February 28, 2001, 3:39 PM — IN GRADUATE SCHOOL, my roommate was the technical one. I studied animal behavior and he was a biochemist, but that wasn't how you could tell. My programmable calculator was made by Texas Instruments; he used a Hewlett-Packard, with Reverse Polish Notation. In those days, the true test of deep technical ability was your brand of calculator and your calculation method.
Bill Hewlett passed away last week. He was 87 years old. The company he co-founded with Dave Packard in his garage in 1939 lives on as Hewlett-Packard and its spin-off, Agilent. In the long run, HP and Agilent may be the least enduring of his many legacies.
To understand Bill Hewlett, start with RPN (Reverse Polish Notation). An obscure, stack-oriented alternative to the traditional arithmetic notation most of us learned back in grammar school, RPN is more efficient. Many engineers loved that efficiency. Bill Hewlett was first and foremost an engineer, and Hewlett-Packard was uncompromising in serving the engineering community.
Bill Hewlett's company was -- and by all accounts, still is -- uncompromising in how it treats its employees, too. Hewlett and Packard engineered their management structure and corporate culture in the same elegant way they designed their products. They kept the HP organization flat, recognized the achievements of individual employees -- HP instituted cash profit-sharing with all employees the year it was founded -- and stayed close to employees. Hewlett's management was as innovative as his engineering, and his innovations endure: Flat organizational charts, bonuses to nonmanagers, and "management by walking around" are widely emulated in well-run companies throughout the world.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Silicon Valley in Hewlett's garage. A coin toss made the company Hewlett-Packard instead of Packard Hewlett; neither man seemed too worried about top billing. Hewlett's first product was an innovative audio oscillator based on the newly developed principle of negative feedback. Among the early buyers was Walt Disney, who used eight of them in the production of Fantasia. Innovators selling to innovators -- it's how HP got its start.
Silicon Valley has since spawned wealthier people, with higher profiles and greater fame. Hewlett never showed much interest in being a celebrity. Throughout his life he remained, at heart, an engineer.
An engineer in the best sense of the word.
