When HP started out, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard took on all sorts of odd contract jobs—Harmonica tuners, a clock drive for a telescope, automatic toilet flush sensors for Stanford…but one of the first tech support calls that Packard made for the company – about 70 years ago – was for a bowling alley. The foul line indicator Hewlett and Packard created wasn’t working properly. But there was Dave, sleeves rolled up, troubleshooting. (They even built a shock machine to help people lose weight.)
Bill and Dave worked out of a rented garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto with $538 in working capital – and a used drill press. And a business plan? As Bill Hewlett put it years later, “When I talk to business schools, occasionally the professor of management is devastated when I say we didn’t have any plans when we started. The idea of having a business came [years] before our invention of the audio oscillator. We were just opportunistic. We did anything to bring in a nickel….trying whatever someone thought we might be able to do. So we got into this not by design but because it worked out that way.” And the company could have just as easily been called “Packard-Hewlett,” but the HP was decided with a coin flip.
For the sake of time, let me just offer this:
I recently asked HP’s Kevin Wentzel if he had any stories that illustrate the kind of person Dave Packard was to his employees. Now, mind you, Kevin was only beginning his time at HP, but here’s what he had to share: “I’m sitting at my cubicle in bldg. 44 in the Cupertino offices. Someone looks over the wall and asks directions to a conference room. That someone was Dave Packard. He, of course, asked me how things were going and after a very short conversation was on his way. (The key to this story was that we had a billionaire CEO and company founder who’d been an assistant secretary of defense in government but was wandering the building on his own and stopping to talk with employees – that is the kind of people Bill and Dave were!)”
Dave retired from HP in 1993, wrote The HP Way in 1995 and passed in 1996 at the age of 83. Here we are, 100 years since the day he was born, with his company still making unique products that help define new categories and touch many people’s lives.
Happy birthday, Dave – and thanks.
