Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded one of the world's greatest companies and established a way of giving that remains with us today.

In 1977, after spending 40 years building one of America's great corporate powerhouses, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard retired from the company they founded. Few men have had the vision and drive to successfully guide a startup from the dusty environs of a garage to the hallowed hallways of the Fortune 500. It was a partnership that would last a lifetime, beginning in the crude and bulky world of vacuum tubes and oscillators and ending in the very frontier of the modern digital age. Through it all, Hewlett and Packard defined a culture and a technology that would become synonymous with Silicon Valley.

In his book, Bill and Dave, which has been excerpted below, author Michael Malone tells us what happened when Hewlett and Packard gave up their leadership positions at HP and opened the next chapter of their lives--creating a legacy of philanthropy that remains with us today.-The Editors

Now, for the first time in nearly forty years, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were no longer in day-to-day control of the company that bore their name. They were the Grand Old Men of High Tech now, and in the years to come it would be a rare executive who didn't at least attempt to follow the path Bill and Dave marked ahead for them.

But if Hewlett and Packard were old men now by Silicon Valley standards, by the actuarial tables they were still comparatively young. How would they spend the years they had left to them? Would they remain partners, or, after all of those years, would they go their separate ways? Would they withdraw from public life, or immerse themselves even more deeply into it?

But the biggest, unspoken, question of all was whether Bill and Dave would devote the rest of their lives to actions that would further burnish their reputations - or would they wander off into strange obsessions or misuse of their great wealth that would cast an eternal shadow on the sterling careers that had come before?

The answer, as those closest to the two men would have predicted, is that in the years that followed their retirement from Hewlett-Packard, Bill and Dave created a legacy of good works that in the minds of many is even more illustrious than their working years at HP. In the process, once again, they set a professional standard (and a capstone career step) that those who followed could only look upon with awe . . .and struggle to match.

A constant refrain from non-profits and the media in Silicon Valley beginning in the early 1990s was that the Valley's newly-minted tycoons had not given back to the community even a tiny fraction of what they had taken out.

It wasn't long before the national media picked up the story, suggesting that high tech's billionaires were greater cheapskates than their counterparts in the rest of the business world - and especially in comparison to the great tycoon philanthropists - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Getty, etc - of the past.

The one counter-example the media used as a cudgel against all of the other techies was, of course, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. By then, Bill and Dave, measured by the size of their benefactions and the funds in their foundations, were among the greatest philanthropists in U.S. history. Why, columnists asked, couldn't high tech's other CEOs be as enlightened as Hewlett and Packard?

Interestingly, the person who leapt to the defense of these purported tightwads was Bill Hewlett. When asked by the San Jose Mercury-News why others weren't following him and Dave into good works, Hewlett replied that they were being judged unfairly.

Give them time, Hewlett said, you forget that Dave and I didn't start giving away our fortune until we were 50 years old. Before that, we were too busy running our company. Just wait: they'll come around, too.

Hewlett was, in fact, being both disingenuous and calculating in making such a statement. Though he and Dave didn't really begin the philanthropic work for which they became famous until after they had retired from HP, both had been making donations of time and money, especially to Stanford, almost from the day they left the garage. As early as 1964, the Packard's founded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation with $100,000 of their money. Two years later, the Hewlett's followed suit with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Both men were, in fact, in their early 50s at the time, which enabled Hewlett to be truthful in his diplomatic remark a quarter-century later. But 1964 was also just seven years after Hewlett-Packard went public - and given the much more accelerated pace to IPO [initial public offering] in the personal computer and dot.com eras, that would have required the next generation of Valley leaders to step up to charity bar in their early forties. Not many did.

But if Bill Hewlett was publicly cutting the younger generations some slack, his secondary message gave them no excuse: you will become philanthropists at some point in your career. It is your duty. And that, of course, was also one of the HP Objectives: Responsibility to Society. Hewlett's remark, often repeated, "Never stifle a generous impulse," underscored the challenge to his professional peers.

Hewlett and Packard also gave those that followed an example of just how big that contribution should be: not merely enough to impress people without great wealth, but commensurate with one's actual wealth. The Packard Foundation, for example, funded during David's and Lucile's lifetimes with more than $1 billion, swelled after their deaths to more than $4.7 billion, with an annual grant budget of more than $500 million. Forty years after it was founded, the Foundation was still the 6th wealthiest institution of its kind in the United States.

Through this legacy, Dave Packard also continued to surprise. Anyone who dismissed him as a relic of another time, or merely a reactionary business tycoon, had to explain the fact that Dave and Lu decided to target their good works at such non-traditional targets as population control, environmental protection, pre-school education and universal health insurance for children. Once again, Dave Packard had proven to be more radical than the radicals he dismissed as deluded dreamers. It was his last lesson on how to make even the most ambitious dreams real.

As for Bill Hewlett, he and Flora created a foundation that would end up, four decades later, with that endless symmetry between the two business partners, almost exactly the same size. It too was dedicated to global environmental and education issues; but it also added global development and, showing Flora's influence, the performing arts. [Their children would go on to create another institution, the Flora Foundation, dedicated to supporting programs in the spirit of their mother's interests and her life.]

With the creation of the two foundations, Bill and Dave also took the last step in what would be regarded as the ultimate high tech career: garage entrepreneur, start-up executive, company president, CEO of a public corporation, billionaire tycoon, government official, global diplomat, and world-class philanthropist. They did it first, they did it best (that is, they had triumphed at each step), and in the process had, largely unconsciously, thrown down the challenge for all to follow. It was a ridiculously high bar to set, but that didn't keep hundreds from trying.

It is also impossible to quantify the full impact that Hewlett's and Packard's own philanthropic activities, and those who emulated them, have had on the world over the last half-century. The more than $1 billion their two foundations have given away is only a fraction of the overall impact of their example on those who emulated them. By making philanthropy of some kind an almost mandatory next career step for high tech tycoons, Bill and Dave have likely already influenced ten times that amount to be given to good works around the world - the single most important, non-governmental source of philanthropy of the last half-century.

Not everyone followed, but those who shared Hewlett's and Packard's attitudes almost always did. At Intel, for example, all three of the troika who built that company ultimately created major foundations. One, Gordon Moore, the Valley figure most like Bill Hewlett, endowed a foundation (also dedicated to environmental causes) nearly as large as Hewlett's and Packard's. William T. Coleman, founder of BEA software, would credit the example of Bill and Dave when he gave $250 million - the largest gift in the history of higher education - to the University of Colorado.

But it was the dot.com generation of entrepreneurs who really took Hewlett's and Packard's example to heart. The real innovators were Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll at eBay, who didn't even wait to go public, but set aside stock options in the very first days of the company with the express purpose of creating a corporate foundation at the IPO. They would go on to create their own large personal foundations. Their model, in turn, was adopted by Sergey Brinn and Larry Page, the two founders of Google - and when that company went public, it instantly also endowed a billion dollar foundation.

But, ironically, the one tycoon who most closely followed Hewlett's and Packard's lead was also the one who appeared least like them, the richest private citizen in the world: Bill Gates. Though little noticed, Gates' philanthropic career has resembled a supercharged version of Bill's and Dave's: from major grants to Stanford's engineering program to the creation, with his wife Melinda, of America's largest foundation ($28 billion) - in this case dedicated to the especially ambitious dream of ending AIDS in Africa.