Hewlett was an inventor, an innovative manager, a philanthropist, and a legend of American business and the high-tech industry. He was known as a gentle, witty, and inquisitive man.

Dyslexia forced Hewlett to memorize schoolwork, and this apparently developed his memory powers to the point that he seemed to memorize everything. He was "a sponge for information," according to Karen Lewis, HP’s corporate archivist. "He knows more about more things than anyone I've ever met," says John Young, former chief executive of HP.

He and his HP co-founder, David Packard, were considered the fathers of Silicon Valley.

Hewlett was born May 20, 1913 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father was a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, then at Stanford. Hewlett attended Stanford, graduating in 1934. He received a Master’s degree from MIT in 1936, and an electrical engineering degree from Stanford in 1939.

Hewlett studied under Frederick Terman, who originally suggested that industry and academia should cooperate for their mutual benefit.

While in grad school, Hewlett invented a resistance-capacity audio oscillator, a tool for testing sound equipment. Terman advised Hewlett and his Stanford co-student David Packard that the oscillator could make a good foundation for a business.

The pair took his advice and, borrowing startup capital of $538, set up shop in Packard’s garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The garage is now a state historical landmark, with a sign designating it as "the birthplace of Silicon Valley." Hewlett won the coin flip that determined whose name came first in the company’s name.

Although the oscillator eventually reduced the cost of measurement equipment by 75%, the fledgling company’s first customer was reportedly the Walt Disney Company, which used eight of the oscillators in making the film Fantasia.

During World War II, HP produced radar, sonar, radio, nautical and aviation equipment.

In 1969, Hewlett challenged his scientists to create a computer that could fit in his shirt pocket. The result was the HP-35, the world’s first handheld scientific calculator. Its high cost caused skepticism in the company about its marketability, but Hewlett insisted, and the HP-35 sold 100,000 units the first year.

But despite his engineering successes and the growth of the company, Hewlett was most proud of his contributions to the management style that became known as the "HP Way," but which Hewlett originally called "management by walking around."

In essence, the HP Way calls for trusting employees; encouraging experimentation even when mistakes are made; helping employees to be creative; have an open environment that encourages employees to walk into their bosses’ offices and discuss ideas; allow employees to make decisions. The company also pioneered with a profit-sharing plan, flexible work hours, catastrophic health insurance, and employee stock ownership.

The company drew researchers, engineers, and teachers from institutions like MIT and Bell Labs. Employees often took their work home with them, discussing ideas at parties and on golf courses.

One story says Hewlett went to the plant on a weekend to pick up a microscope, only to find the storage bins locked. He smashed the lock, and left a note ordering the bins to be left open so employees could take home equipment to experiment with.

Another story has 12-year-old Steve Jobs calling Hewlett at home to ask for spare parts. When he stopped laughing, Hewlett gave him the parts and his first summer job at HP. Jobs has often acknowledged a debt to Hewlett and to HP.

He even escorted competitors on tours of the HP plant. "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," he said.

In 1970, when the company experienced difficulty and needed to cut its payroll by 10 percent, Hewlett declined to lay off anyone, and instead ordered that all employees, himself included, would take Fridays off without pay for six months.

The HP Way has become a commonplace practice at high-tech companies, including Agilent Technologies (an HP spin-off), Silicon Graphics Inc., Sun Microsystems, and Tandem Computers.

Hewlett and Packard together gave more than $300 million to Stanford. "This was equivalent to the financial contributions the Stanfords themselves had made, adjusted for inflation," said Stanford professor James Gibbons. But he refused to allow Stanford to name any buildings after him during his lifetime, according to his oldest son, Walter.

Hewlett and his wife established the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which will receive the bulk of his estate and become one of the world’s richest foundations.

He helped create the Palo Alto-Stanford Hospital, and was a Stanford trustee.

"The story of Bill Hewlett is the story of extraordinary contribution, extraordinary humanity and caring.'," said HP CEO Carly Fiorina.

