Hewlett started out like most born engineers--by blowing things up. "A doorknob is compact--you can put explosives in it, use it as a bomb," he says.

While science came easy to him, Hewlett suffers from dyslexia, which frustrated him in other school subjects. But the learning disability drove him even further into the sanctuary of the laboratory. "This was a place where the learning disability didn't matter. He wanted to be out of the limelight," says Karen Lewis, corporate archivist for HP.

Dyslexia also forced Hewlett to memorize schoolwork, and eventually he seemed to memorize everything. "He is a sponge for information," Lewis says.

"He knows more about more things than anyone I've ever met," says John Young, former chief executive of HP. Hewlett, a transplanted Midwesterner who grew up in San Francisco, came of age during the Depression, the worst time for a budding inventor.

Luckily, he met Packard. Both were graduate students in engineering at Stanford University, drawn together by common Western roots and a shared natural conservatism. But the friendship had elements of an odd-couple relationship. "Hewlett is much more of a lighthearted individual--a bubbly person. He indicates an interest in literally everything," says Dr. John Linvill, professor emeritus at Stanford. "David Packard didn't enjoy life externally as much. But they understood each other's strengths."

Both came under the influence of their professor, Frederick Terman. If Hewlett and Packard were the fathers of Silicon Valley, Terman was the grandfather. Terman proposed to his students an idea that dated back to medieval times: Industry and academia should feed off each other with the goal of building an environment to nurture genius.

The network of intelligentsia Terman envisioned started off small, with Hewlett's invention of a resistance-capacity audio oscillator. Terman suggested the device--used to test sound equipment--could be the kernel for a business.

"We didn't have any plans when we started," Hewlett has said. "The idea of having a business came before our invention of the audio oscillator. We were just opportunistic. We did anything to bring in a nickel."

Desperate to make money, Hewlett and Packard scattered their creativity across disparate inventions--a bowling-line foul indicator, a machine that shocked people into losing weight and a device that automatically flushed a urinal. But it was the audio oscillator that in 1938 attracted the attention of Walt Disney, who ordered eight of the HP 200B products to use for his film "Fantasia."

Hewlett and Packard had flipped a coin to determine their new company's name and set up business in the garage of Packard's Palo Alto, Calif., house. Neighbors said they knew that when the car was parked outside, HP had an order to fill.

Terman's ideas, however, had not been forgotten with the duo's initial success. The two businessmen had begun gathering a list of business practices--some of which had never been tried before. Help the employee. Be as creative as possible. Establish an open environment that allows workers to stroll into their bosses' offices and pitch an idea. Do not concentrate all of the company's power in its executives; let the employees make decisions in cases where they know best. Do not look at the competition as a blood enemy, but find ways to work together for mutual benefit. Tie your success to that of the university community.

These policies became known as the "HP Way," and they were the company's greatest inventions. "It was that simple garage model: Take a bunch of bright people and let them have their head," says Robert Herwick, president of Herwick Capital Management, a San Francisco financial firm.

Packard made vital contributions to the HP Way but, ultimately, Hewlett was its guiding force. "Bill gets a lot of credit for what they call the HP Way," Young says.

Hewlett's scientific background played a role in developing the HP Way. Unlike the business community, scientists and engineers relied on an international network to develop ideas.

"Bill was interested in the process of lining up bright, young engineers in small development communities," Herwick says.

"He was the godfather of engineers. He loved engineers," Young says.

And they loved him. The best talent at Eastern institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bell Labs took notice, and the Western migration of the country's technological brain trust began. The environment awaiting these scientists, teachers and engineers could not have been more conducive to encouraging technology. Employees of HP not only took their work home with them, but they discussed it at dinner, mapping out ideas on napkins, on the golf course and during parties.

One weekend when Hewlett stopped by the plant to pick up a microscope, he found the storage bins locked up. He smashed open the latch, took what he needed and left a note saying the bins should always be kept open to encourage workers to take home equipment to experiment with.

The creative give-and-take extended to an HP policy of escorting competitors on tours of the company's labs. Hewlett told Lewis, "I'm always in favor of that. We can show them what we're doing, but we don't have to tell them what's in my head."

As the post-war interest in technology seeded Silicon Valley with businesses, HP grew. The company, however, did not outgrow its principles. HP would throw barbecues for the employees at a ranch in Santa Cruz with Hewlett and Packard acting as master chefs.

But not everything was so lighthearted. A quality problem with the company's printers required Rick Belluzzo, now executive vice president of the Computer Organization, to describe the situation to the board, including Hewlett. "I say that we had a range of tens of millions of dollars of exposure here, and Bill, I couldn't even tell if he was paying attention," Belluzzo recalls.

But Hewlett asked, "Rick, what have you learned from this experience?"

"We talked about what we had learned and why we made the mistake," Belluzzo says. Instead of bawling out Belluzzo, Hewlett said, "Make sure your No. 1 responsibility is to take care of our customers."

Hewlett remains a pragmatist, encouraging technology as a solution to a problem rather than for its own sake. To this day, the co-founder of the world's second largest computer company does not surf the Web and uses PCs sparingly.

"I don't know anything about [the Internet]. I hate to say it, but I just don't. [It's new] since I was around," Hewlett once said.

Typically, HP backed into the computer industry in 1966 to solve a problem. At the time, the manufacturer's main business was test and measurement products. Only because computers had become the primary monitors for the devices did HP come out with the 2116A.

But an invention much closer to Hewlett's sense of simplicity was the HP-35, the first scientific handheld calculator. Hewlett was now the company's chief executive, and he encouraged HP scientists to develop a computer that would fit into his desk drawer. The HP-35 fit into his pocket, but it performed the same functions as a slide rule at considerably more cost.

HP introduced the HP-35 anyway and sold 100,000 in the first year. Hewlett's distrust of computers' bulky pretensions now seems prophetic. By the late 1970s, a former HP summer employee, Steve Jobs, and his friend, Steve Wozniak, began working on a computer that would be simpler than the mainframes and minicomputers that dominated at the time. Jobs fully admits his debt to HP. And other companies, such as Silicon Graphics Inc., The Ask Group, Sun Microsystems Inc. and Tandem Computers Inc., also adopted elements of the HP Way.

Cots became required furniture in Silicon Valley offices, and computer code made for cocktail conversation. Mainframes began looking like dinosaurs, the East Coast-based minicomputer industry went into a tailspin, and the computer industry reinvented itself.

Today, two years after Packard died, Hewlett does not participate much in the culture he created. Several strokes have ravaged his body, making it hard for him to venture far beyond his home. After one stroke a few years ago, Sandra Kurtzig, a friend and founder of the former The Ask Group, visited Hewlett's hospital bedside.

Anxious about Hewlett's condition, she made small talk about how she had stopped beforehand at some offices under renovation. As she walked across the parquet floors, workers had shouted at her to remove her high heels so she would not leave marks. "Let me see your heel," Hewlett said from his hospital bed. A pause and then, "How much do you weigh?" Kurtzig listened in surprise as Hewlett--one day after a stroke--tried to calculate whether the pounds per square inch she exerted on the floor would have been enough to make an impression. The garage genius still had a problem to solve.