David Packard in the context of "HP Labs"

The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard (/ˈhjuːlɪt ˈpækərd/ HEW-lit PAK-ərd) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, California. Growing to become an influential high-tech powerhouse at the heart of Silicon Valley, the company was known for its progressive business philosophy known as the HP Way. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components, as well as software and related services, to consumers, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and fairly large companies, including customers in government sectors. At its peak in 2011, HP employed 350,000 people around the globe. The company officially split into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. in 2015.

HP initially produced a line of electronic test and measurement equipment. It won its first big contract in 1938 to provide the HP 200B, a variation of its first product, the HP 200A low-distortion frequency oscillator, for Walt Disney's production of the 1940 animated film Fantasia, which allowed Hewlett and Packard to formally establish the Hewlett-Packard Company on July 2, 1939. The company grew into a multinational corporation widely respected for its products. HP was the world's leading PC manufacturer from 2007 until the second quarter of 2013 when Lenovo moved ahead of HP. HP specialized in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software, and delivering services. Major product lines included personal computing devices, enterprise and industry standard servers, related storage devices, networking products, software, and a range of printers and other imaging products. The company directly marketed its products to households, small- to medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, as well as via online distribution, consumer-electronics, and office-supply retailers, software partners, and major technology vendors. It also offered services and a consulting business for its products and partner products.

William Redington Hewlett (/ˈhjuːlɪt/ HEW-lit; May 20, 1913 – January 12, 2001) was an American engineer and the co-founder, with David Packard, of the Hewlett-Packard Company (HP).

The HP Way, also known as the Packard Way, or simply the Way by employees, was a progressive business philosophy implemented at Hewlett-Packard (HP) by its founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard from the 1940s through the early 2000s. It was a form of management by objectives, which emphasizes teamwork, innovation, fiscal responsibility, and morality ("obligations to society"). It involved collaboration between management and the labor force and infused HP's corporate governance, and was a significant factor in HP’s employee loyalty.

Bill Hewlett and David Packard were initially inspired by the Stanford University engineering professor Fred Terman. The HP Way first appeared formally in 1957 as a set of six written objectives for the company, with a seventh added in 1966.

The HP 200A Audio Oscillator, first built in 1938, was the first product made by Hewlett-Packard and was manufactured in David Packard's garage in Palo Alto, California.

It was a low-distortion audio oscillator used for testing sound equipment. It used the Wien bridge oscillator circuit, that had been the subject of Bill Hewlett's masters thesis. It was also the first such commercial oscillator to use a simple light bulb as the temperature-dependent resistor in its feedback network. The light bulb was an inexpensive and effective automatic gain control that not only kept the oscillator output amplitude constant, but it also kept the oscillator's loop gain near unity. The latter is a key technique for achieving a low distortion oscillator. Earlier, Larned Meacham had used light bulbs in bridge circuits to stabilize and linearize oscillators in 1938.