Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett attended undergraduate classes taught by Fred Terman at Stanford and became acquainted with David Packard. Packard and he began discussing forming a company in August 1937, and founded Hewlett-Packard Company as a partnership on January 1, 1939. A flip of a coin decided the ordering of their names. Their first big breakthrough came when Disney purchased eight audio oscillators designed by Hewlett which were used for the production of the film Fantasia.
The company incorporated in 1947 and tendered an initial public offering in 1957. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were proud of their company culture which came to be known as The HP Way. The HP Way is a corporate culture that claimed to be centered not only on making money but also on respecting and nurturing its employees. Hewlett was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1954.
Hewlett was president of HP from 1964 to 1977 and CEO from 1968 to 1978, after which he was succeeded by John A. Young. He remained chairman of the executive committee until 1983, and then was vice chairman of the board until 1987.
A young Steve Jobs, then age twelve, called Hewlett (whose number was in the phone book) and requested any available parts for a frequency counter he was building. Hewlett, impressed with Jobs' initiative, offered him a summer job assembling frequency counters. Jobs then considered HP one of the companies that he admired, regarding it among the handful of companies (Disney and Intel were the others) that were built “to last, not just to make money”. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple along with Jobs, unsuccessfully attempted five times to sell the Apple I computer to HP while working there. The early Apple computers were built with HP parts, under a legal release from HP. Of the missed opportunity, Hewlett reportedly said, "You win some, you lose some."
