image processing systems, colour proofing systems, and X-ray film; photometers, 3-D digitizers, and other sensing products; and textile printers.
 It formerly also had camera and photo operations inherited from Konica and Minolta but were sold in 2006, including its SLR division to Sony, with Sony's Alpha series being its successor. IKey
iKey, LTD, also known as iKey Industrial Peripherals, is an Austin, Texas-based manufacturer of rugged computer keyboards, mice and other peripherals.
 The company was founded in 1989 and currently works with several Fortune 500 companies.
 The company was formerly known as Texas Industrial Peripherals. Ultra Network Technologies
Ultra Network Technologies (previously called Ultra Corporation) is a now defunct networking company.
 It offered high-speed network products for the scientific computing market as well as some commercial companies.
 It was founded in 1986 by James N. Perdue (formerly of NASA, Ames Research Center), Drew Berding, and Wes Meador (of Control Data Corporation) to provide higher speed connectivity and networking for supercomputers and their peripherals and workstations.
 At the time, the only other companies offering high speed networking and connectivity for the supercomputer and high-end workstation market was Network Systems Corporation (NSC) and Computer Network Technology Corporation (CNT).
 They both offered 50 megabytes per second (MB/s) bandwidth between controllers but at that time, their architecture was not implemented using standard networking protocols and their applications were generally focused on supporting connectivity at high speed between large mainframes and peripherals, often only implementing only point-to-point connections.
 Ethernet was available in 1986 and was used by most computer centers for general networking purposes.
 Its bandwidth was not high enough to manage the high data rate required by the 100 MB/s supercomputer channels and 4 MB/s VMEbus channels on workstations. Barcode
A barcode is an optical, machine-readable, representation of data; the data usually describes something about the object that carries the barcode.
 Originally barcodes systematically represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or one-dimensional (1D).
 Later two-dimensional (2D) codes were developed, using rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns in two dimensions, usually called barcodes although they do not use bars as such.
 Barcodes were initially scanned by special optical scanners called barcode readers. Later application software became available for devices that could read images, such as smartphones with cameras.