I’m reading Michael S Malone’s book ‘Bill & Dave’ subtitled How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.
Interesting revelations to date are that Dave Packard had a penchant for explosives in his teens, though a near miss that nearly cost him his hand redirected his talents to engineering. In his, at times, excitable purple prose the author states; ”In nearly blowing himself up, Dave not only changed his own life, but the world„.
As well, it was a toss of the coin that decided whose name came first with Hewlett-Packard. A touch more gravity and we would have known the company as Packard-Hewlett, PH for short.
This also caught my eye.
”Fairchild [formed in 1957] was a company of legend - perhaps the most extraordinary collection of business talent ever assembled in a start up company. If Fairchild had a corporate culture, it could only be described as volatility incarnate…Not surprisingly Fairchild Semiconductors was a company-as-frat-house: brilliant young engineers and marketers working long days and partying long nights…And somehow, in the middle of it all, they also managed to invent the integrated circuit, the defining product of the late twentieth century, and in the process helped create the modern world.
”The semiconductor industry, as it emerged in the late 1950s and exploded onto the world scene over the next two decades, was the Wild West. Companies stole technology, customers and employees from each other, squabbled in endless lawsuits, and hired and fired thousands of their workers with the quadrennial cycle of chip demand. It was a high-risk game, and it was thrilling. And if it produced a lot of walking wounded, it also offered unimaginable rewards."„
Fifty years or so on and technology has evolved beyond what the most starry-eyed IT engineer of those early Silicon Valley days could have envisaged.
People though, stay pretty much the same.
For further blogs on this book go here
