If you drive down Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, you might miss it. It’s just a house. Specifically, 367 Addison Avenue. It looks like a standard, well-kept California Craftsman, the kind of place where you’d expect to find a retired professor or a young family. But that tiny, detached garage in the back? That’s the birthplace of Silicon Valley. No glass towers. No espresso bars. Just a 12-by-18-foot wooden shed with a concrete floor.
It’s kinda wild when you think about it.
The global economy basically pivoted on a single decision made in 1938 by two guys named Bill and Dave. They had $538 in their pockets. Today, that’s barely enough for a decent laptop, but back then, it was enough to start Hewlett-Packard (HP). This isn't just some marketing myth cooked up by a PR firm; the State of California officially designated this spot as California Historical Landmark No. 976 in 1989.
People always talk about the "garage startup" culture like it's a cliché. Well, this is the original.
The HP Garage: More Than Just Four Walls
Let's get one thing straight: the birthplace of Silicon Valley wasn't a "tech" hub because of the internet. The internet didn't exist. This was about hardware. It was about vacuum tubes, oscillators, and raw engineering.
Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were mentees of Frederick Terman. If you want to know who the real "father" of the valley was, it’s Terman. He was a Stanford professor who got tired of seeing his best students flee to the East Coast for jobs. He basically told Bill and Dave, "Hey, don't leave. Start something here."
And they did.
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They moved into the Addison Avenue property because it was cheap. Dave and his wife, Lucile, lived in the main house. Bill slept in a shed on the property. They spent their days in the garage building an audio oscillator, the HP 200A. It looked like a piece of military equipment because, well, everything did back then.
Why the Walt Disney Connection Matters
The first big break didn't come from a venture capitalist. It came from Mickey Mouse.
Walt Disney was working on Fantasia. He needed a way to test the sound systems in the theaters that would be showing the film. He heard about these two guys in a garage and ordered eight of their oscillators. That sale was the "proof of concept" every founder dreams of. It proved that a small, independent shop in a fruit-orchard-filled valley could compete with the giants of the East.
The Stanford Industrial Park Shift
While the garage is the symbolic start, things got serious when Terman pushed for the creation of the Stanford Industrial Park (now the Stanford Research Park).
This was a genius move. Stanford had plenty of land but couldn't sell it because of the terms of Leland Stanford's will. So, they leased it. They invited companies like Varian Associates, Eastman Kodak, and General Electric to set up shop right next to the university.
This created a feedback loop.
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- Students learned from the companies.
- Companies hired the students.
- Research moved from the lab to the factory floor in weeks, not years.
By the mid-1950s, the "Valley of Heart's Delight"—which was mostly known for apricots and prunes—started smelling more like ozone and solder.
The "Shockley Eight" and the Traitorous Turn
You can’t talk about the birthplace of Silicon Valley without mentioning the drama at Shockley Semiconductor. William Shockley was a Nobel Prize winner and, frankly, a terrible boss. He brought the first silicon-based transistor work to Mountain View, but his ego drove his best engineers crazy.
In 1957, eight of them—the "Traitorous Eight"—quit.
They founded Fairchild Semiconductor. This is the moment the "Silicon" part of the name really took root. If you map out the genealogy of tech companies, almost every major player, from Intel to Nvidia, can trace its lineage back to the Fairchild folks. They pioneered the "spin-off" culture. If you didn't like your boss, you didn't just quit; you started a competitor across the street.
Honestly, that cutthroat, fast-moving energy is exactly what separates Northern California from the more traditional corporate environments of the time.
The Geography of Innovation
The physical layout of the area actually played a role. Palo Alto, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale are all scrunched together. In the 60s and 70s, engineers from different companies would hang out at the same bars, like the Walker’s Wagon Wheel in Mountain View.
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They’d swap ideas on napkins.
They’d talk about "lithography" and "yield rates."
Information leaked.
This "informal exchange" is a huge reason why the area exploded. While companies in Boston (Route 128) were obsessed with trade secrets and non-compete clauses, the folks in the birthplace of Silicon Valley were essentially open-sourcing their problems over beer.
Why the Garage Still Matters Today
Some people argue that Silicon Valley is "over." They point to Austin, Miami, or remote work. But they’re missing the point of the garage.
The garage isn't about the wood and the nails. It’s about the permission to fail. In 1938, Bill and Dave were tinkering. They made a bowling alley foul-line indicator. They made a shock machine for weight loss. Most of their early stuff flopped. But they were in a place—and a culture—that let them keep tinkering until they hit the oscillator.
Today, that spirit is still there. You see it in the Y Combinator batches and the late-night lights on in downtown Palo Alto offices.
Misconceptions About the Location
- Myth: It was always called Silicon Valley.
- Fact: The name wasn't coined until 1971 by journalist Don Hoefler. Before that, it was just the Santa Clara Valley.
- Myth: The garage is a museum you can walk through.
- Fact: You can look at it from the sidewalk, but the garage itself is rarely open to the public to go inside. HP restored it in 2005, but it’s more of a private landmark.
What You Should Actually Do Next
If you’re a founder, a student, or just a tech nerd, visiting the birthplace of Silicon Valley is a bit of a pilgrimage. But don't just stand there and take a selfie.
- Walk the Neighborhood: See how close Addison Avenue is to downtown Palo Alto. Notice the scale. It reminds you that massive things start incredibly small.
- Visit the Computer History Museum: It’s in Mountain View. It houses the actual artifacts—the physical stuff—that came after the garage.
- Read "The Silicon Valley Edge": It’s a bit academic, but it explains the Stanford-Industry connection better than any blog post ever could.
- Check out the Digital Archive: HP has a massive collection of Bill and Dave’s notes. Seeing their handwritten calculations makes the whole "tech giant" thing feel a lot more human.
The real takeaway from 367 Addison Avenue isn't about the past. It’s about the fact that right now, someone is probably in a garage (or a Slack channel) building something that will make our current world look like the "apricot orchard" era.
Keep an eye on the small stuff. That's usually where the big stuff starts.