Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, tells an interesting story about doing business with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. This is a segment from the full unscripted interview.

Douglas Engelbart 1995 Interview
Interview date: February 6, 1995
Interviewer: John McLaughlin, Historian and President of the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

Interviewer's question: 
"Entrepreneurs that you really admire? Bill Hewlett's name?"

Transcript:
"I have some stories about twenty some, thirty years ago in the valley that when I did my thesis at Berkeley I ended up with ten to twenty patents that were in a new phenomenon and one thing I did was go to Hewlett-Packard and see if they would like to buy them. So Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were still very active in that so in that kind of research so they’d said yes. They’d buy a package of them from me and Bill Hewlett explained to me a whole bunch about the business activity. And Dave Packard while I was talking to him I said, “One thing I was worried about is I’m going to keep on inventing and I haven’t even got it all tied down yet. And so the package that’s there isn’t all that’s here in my head.” He says, “Well, I tell you. I’ll make you a deal. For the first six months everything you can write down will be yours part of that deal and after that they’re ours.” Very pragmatic. He won me over right then. But the funny part of that was as I was leaving I was talking to the research director and said, “ I’m assuming that Hewlett-Packard will go into digital techniques for their instrumentation and likely in digital processing on the computers.” “Not a chance.” So that whole thing fell through right then. Part of history and there’s more kinds of things like that that are interesting to tell too."

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