Bill Hewlett

Hewlett's master's work at Stanford produced a cheap, stable audio oscillator using a light bulb to control its output, and with his classmate David Packard he started making it in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. Walt Disney's studio bought eight for Fantasia. Hewlett was the engineering mind and Packard the manager, a division they kept for decades as HP grew into electronic test instruments, calculators and computers. Their informal management style became a model for the companies around them.