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The HP Garage, Palo Alto, CA
37° 26Ⲡ35.05ⳠN, 122° 9Ⲡ17.32ⳠW
367 Addison Avenue
A common piece of Silicon Valley mythology is the company that started in a garage and went on to become the Next Big Thing. But some companies really did start in garages: Apple was started in Steve Jobsâs parentsâ garage in Los Altos, California, and Googleâs founders rented a garage in Menlo Park, California, and worked for five months in it (and in the ownerâs hot tub).
But almost 40 years before either of Googleâs founders was born, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard decided to âmake a run for itâ and try to build their own business. They found a house for rent, complete with a garage. Dave Packard and his wife, Lucile, lived in the ground-floor apartment, and Bill Hewlett got to tinker in the garage and sleep in a shed.
That was 1938, and Hewlett and Packardâs first product was a simple audio oscillator dubbed the Model 200A, to make it sound like the newly formed Hewlett-Packard (or HP) had been in business for a while. The Model 200A undercut and outperformed other oscillators on the market, and Walt Disney became an early, happy customer. The cheap audio oscillator was put together in the garage with the paintwork on its case baked on in the oven tended by Lucile ...
