$1.7m for a humble start - Hewlett-Packard buys The Garage - Brief Article

Electronics Times,  Oct 23, 2000  

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Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP), has ordered her staff to shell out $1.7m to buy The Garage, the building in which the company was founded and its first products created, and also the officially recognised birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Right now, the move is more than appropriate: the building features in just about every promotional item or commercial that HP has produced since Fiorina took the helm a year ago, from TV adverts to trade show carrier bags.

But Fiorina's move has got Valley dwellers wondering just why HP did not buy this landmark many years before, when it would have been much cheaper. A surprising answer emerged: company founders David Packard and Bill Hewlett hated the place.

It has now been discovered that their disdain for The Garage also ensured that, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Fiorina's two predecessors, John Young and Lewis Platt, steered clear of the unassuming building and the adjoining house at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto.

Packard and Hewlett commonly referred to The Garage as "that worthless shack" when people asked them about their humble beginnings. In 1989, Hewlett went further when the building was recognised by the State of California as a historical landmark (see box). He complained: "Now they can't tear it down!"

It was the place where Hewlett and Packard built their first product, a resistance capacity oscillator for testing sound equipment. It was sold to The Walt Disney Company which used the device in the production of the animated classic Fantasia.

Other products built in The Garage included an electronic foul-line indicator for bowling alleys, an automatic lettuce picker and an electroshock weight reduction machine. The demands of work later forced the founders to split the 216sq ft building into two halves, one for manufacturing and the other for R&D.

Packard and his wife Lucile lived in the downstairs part of the adjoining house, while Hewlett lived in a cottage in the back.

Amid the surprise revelations about its founders' opinions, HP now says it has no immediate plans for the house other than to renovate all the buildings on the site and continue renting them out to tenants.

The Garage remains a `must see' for the increasing number of high technology tourists that Palo Alto now attracts.

In the beginning...

The following inscription marks the site of The Garage on the official landmark plaque, erected by the State of California.

"This garage is the birthplace of the world's first high technology region, Silicon Valley. The idea for such a region originated with Dr Frederick Terman, a Stanford University professor, who encouraged his students to start up their own electronics companies in the area instead of joining established firms in the east.

"The first two students to follow his advice were William R. Hewlett and David Packard who, in 1938, began developing their first product, an audio oscillator, in this garage."

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