Things to Do at Hewlett Packard Garage

The Hewlett Packard Garage sits at 367 Addison Avenue in a quiet Palo Alto residential neighborhood. If you weren't looking, you'd walk right past. It's a one-car wooden garage behind a modest 1905 Craftsman house. Dark green paint, slightly weathered. A small bronze plaque out front declares it the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley.' That's the whole. No gift shop, no docents, no interior access. Just a garage on a leafy street. In 1938, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tinkered here with their first product, a precision audio oscillator. Walt Disney bought eight for Fantasia. Stand at the picket fence and feel the anticlimax. The garage looks like every other garage here. Shingled roof, door slightly off-plumb, re-stained every decade. The house is privately owned. HP restored the property in 2005 and it's a California Historical Landmark. Nobody lives there as a museum. You stay on the sidewalk. The air smells of pittosporum hedges and warm asphalt. You hear birds, the occasional Tesla, not much else. The gap between cultural weight and physical presence does the talking. For pilgrims of tech history, that gap is the point. The plaque mentions the founders' $538 starting capital. Stand exactly where two Stanford engineering grads bet on themselves. Try to square that with the trillion-dollar industry large around you. It takes about four minutes. Most people leave a little quieter than they arrived.

The garage sits at the corner of Addison Avenue and Waverley Street. About a 12-minute walk from the Palo Alto Caltrain station. Head east on University Avenue, then north on Waverley. If you're driving, residential street parking is free but tight on weekdays. The public garages on Bryant Street or Lytton Avenue are a five-minute walk. They cost less than a coffee for an hour. Rideshare drops you right at the curb. Cyclists will find Palo Alto's bike infrastructure as good as anywhere in California. The Bryant Street bike boulevard runs two blocks over.