Gotterdamerung, or the twilight of Carly Fiorino

At one time, giants trod the earth. Lew Terman invented IQ and begat Fred. Fred taught everything to Bill and Dave. But there was Depression in the land, and no jobs for even Stanford grads. So Fred said, never you mind; just build a dozen of those neat signal sources and sell them to Disney to build his empire of Fantasia. Meanwhile, I will build the greatest junior university in the world, with its German motto, "Die Luft de Freiheit Weht", which translates to "Make checks payable to Stanford University". And it was done.

Soon, war came and other giants arose, such as Generous Eccentric, I and BM, and Various Associates. To all of them , Bill and Dave sold wide-ranging signal sources, versatile VTVM's and eventually, reverse Polish calculators. After peace returned, I and B.M. said "Let us build monstrous mainframes and sell them for a megabuck each." Then, the Steves said we could put something on everybody's desk and sell them for $5K. Next Bill and Dave said,"We could do that for a kilobuck if we use that virus-prone and hackable operating system from up north. They got bigger and bigger and then they said,"It is not as much fun as it used to be. Let's split it up and split." So they said,"From now on, H.P. will be computers and peripherals. We will call the instrument division Agilent". Meanwhile, in the city, Lotfi, pronounced "God's Grace" in the original Farsi, was wowing the susceptible with musical tales of dwarf gold miners and the follies of trying to woo 1000 ladies all at once.
Women also became giants. DiFi said "I come not to praise Moscone and Milk, but to bury them", which she did. Moscone got a convention center named after him. Milk got an opera, first staged in Texas of all places. Pamela took over the opera but ran low on money and succumbed to the less critical attraction of grandchildren. Bill and Dave put Carly in charge of HP, who wanted to build her kingdom and sought mergers; remembering the difficulties of Eve from swallowing apples, she aimed higher and swallowed Compag instead. Even so, the computer industry got into the doldrums, and the nations Nibelungs, led by young Hewlett, were saying they could sell lots of ink for the price of one computer. So Carly let out a contract on young Hewlett. But even with a spear sticking in his back, young Hewlett was looking better than Carly, leaving her the choice of (1) Walking the plank (2) riding her horse into the inferno or (3) blowing her severance pay on a race for the U.S. Senate. Thus, once again, we see the wisdom that is stated at the end of the story of Ali Theeva and the Forty Babs, "A mool and his funny are poon sarted"
This leaves but one steroid-free giant on earth, Larry the Oracle, who seems to think he is Pavarotti and thus allowed to keep the citizens of San Jose awake until all hours. Those who could, moved to Tracy, where the sleeping is easy, and hired a bus to take them back to their offices in Silicon Valley. At this writing, Larry was dickering to buy a roundball team that no longer has that center that claimed to have successfully wooed 10,000 ladies. Maybe he will go back to racing sailing boats before he blows his fortune.