HP Garage gets spot on National Registry of Historic Places

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

The information age just got a little older, as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" has been formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More specifically, this is 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, California: the garage where, in 1938, two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company that became known as Hewlett-Packard the next year.

The new historic status is official as of Thursday. (You think it's been Zillowed?)

The house had been built circa 1905 and apparently once housed Palo Alto's first mayor; the garage, however, wasn't built until around 1924--coinciding with the paving of the city's streets to deal with those newfangled contraptions known as "cars." The "HP Garage" was already listed as an historical landmark in the state of California (number 976, if you like numbers). It achieved that status in 1987.

HP bought back the garage, along with the house, in 2000 for a reported $1.7 million (last year, Google did the same thing with the garage that had been home to Larry and Sergey's early start-up days), and in 2005 the HP Garage underwent an extensive renovation.