Hewlett [Interrupts]: Promoters.
Packard: Promoters. This was before World War II, and his theory was that all harmonicas are made in Germany, so there would be a great opportunity for someone to have a non-German made harmonica. The question was, How do you tune a harmonica?
Hewlett: At some point, we decided that we were going to try and form a company.
Packard: Well, I think it was a sequence of things. As I recall, it was around Christmastime, because I think we took pictures of this oscillator in the living room sitting there, and we put together a set of specifications and a little sales pitch that Lu typed out for us. Then we got a list of potential customers and right about Christmas or the beginning of 1939, we sent those letters out. In a couple of weeks, we got some orders back. . . . One order I remember had a check enclosed. I think that's what convinced us this was going to go.
Hewlett: Do you remember how we priced it?
Packard: Yes. [Laughter] We didn't have any idea about the pricing in those days, and I guess we started out with $54.50, wasn't it?
Hewlett: $54.40 or fight.
Packard: And then we found out that we really hadn't understood the economics very well, and we raised the price again, and fortunately, I think we learned very quickly that we could raise the price. It was a good value, and that was a lesson that was very important, because it made it possible for us to finance the company as we went along.
Hewlett: Because at that time, as you remember, electronics wasn't quite called that yet. It was limited to just a few fields: communications; entertainment, which really meant radio and phonographs; the motion pictures; and geophysical work.
I also remember we started out baking our panels in Lu's oven. Then we decided we wanted our own oven, so we bought an old refrigerator unit because it had good insulation. What we did not realize, though, was that it was kapok insulation. So when we heated this thing one night, it got so hot that it caught fire. Someone driving down El Camino saw these flames coming up in the back of the building, and the fire department came and put it out. Otherwise, we would have lost the whole works.
"The Valley was still greenhouses and onion fields." -- Larry Kaplan
A child of the '60s, 36-year-old Larry Kaplan helped found Activision Inc., and made a $3.6-million fortune -- on paper -- when the company went public in 1983. Then he retired -- and lost most of the money five months later when the stock plummeted before he could sell out. Since last February, he has worked as a programmer at Silicon Graphics Inc., in Mountain View.There, he gleefully spent at least an hour of our time together demonstrating the marvels of his new color monitor. He still wears jeans and has a beard, but he no longer throws the I Ching to foretell the future.
My career history runs parallel to the history of Silicon Valley: There hasn't been foresight, planning, or thought. It was even an accident that I became a programmer. I started off in Berkeley the spring quarter [of 1968], but all the courses I wanted started in the fall. I had some adviser who said, There's this new computer science course that just started, and they need students to fill up the courses. So I took beginning FORTRAN, CS 1 -- Computer Science 1 -- the first time it'd been taught.
I came to Silicon Valley by pure luck, too. I saw ads in the paper, wrote a resume, and interviewed at a company called CSI, and I got my first job, $11,000 a year as a programmer in August of '74. The Valley was still greenhouses and onion fields. CSI was just a little company, 110 people maybe, down in Sunnyvale. They designed, engineered, and manufactured the hardware, wrote the software, everything. So I got to know all the facets of the company, all the stuff that school doesn't teach you.
The first personal computer, the Altair, was announced in January 1975 on the cover of Popular Electronics. I bought mine in the first Byte Shop as soon as they opened the doors Monday morning. I played around with it a lot. Meanwhile, my manager and I weren't getting along, because I was more interested in games than research work. I was doing research until five o'clock, and after that, I'd do the games. "No," he said. "If you're going to stay here, why don't you do more work?"
In mid-1976, Atari was advertising for a programmer. I knew they had a game room. We could play games for free. I never wanted anything more in my life than to work for this company. They wouldn't tell me what the job was. It was a secret division developing this secret product. They gave me the job because of the Altair. They said, "He's got a home computer. He must be good." And it turned out the job was writing games.
Then, of course, it just took off. Not right away. We struggled for a while. We wrote cartridges. We hired some people. We were having a great time just writing games. As soon as we finished one, it went into production. Everything we discovered was like a new trick, a new way of doing something. But there were management hassles. The company's growing too fast. It's gone from 200 people to 4,000 in a couple of years, all these new people are coming -- new marketing people, etc. -- not getting along. It's a classic Silicon Valley fight, a microcosm. Engineers versus marketing. Sales versus engineers. Manufacturers versus engineers.
Then the original four ringleader software-game builders decide we want royalties. Management said forget it. Work your hours and get your check. You artistic types think you're wonderful. I could replace you easily. So we decided to start our own company.
"People change jobs here like you change shoes." -- Ron Beach
Ron Beach is the director of classified advertising for the San Jose Mercury News.
The San Jose Mercury News ranked first in employment advertising linage in the United States in 1983 and 1984. That would equate to a world figure as well.
