In 1938, after returning from stints at General Electric and MIT, respectively, David Packard and William Hewlett, with the encouragement of their former Stanford University professor, Fred Terman, went looking for a place to set up their nascent company in what is now known as Silicon Valley. "The boys," as their landlady called them, set out with a business model that is now famous for including everything but what products they would sell.
Eventually, however, they settled on an established product, an audio oscillator, but improved it in such a way that they were able to significantly undersell other vendors, in part because they made the devices themselves in the Packard's Palo Alto, Calif. garage.
Hewlett and Packard's new company, Hewlett-Packard, quickly became profitable, and they were only in the garage for about 18 months. Today, however, the house in front, where Packard lived with his wife, the shed behind, where Hewlett lived as a bachelor, and the garage itself are the property of HP and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places as "the birthplace of Silicon Valley."
Although this is an authentic HP 200B audio oscillator, everything in the garage has been placed there as a re-creation by HP's archivist. This was the second model of the audio oscillator. An earlier version, the 200A, was much more rare.
Photo by Daniel Terdiman/CNET
