The garage is an important cultural place in American society. Place to play music, serve as a DIY workshop, bodybuilding room or games, all films and series constantly show open garage doors to another world. And it is logically that some of the largest technological companies have emerged and have remarkably recognized Silicon Valley.
Because the garage symbolizes the sobriety of the beginnings, the passion, the side of the hands and the resulting vision. The myths created around innovations for a perfect narrative of the Californian dream.
Hewlett-Packard garage, Silicon Valley’s cradle
Located in 367 Addison Avenue, this small green and brown garage at the bottom of a corridor is more discreet, on a street with Palo Alto equally quiet. However, the cradle of the Silicon Valley is considered. A dish placed in front of the house that stretches it attests. This is where at the end of the 1930s, David Packard, then occupying the first floor apartment with his wife Lucile, and William Hewlett, his university member, will create a high -precision audio oscillator called HP 200A.
The two men know themselves of Stanford, where they studied electrical engineering. And it was his teacher who encouraged them to stay in California instead of responding to the technological sirens of the east coast.
Then they refine your device used to test the sound equipment. And his first buyer in 1939 will be none other than Disney who wants to try the cinemas that wish to project his film. Fancy. A company called Hewlett-Packard is born. Hewlett-Packard and No Packard-Hewlett, because the two men played the right or face.
Hewlett and Packard stay a year in the garage to search, try, develop and manufacture their team, before moving. In 2005, the garage bought $ 1.7 million five years earlier, was restored by the HP company and the classified historical site.
The Steve Jobs garage, the iconic myth
This is one of Silicon Valley’s best known stories and yet it can be mainly of brand’s mythology. Three men occupied the small premises belonging to the Jobs family in 2066 Crist Dr in the Altos. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, who will quickly retire from the case and that story tends to forget, will create what will become Apple.
The legend says they have designed Apple I and Apple II, but it was nothing. Apple’s first computer will be assembled there, but Steve Wozniak did the prototype at home, and even in HP, where he worked at that time. The garage served especially as a logistics basis and to maintain the idea that everything had begun there. The site is classified today as a historical heritage of California, but the house belongs to people.
Google’s garage, Antre’s potas
He is the only one of the three that does not belong to any of the founders of the company that saw the birth. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet there to think about their research engine idea, it is actually in Susan Wojcicki, former Stanford comrade, whom they put on squatting. I even praise him $ 1700 per month this garage of 232 Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park to help the future YouTube chief to pay his mortgage.
It will be Google’s first direction. The place then houses some computers, a board and a coffee maker. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were only five months there, between the end of 1998 and early 1999, with five other employees before moving on to Google’s first real premises to Palo Alto. In 2006, Google bought the garage to be a symbolic place in its history.
Other large companies such as Microsoft and Amazon were also born in garages, far from Silicon Valley. Albuquerque (New Mexico) in 1975, Bill Gates will welcome Paul Allen in him to design his first computer and projects that will give birth to a computer giant. Jeff Bezos will administer his first online bookstore in 1994 from his garage in Bellevue, in the state of Washington, after leaving his job in New York to start on the Internet. In his early days, Michael Dell has also operated since his garage in Austin (Texas) to sell and design his computers.
Source: BFM TV
