David Packard, Founder of Silicon Valley Electronics Giant, Dies at 83
 
SAN FRANCISCO   David Packard, who with his partner William Hewlett launched
one of Silicon Valley s most innovative electronics companies from a Palo
Alto garage with $538 in cash and a calling to  do something useful,   died
Tuesday at Stanford University Hospi-tal. He was 83 years old The cause of
death was pneumonia and complications from pneumonia.
 
Mr. Packard and Mr. Hewlett founded the Hewlett-Packard Company in 1938 with
encouragement from their old Stanford University engineering professor,
Frederick Terman, and built it into a multinational company with $31 billion
in revenue last year. Hewlett-Packard s technical prowess and commercial
successes made it the prototype of the modern technological company and one
of the most widely admired corporations in the world. But Mr. Packard also
made it famous for a management philosophy called the  HP Way,   essentially
a formula for unleashing employees  creativity.
 
Throughout his corporate career, Mr. Packard was also an enemy of executive
pomposity. When Hewlett-Packard s senior managers traveled to New York City
in 1961 to celebrate the listing of the company s stock on the New York Stock
Exchange, he insisted they take the subway instead of a taxi to Wall Street
from a hotel on Central Park South, where they were staying. They made the
wrong connection at Times Square, however, and got lost.
 
[Sam Walton insisted on the same sort of frugality and lack of pomposity,
too. And his employees have the same kind of stories to tell, also -- Wirt]
 
By LAWRENCE M. FISHER