Silicon Valley pioneer, `H' in HP passes away

Silicon Valley pioneer, `H' in HP passes away
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

WASHINGTON, JANUARY 13: William Hewlett, the legendary American engineer who along with his partner Dave Packard parlayed a $ 538 start-up into a $ 50-billion behemoth called Hewlett-Packard, or HP for short, died on Friday at 87, bringing to a close an era in Silicon Valley.

Hewlett holds a very special place in the pantheon of American tech heroes for many contributions, most of all the idea of a garage start-up. HP was started in 1938 in a garage in Palo Alto township of what later came to be known as Silicon Valley.

The site, recently acquired again by HP, is now a state historic monument and is officially considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley or the Bethlehem of Technology. HP is effectively the very first Silicon Valley company.

Hewlett and Packard (who died in 1966) were both graduate students at Stanford when they scratched together the $ 538 to kick-start the tiny electronics company with a verve and passion that would become a Silicon Valley trademark decades later.

Their initial inventions included a self-flushing urinal, a bowling-lane foul indicator (which may still come in handy to call No Balls in cricket), and a shock machine to help people lose weight.

Their big break however came when Walt Disney contracted them to make eight audio oscillators to rest sound equipment for the movie Fantasia. HP never looked back after that, going on to become one of the world's largest electronics, instrumentation and computing giant, employing more than 100,000 people and with revenues of more than $ 50 billion, more the GDP of a mid-sized country.

Along the way, HP also engendered a whole new corporate and business culture, including pioneering the open plan office structure that is prevalent worldwide now. Such an internal office architecture which enabled open workplace without doors where employees are separated only by low-rise dividers was a hallmark of the hierarchy-hating Hewlett.

Hewlett also had a hand in one of the most fundamental inventions of our times. It was at his insistence that HP produce a calculator which would fit into his shirt pocket that designers at HP scaled down the desktop HP 9100 calculator to the palm-sized HP 35 scientific calculator. The downsizing effectively made the slide rule obsolete and in years to come became a boon to those who are not natural number crunchers.

Hewlett (and Packard) were also famous for their ''management by walking around'' concept. In a recent interview with this correspondent, Radha Ramaswami Basu, who became one of HP's highest ranked executives heading a billion-dollar division, recalled how Hewlett ambushed her first review when she headed a medical equipment division.

``He sat slouched in a chair with his shirt sleeves hanging out and his eyes closed, and I kept thinking `My God, why is this man so famous?''' Basu recounted. ``After my presentation, he stiffened and fired off three complex and technical questions, saying he didn't think their product would work unless they were straightened out. We spent the next three monthssolving the things he had raised and that we hadn't even thought about.''

Basu quit HP last year after a 22-year stint and recently became CEO of Support.com, an Internet start-up backed by her parent company.

Hundreds of Indian techies have cut their teeth at HP and considered the 100,000-strong company the very fount of technology. ''It is the kind of place you want your career to start in,'' says Jagdeep Singh, an Indian serial entrepreneur who got a break in HP when he was only 20. He quit after a couple of years and has since cranked out three start-ups, includingLightera Networks that was sold to Ciena in 1999 for more than $ 500 million.

Although HP briefly began to be dubbed a ``printer company'', it has pulled together in recent years and staked out the frontiers of Internet. Rajiv Gupta, another Indian computer designer, heads HP's E-Speak division that deals with high-level service language for the future Internet economy.

Hewlett, who died of old age, was one of the richest men in America with a fortune estimated to be worth $ 9 billion. But he made light of his wealth and lived a simple life, giving amply in philanthropy. The Hewlett Foundation has an endowment of $ 3.5 billion and he contributed $ 300 million to his alma mater Stanford University alone.