BBC Goes Inside a Garage

~ Cheryl

But not just any old garage. This is one of those famous Silicon Valley garages, specifically the one used by Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard before their company got big enough to need proper offices. Bay Area folks and computer nerds can go here to read more.

4 thoughts on “BBC Goes Inside a Garage”

  2. As the article says, they get 40,000 visitors every year, which is quite impressive given that all you are allowed to do is gaze through the gate at a locked garage door.

  3. It’s in a neighborhood zoned single-family residential with many neighbors actively interested in keeping it that way, so they aren’t allowed to run any kind of business, or even routinely admit people for free. Occasionally letting in a small group (like the BBC crew) is OK, and they have gotten permission from the planning board to have slightly larger events once a year or so.

    I’m skeptical of that 40,000 a year figure, since that’s about 12 people an hour during daylight. I’ve walked by the place several times — it’s only 8 blocks from my house — and I’ve never seen anybody else looking down the driveway, reading the historical marker, etc.

    I did like the picture in the BBC story labeled “how it looked 70 years ago”, with the little flat panel display visible in the corner. If I were “decorating” it I would be sorely tempted to quietly tuck an HP-35 calculator in a corner of the workbench.

    Other neighborhood sci-tech connections: 3 blocks from the HP garage, at the corner of Channing and Emerson, is the place where Lee De Forest invented the triode vacuum tube 100 years ago. The actual building no longer exists, but it was the lab of the Federal Telegraph Company. When vacuum tubes made arc transmitters obsolete, the FTC gave Berkeley prof E.O. Lawrence the resulting surplus giant magnet; Lawrence used the magnet to invent the cyclotron, which is why we have elements named “Lawrencium”, “Berkelium”, and “Californium”.

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