This Day in History

August 18, 1947

Hewlett-Packard is incorporated

Hewlett-Packard Co. is incorporated, nine years after William Hewlett and David Packard sold their first oscillators from a garage in Palo Alto, where they had set up shop with $538 in capital. They determined the order of their names in the company by a coin toss

Moving from oscillators, the first of which they sold to Disney for the movie Fantasia, the Stanford graduates built one of the world's largest electronics companies

HP and Intel are now co-operating on design of the next generation of microprocessor, the IA-64 architecture.