David Woodley Packard

The younger Packard has dedicated his life to the study of the past, not as in previous months or years, but as in millennia. The former classics professor is a devoted student of ancient civilizations, historical documents, classical music and, fast-forwarding a few centuries, the films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. He did once invent a computer, the Ibycus, but its purpose was to translate ancient languages for scholarly research. The irony, of course, is that his late father, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, was among the handful of Silicon Valley visionaries who practically invented the future. What David W. Packard does share with his father is a commitment to philanthropy. During his 35 years on the board of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the son launched two of his own charitable ventures, the Stanford Theatre Foundation and the Packard Humanities Institute. The latter was transformed in July 1999 from an obscure academic venture to one of the nation’s 50 richest foundations when it received 11 percent of the Packard Foundation’s holdings, worth roughly $1.5 billion.