One of the most memorable days of my life was a long afternoon in the early spring of 1982 spent in the company of Bill Hewlett and David Packard at HP headquarters in Palo Alto. Bruce Davidson, no small potatoes in the world of photography, and I had gone there to photograph and interview them for a story in a fancy corporate magazine called World that I edited for many years. Both men were 69 at the time but active and enthusiastic. Packard was still chairman of the board of HP and Hewlett, who had retired, had just returned from a weekend of skiing at Taos, one of the toughest mountains in the west.

True to reputation, Packard was the outgoing talker of the pair, fondly recalling memories of the early days when they launched the company that bears their name with $538 in working capital in the garage behind the Packards’ rented house at 367 Addison Avenue, near Stanford University, and now considered “the birthplace of Silicon Valley.”

Hewlett was more the strong, silent type, an aw shucks Jimmy Stewart kind of guy, whose modesty concealed one of the great technical minds of American engineering and a deep and abiding humanism that Packard shared. This is the man, remember, who forbade the locking of storage rooms because he didn’t want employees to think management didn’t trust them. Trust was the sub-text of almost everything they said that day.

I remember two anecdotes that provide a lot of insight into their characters. Packard recalled that in 1939 he had gone to the local branch of a well-known bank to ask for a loan of $500 and was told that he would have to pledge the fledgling company’s receivables as collateral. He went instead to Wells Fargo and was given the loan on “trust.” It was one of the best investments Wells Fargo ever made and the other bank never saw a penny of H-P’s money as long as Packard was alive.

Bill Hewlett told me how in 1971 he had commissioned a marketing study to determine if engineers would give up their old slide rules for a small, pocket-sized device that performed all of the calculations they needed electronically. The marketers came back with the a decisive ”no.” None of the potential users they surveyed could see much future for such a device. Hewlett tossed the study in his waste bin, launched the HP-35 Scientific Calculator, the world’s first handheld scientific calculator, and the rest–as they say–is history.

What struck me most about watching the two of them together was how much they clearly trusted, respected and, yes, loved each other. More than 40 years after joining their talents and fates together, they had the kind of easy rapport that you see in men who have seen combat together and survived to tell the tale.

Hewlett and Packard became rich and successful by treating their employees the way they treated each other. “The HP Way” was not just a slogan. This is the company that invented many of HR practices that are now considered standard– from profit sharing to maternity leaves and extension of catastrophic illness coverage and job protection to the open door, open office environment.

At a time when the business world is taking a lot of heat, much of it well-deserved, for greed and excess, when our most successful entrepreneurs are spending years litigating with former classmates over ideas they may or may not have stolen, fighting with their partners over who has the biggest stateroom (by a few inches) on the company jet, or behaving like spoiled two-year-olds at NBA games because their team is losing, it's good to remember these remarkable gentlemen and the values they represented.