On this day of August 18, 1947, Hewlett-Packard Co. was 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.
Goes to show that even the lumbering giants of our day had humble beginnings.