A Peek into the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley'
Cox News Service
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
PALO ALTO, Calif. — The old workbench is there, right next to a green Sears Craftsman drill press like the one that was the company's first piece of equipment. There's still paint on the concrete floor, and the partially whitewashed walls have holes in them.
For real estate in one of the most expensive cities in America, it isn't much. But by some measures, it is the most important piece of property in Silicon Valley.
 BOB KEEFE/Cox Newspapers The house on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented the house, the garage and gardener's shed out back for $45 a month. Hewlett-Packard Co. bought the property in 2000 for $1.7 million. It was dedicated as a California Historical Landmark in 1989.  BOB KEEFE/Cox Newspapers More than 40,000 people a year stop for a glimpse of the Palo Alto, Calif. garage that's considered 'The Birthplace of Silicon Valley,' but the building is closed to the public. Anna Mancini, HP's corporate historian, is one of the few to go there regularly.  BOB KEEFE/Cox Newspapers A photo of the founders of Hewlett-Packard Co. sits next to one of the company's first products, an oscillator, in the garage considered 'The Birthplace of Silicon Valley.' More than 40,000 people a year stop for a glimpse of the Palo Alto, Calif. garage even though it is closed to the public.  BOB KEEFE/Cox Newspapers Among the electronics in the HP garage is a ham radio set. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's friendship - and partnership - blossomed in part out of their interest in ham radio.  BOB KEEFE/Cox Newspapers A replica of the desk in the gardener's shed where Bill Hewlett lived while he and partner Dave Packard started HP. |
Seventy years ago this September, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented the 12-by-18-foot garage on Addison Avenue in this quiet residential neighborhood to start Hewlett-Packard Co. and sow the seeds that would blossom into Silicon Valley.
For $45 a month, the partners also got a first-floor apartment in the house out front, where Dave and his wife Lucile lived, and the use of a gardener's shed where bachelor Bill bunked.
But it was the garage that was the most important building of them all.
Today, an estimated 40,000 people a year — geeks on a pilgrimage, sightseers on vacation, entrepreneurs seeking inspiration — stop by for a glimpse.
They come despite the fact that the garage is closed to the public and is tough to find.
"I can assure you a lot of people — people who have lived here their whole lives, people in the industry — have no idea where it is," said Alex Bochannek, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
HP bought the property for $1.7 million in 2000, completed restoration work in 2005, and now uses it mainly for private company events. Last year, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The business that got its start there has grown into one of the world's biggest technology companies, with $108 billion in revenues and employees and operations around the globe, including in Atlanta and Austin, Texas.
In a rare glimpse into high-tech history, the company recently opened the property up to a small group of invited journalists.
Bill Hewlett first came across the property in summer of 1938 after he returned to California from graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained Anna Mancini, HP's corporate archivist.
Hewlett liked that the property was near his and Packard's alma mater, Stanford University, and their mentor, Stanford electronic engineering professor Fred Terman.
But Hewlett "rented this place specifically because the landlord said they could use the garage for a workshop," Mancini said.
Hewlett and Packard founded their company with $538 between them and few ideas other than to start an electronics company. They tinkered with gadgets such as an electronic eye for self-flushing toilets and foul detectors for bowling alleys.
Their first major product, however, was even more obscure: an oscillator used to test sound equipment. Today, a replica of their first model sits on a workbench in the garage, surrounded by wood-handled tools and coffee and tobacco tins filled with nuts and bolts.
The partners didn't invent the oscillator, but theirs was the cheapest. The HP 200A — given that name to make it seem like the partners had been in business for a long time — sold for $71.50. Similar devices sold for $500 back then.
Hewlett and Packard's first big customer was another California corporate icon, Walt Disney Co., which ordered eight of the HP oscillators to use in developing the movie "Fantasia."
Another remnant of HP's roots, a ham radio, sits on another bench in the garage. Hewlett and Packard were both enthusiasts, and their studies at Stanford involved radio and sound frequencies.
Inside the house is a replica Wedgwood stove that the partners used to bake paint onto the metal panels of their oscillators, and the Underwood typewriter Lucile Packard used for company correspondence.
Most of the original equipment was lost in the years after the partners moved out of the garage in 1940 and into a real office and factory about two miles away.
Neither Hewlett nor Packard cared much for preservation, explained Mancini.
"They didn't want to look backward, they were always looking forward," she said.
Indeed, when HP started expressing interest in buying and restoring the garage in the 1980s, both founders grumbled about it. Packard died in 1996 Hewlett died in 2001.
Though the garage today is known as the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley," the moniker may be a bit misleading.
Even before Hewlett and Packard started their company, Russell and Sigurd Varian — brothers and fellow Stanford students — introduced a prototype of the Klystron Tube, a microwave amplifier that was a key to early radar. In a San Francisco laboratory, Philo Farnsworth was perfecting what would become the world's first electronic television.
HP's garage, however, is certainly emblematic of Silicon Valley, said Bochannek of the Computer History Museum. Other modern high-tech giants — Apple Inc. and Google Inc., to name two — also got their start in Silicon Valley garages.
"The importance of the garage is really sort of the mythological anchor of Silicon Valley and what it stands for," Bochannek said. "It shows that even if all you have is a garage and a great idea, you can still make it."