Gross got an amateur radio license in 1934 when he was 16. A few years later, while still in high school, he invented a portable, handheld, radio transmitter-receiver. He called it a "walkie-talkie."

The Office of Strategic Services, precursor to the CIA, noticed the device and recruited Gross. He led the effort to develop the two-way air-to-ground communication used behind enemy lines during World War II.

After the war, he started Gross Electronics to design and manufacture communications products. His concept of a miniaturized two-way radio inspired cartoonist Chester Gould, with Gross’s permission, to create Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio.

In 1948 he successfully lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to create the Personal Radio license spectrum, which became citizen band radio.

In 1950 he helped develop the first paging system in New York’s Jewish Hospital.

During the 1950s and 1960s Gross received several patents on portable and cordless telephone devices.

"If you have a cordless telephone or a cellular telephone or a walkie-talkie or beeper, you've got one of my patents," Gross once said. He added that if his patents on those technologies hadn't run out, he'd have been a millionaire several times over.

His first invention of the telephone pager was intended for medical personnel. He took it to a medical convention in Philadelphia, but most of the health-care professionals felt the beeping device would upset their patients. Some doctors also felt it could interrupt their golf games.

In the 1950s he tried to interest telephone companies in mobile telephones, but Bell Telephone wasn’t interested and other companies followed their lead.

Gross was born in Toronto in 1918 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He became captivated with radio at the age of nine, when he came across a radio operator while on a steamship cruising the Great Lakes.

Shortly afterward, he convinced his father to buy him a crystal radio. He began to scavenge in junkyards, looking for parts.

His obsession led to his successful career, which he acknowledged without bitterness came too early.

"If I still had the patents on my inventions, Bill Gates would have to stand aside for me," he often said with a smile.

Dell Computer has stated it is no longer licensed to install Windows 95 on new computers, and Microsoft no longer offers Windows 95 in the volume licensing agreements it offers to larger businesses. It is now available only in the OEM channel, to small manufacturers, dealers, and distributors.

Windows 95 was one of Microsoft’s most successful operating systems. Crowds lined up before midnight to be first to get it, while the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up was the theme song for commercials.

Windows 95 offered a very different interface from Windows 3. It can be argued that all Windows versions since have been mere upgrades to Windows 95, which may be the cause of somewhat lackluster sales for later versions.

Many businesses are still standardized on Windows 95, but Microsoft would like them to migrate to Windows 2000. Windows 2000 sales have lagged, according to industry analysts, which may have contributed to the slowdown in PC sales.

The next version of Office, Office XP (for "experience"), is not compatible with Windows 95, which is seen as another Microsoft technique to encourage upgrades to Windows 2000.

When he left the company in 1984, the company had moved to Bellevue, Washington, and still had fewer than 500 employees.

McDonald is now back at Microsoft, as a result of Microsoft’s acquisition of an electronic publishing company called Design Intelligence, and he has been issued badge number 00001.

McDonald graduated from Lakeside private school in Seattle a year behind Bill Gates. McDonald, Gates, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, another Lakeside graduate, used to race through the streets of Albuquerque to a theater or restaurant. McDonald had a supercharged Saab Sonnet, while Gates had his well-known Porsche 911.

McDonald was hired to help adapt BASIC to new microprocessors. He went on to develop a file allocation table, which caught the eye of Tim Paterson, developer of QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). When Microsoft bought QDOS for the new IBM personal computers, it became the standard way to organize data on PCs.

McDonald collaborated with Allen on later versions of MS-DOS. Not long after Allen left Microsoft, McDonald left as well. After some time off, he became the first employee of Asymetrix, a company founded by Allen in 1985.

Ten years later, he became the first employee at Design Intelligence, founded by Mike Orr, another early Microsoft employee.

At Microsoft, he will be working on e-books technology that automatically adjusts electronic content to fit different screen sizes and formats.