Back when I came out of college as an engineer, Hewlett and Packard were still fully at the helm of Silicon Valley's flagship enterprise.

There was in The Valley at that time, a sense of excitement and innovation due to the plethora of 'home-brew' computer hobbyist who worked as engineers or programmers by day and who — just like hobbyist beer makers — assembled their kludgey computers by night. They were rabid about their hobby, talking and thinking about it round the clock. (We didn't say "24x7" in those days.) These guys were buying mothers boards, and transistors, and components, and buses, and CRTs from Radio Shack, and other small electronic stores, and catalog houses, and each other. It was pretty neat.

Jobs and Wozniak were busy at the time, as well. They were doing what every other engineer and software guy was doing — but doing it with a deadly purpose. They were about to take on the entire mainframe and minicomputer industry — including HP — to see if, just for the hell of it, they could build a desktop computer with a small form factor, that would be easy to use, and fun as well. Just the kind of product that all of the home-brew guys would build if they had the time and passion to do it full time in their own garages.

Jobs and Wozniak succeeded. IBM took notice and got hysterical. They came out with the PC — typical IBM arrogance to use the term "Personal Computer" for the name of their specific product, a term which had been generic for Apple-type desktops that promised to bring magical computing power to the common man. The IMB PC became mainstream, Gates became a bazzilionaire, Intel became a household word, and it was all that Jobs and Wozniak could do to stay on their toes and try and out-guess and out-design Big Blue.

It was a shootout with lots of players jumping in — one that's still going on — and everybody, in many ways, came out a winner. The laptop I'm writing on is a direct descendent of the PC wars and it's great for me — I think.

Meanwhile, back in The Valley, things were moving along at a brisk little clip. A heightened interest in all-things start-up was emerging that hadn't been seen there for decades. The Venture Capital wars were underway. By the mid-1990's, little men in big suits could be spotted here, there, and everywhere. They were listening, and picking, and choosing, and investing, and becoming the behind-the-scenes drivers of a million little companies. If Jobs and Wozniak and their heirs could succeed, there must be other ideas out there just waiting to earn huge returns on the VC dollar. The suits started stopping in on the first Wednesday afternoon of the month to attend the Board Meetings of every start-up in The Valley, and they were demanding satisfaction. They wanted to see the books. They wanted to see the production metrics. They wanted the return on their investments. And they were in a hurry.

But then, so were the founders of the million little start-ups. After all, they wanted their pot of gold, too — sooner, not later. But, when the VCs were not satisfied, they'd take the CEO and founders aside and ask them to move along, while they brought in a new guy more to their liking to run things. And what of all the innovation driving all of these numbers and metrics and returns? Well, the ideas or technologies may or may not have survived the turnover, or takeover, or rollover. So where's the news in all of this? There is none.

And, meanwhile, what of Hewlett and Packard? By the time the PC came along, HP was already a mega-corporation with tens of thousands of employees. It's not really fair to compare that company with the thousands of little start-ups that have characterized Silicon Valley over the last two decades — but compare them, we will.

Hewlett and Packard founded a part of The Valley, which was then, and is still, legendary. They took care of their employees, all of them. If there are cubicles in Silicon Valley, they started at HP, where the folk wisdom said that senior managers didn't need offices; they needed to be among the worker bees listening, and guiding, and not losing track of their own humble beginnings. HP honored, and encouraged, and grew their employees.

I remember at one point, the rumor in The Valley was that, rather than lay people off during a cyclical downturn in the electronics industry, HP asked the employee population to cut back on their hours and to take a reduction in pay in order to avoid having to lay folks off during tight times. But, this whole thing came back to haunt them. The sense emerged that HP was a "safe" place to work, one of the last places where you would find "career employees" in Silicon Valley, and that's not necessarily a good thing at the world's epicenter of innovation.

So, Modern Times caught up with HP. Agilent was spun off, taking with it the descendents of the original product line of Bill and Dave's company. The Cult of Carley was introduced along with private jets and windfall profits and jazzy image — spin doctors. After all, HP didn't want to look stodgy. Shiny cars were whizzing here and there in The Valley and HP needed to be part of it. Downtown San Jose was becoming a showcase of architecture and re-emergent urban renewal and HP needed to be part of it. People are running around with their cell phones, and their PDAs, and their laptops, and gosh they were so much hipper and happier — and HP needed to be part of it. And, of course, there were stock options and hiring bonuses and IPOs and early retirements.

And, then there was reality: increased rent — residential and commercial — litigation over intellectual property, and overtime, and job-hopping, and people sleeping under their desks in 1000s of cubicles across the width and breadth of Silicon Valley attempting to meet their time-to-market deadlines, and dot.coms, and the shakeout, and finally doubt began to set in.

People began leaving The Valley, looking for other locations in the country, or around the world, where they could still afford to live and work and go home for dinner. The Valley began to whither. Clearly, the New Economy wasn't new at all; expectations had way, way exceeded reality, the bubble burst, and the Valley started to follow suit. Bill Hewlett went to his rest and would never see the end of one of the many chapters in the long story that he helped initiate.

So, where are we today? I, for one, think there's hope. I'm betting my money on the hypothesis that the Real Valley will survive; Real Men will survive; HP will survive — it will survive the Cult of Carley, the IPOs, the early retirements, the vacuous lifestyles, and the foolish flailing about looking for the pot of gold.

Why will the Real Valley and the Real Men survive? Because they're built for the ages with their creativity and their restless technical curiosity and their interest in home-brew tinkering. After all, that's what started it all, and eventually everyone returns to their roots. It's just something that Real Men do.

Meanwhile, I think I'll go have a beer.