If you grew up in Silicon Valley in its formative years, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the company everyone knew, even if they knew nothing about the technology industry. Its low-slung wood and concrete buildings - of a style that would become the norm for the Valley - sprawled across acres of land in the attractive industrial park set up by Stanford University, at the base of the low coastal hills. You drove by them regularly if you lived in the region. My father, a physician, taught part-time at Stanford, and always pointed them out to us as we passed.
We were children squirming in the back seat of a white Chevy station wagon and probably secretly punching or pinching each other out of dad's eyesight but we always understood the company was some kind of landmark. We had no idea what happened there but my father clearly admired the technologists who created long queues as they all drove into the asphalt parking lots every morning and out again at night - those that went home. Some windows always shed a soft glow onto the surrounding trees and lawns late into the night.
I have been thinking about HP's low-key, yet dominating presence in the Valley of my childhood because last week the world lost a man that, to my mind, quietly towered above other technology figures. Mr Bill Hewlett, HP co-founder with his friend Mr David Packard, bowed out last Friday at the age of 87. He led a life and built a company that helped create and define Silicon Valley. The company's open, non-hierarchical managerial style, born out of the painful limitations of the Depression, became the model for other California technology companies and still holds sway today in every technology company in the Republic and those of many other industries as well.
In every way, HP became the model on which nearly all other technology companies would be based. Even its earliest beginnings established a general Silicon Valley legend for how start-ups begin - in a garage, on a handful of savings. In HP's case it was Mr Hewlett's garage (which was designated a state historic monument in the 1980s and was purchased by HP when the house it belonged to went on the market last year). Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard scraped together $538 (€573) to form a company that is now one of the 50 largest in the US. They tossed a coin to decide whose name would go first.
They gradually developed a company operational style that became known as "the HP Way". HP gave its employees shares in the company when the notion was unheard of because the two founders believed employees should feel a personal investment in their company and receive rewards for its - and their - performance. The men made the workplace a more human place by introducing open-plan offices, free snacks and drinks, casual dress - an environment in which they felt ideas could be more easily exchanged and managers were more accessible. Indeed, Mr Hewlett was so accessible that an impudent Steve Jobs, aged 12, famously phoned him up and asked for spare electronics parts for his tinkering, which he got as well as a summer job.
Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard were known for being accessible to many in the Valley who had ideas and wanted to share them. They even let their competition come by the company's offices and have a wander around. Their openness and the close, interactive ties they maintained with Stanford are credited with helping build the networking culture that pumped ideas through the Valley and nourished endless streams of young start-up companies.
Their fortunes made, both men became leading philanthropic figures at a time when almost no other technology companies bothered. To the industry's shame, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, founded in 1966, has remained one of the only ones to come out of the now ultra-wealthy technology industry and is one of the largest charitable organisations in the world.
Mr Hewlett also had a keen sense of state citizenship and established non-profit institutes of relevance to California policy and historical preservation. He and Mr Packard were also founding members of San Jose's wonderful technology museum, known with affection as The Tech.
The death of Bill Hewlett comes at a time of turmoil within the technology industry, when the landscape is littered with the carcasses of companies founded by people intent only on selling on companies, in which they felt no personal involvement, that created services and products nobody asked for, cared more about burning through others' investment capital than generating sales, and were run by young entrepreneurs intent on self-promotion, who didn't care about their communities.
This modest and generous man, who remained to the end one of the Valley's leading lights, demonstrated that you could build a company on the basis of corporate decency, shared goals and community values. It is hard not to see his passing as symbolic of the end of a wholly different era for the technology sector. I'd prefer, in deference to Mr Hewlett's own good nature, to believe we are waving goodbye to him just as the technology industry regains some sense, and rebuilds value and integrity into the corporate equation for success.
klillington@irish-times.ie
