Business Notes PHILANTHROPY

David Packard already ranks among the most successful American entrepreneurs in history. From now on, the lanky, 6-ft. 4-in. chairman and co-founder of the Hewlett-Packard electronics corporation will also be counted among the most generous. In the tradition of such industrialists as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, Packard, 75, has disclosed that he will give more than $2 billion -- most of his fortune -- to charity.

Starting this year, Packard will gradually donate his 450,000 Hewlett- Packard shares to the foundation he and his wife established in 1964 to support scientific and health research and a broad range of social programs. The spectacular giveaway will transform the relatively small David and Lucile Packard Foundation (1987 assets: $145 million) into one of the largest such U.S. institutions, nearly half the size of the top-ranked Ford Foundation (assets: $4.7 billion).

Packard and fellow Stanford Graduate William Hewlett started their company on a $595 bankroll in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage a generation before the area's high-tech breeding ground earned the name Silicon Valley. Early on, Packard said, he and his late wife decided to turn their growing fortune into a great foundation. Today their four children supervise the foundation's projects in archaeology, marine biology and other areas. Among Packard's ideas: using $20 million of the endowment's earnings for such programs as employment training and funding for black colleges.