Hewlett and his fellow Stanford pal, Dave Packard, might not have planned for their success, but the two friends would go on to create what is today the largest information technology company in the world.

From their days tinkering with gadgets in Packard’s one-car garage, to becoming two of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, Hewlett and Packard have left a company – and a legacy – that has stood the test of time.

The story of Hewlett and Packard has become legendary throughout Silicon Valley: two guys who started off in a small garage with just a few hundred dollars go on to create the largest IT company in the world.

How did they do it? How did these two college buddies work their way out of the garage and into the homes and offices of consumers around the world?

“Here we were with about $500 in capital trying whatever someone thought we might be able to do. So we got into this thing not by design but because it worked out that way.

I’d always been interested in scientific things, but my father – who died when I was 12 – was a greatly beloved doctor, and I did not want to compete with his image, so instead of getting interested in medicine I invested a lot of hours disassembling door locks and things like that. My mother just called it mischief.

When I talked to business schools occasionally, the professor of management is devastated when I say we didn’t have any plans when we started. We really didn’t know if this oscillator was any good. We simply put one together that worked pretty well, sent a letter out to universities and others, got three or four orders, and tried it again.

We were just opportunistic. We did anything to bring in a nickel. We made a bowling alley foul-line indicator, a clock drive for a telescope, a thing to make a urinal flush automatically, and a shock machine to make people lose weight.

We knew what technology was available, and we figured out how little bits of it would fit within the area where we wanted to be. There was not one giant step that we took at any point; there were a lot of little steps. Pretty much we just stuck to our knitting. I think we were concerned about making a technical contribution and we operated on the assumption that if we made a contribution to society, rewards would follow.

We wished to operate, as much as possible, on a pay-as-you-go basis, that our growth be financed by our earnings and not by debt.

I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper to find our real reason for being…A group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company…to do something worthwhile – they make a contribution to society.“