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