Hackborn may have been Dave Packard's favorite, but Fiorina, at 47, is a flawed vessel.

FORBES: VOTE CARLY

The book's portrayal of HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is intriguing, too.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Still, all but one of the Hewlett-Packard directors with close ties to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, including Perkins and Keyworth, are now gone.

NEWYORKER: The Kona Files

Case in Point A decade ago, Hewlett-Packard, the legendary garage startup of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, was suddenly in a bad spot facing middle age.

FORBES: Digital rules

In fact, just about the only people in all of the electronics industry who didn't buy into the Packard garage myth were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

FORBES: Great Garages

But Dave Packard wouldn't hear of it.

FORBES: Digital rules

You can picture the teams of executives holed up in conference rooms at HP headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, just down the street from the iconic garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched the company more than 70 years ago and planted the seed that became Silicon Valley.

FORBES: HP's $12 Billion Conference Call

Silicon Valley's been doing this since Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built an oscilloscope for Walt Disney. (It was used in the movie Fantasia.) The births of Intel in the 1960s, Apple in the 1970s, Sun and Cisco in the 1980s and Ebay and Google in the 1990s occurred when cutting-edge technology was diligently transformed into products.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The difficulty of CEO selection is evident at Hewlett-Packard, where several boards have been forced to oust every CEO since founders Bill and Dave, ostensibly left active management.

FORBES: The Risks Of CEO Succession

Readers of Packard's 1995 autobiography, The HP Way, or Michael Malone's 2007 book Bill and Dave will find familiar vignettes.

FORBES: Magazine Article