HP’s Garage Tour, Birthplace of Silicon Valley

Filed under: Hp Compaq

Wednesday
Mar 19,2008

The Birthplace of Silicon Valley is a 12′ x 18′ garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in 1939. I got a rare opportunity to visit the garage that served as HP’s headquarters when it was a tiny startup.

HP Archivist Anna Mancini hosted the tour and I got a chance to hang out with bloggers from Gear Live, Hardware Geeks and Windows Now. Afterwards we had dinner and talked about computers, gadgets and blogging with part of the HP marketing team.

I’ve heard some of the lore and seen pictures of HP’s garage before, but seeing it in person made was awesome. It’s still hard to believe that HP got its start in such a humble little garage with just $500 in cash and a used drill press.

We didn’t move around too much since the former HP headquarters is about the size of my bedroom, but Anna provided a ton of interesting info. Here are a few factoids she shared:

- The garage was behind Dave and Luicile Packard’s small Palo Alto apartment, as was a small shed, where Hewlett slept.

- The company’s name was decided by a coin toss. If it landed Packard’s way, the company would’ve been called Packard-Hewlett.

- The best job prospects for Stanford-trained engineers in the 1930’s were on the east coast. Packard moved to New York to work for GE after graduating from Stanford.

- The company’s first product was an audio oscillator, which was designed and hand made in the garage. The desk in the pictures below was the assembly line.

- HP’s first big break came when Disney ordered several audio oscillators to prep for the release of Fantasia, the first motion picture to feature stereophonic sound.

I took these pics with my new second Nikon D300. It’s been rock solid, unlike my first Nikon D300. I used Adobe Lightroom to get the old-photo styling. Click on the pics for high-res versions.