Inside the Bay Area home where renters paid $45 and changed the world

The house at 367 Addison Ave. blends in with its Palo Alto neighbors.

It’s a scene of quiet, unassuming wealth: two stories, clean exterior, American flag. Wicker chairs with big green cushions sit empty on a large, sheltered porch.

But this house is one of Silicon Valley’s premier tourist destinations. It’s the one-time home of Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Stanford engineers turned businessmen who turned their 1939 startup into one of the world’s largest companies, and the house’s humble garage into a National Historic Place.

Unlike the Golden Gate Bridge or the cable car, “the birthplace of Silicon Valley” is privately owned and frustratingly closed off. HP owns the property, but usually just uses it as a backdrop for corporate videos and events to boost employee morale. It’s not really a museum, but it is still a carefully crafted tourist attraction.

“While the HP garage is not open for public tours, visitors may view and photograph the property and landmark from the sidewalk,” warns San Jose’s tourism bureau. 

But I had an in: historian and HP expert Jack Fiorini.

After arranging a tour with Fiorini, who manages the house and its archives on behalf of HP, a few days in advance, I arrived in the neighborhood on a hot day in late August. Luxury sedans lined the curbs of the wide, tree-shaded street, but there was basically no one on the sidewalks. The house is a half-hour walk from Stanford’s campus, in the middle of one of the country’s most expensive housing markets. Hewlett and Packard rented the lower level flat, shed and garage here for $45 a month in 1938, about $980 in today’s money. HP owns the property now, having bought it for a reported $1.7 million in 2000. Other houses in the neighborhood currently range in value from $2 million to $7 million on Zillow.

Inside, the house is restored to its 1938 style. I walked in and instantly felt transported to a prior age. Demure decorations hang on wood-paneled walls, flowery curtains fall behind leather couches and sturdy tables. There’s a typewriter, the kind Packard’s wife used to keep the books and write advertising copy for her husband’s nascent business, and in the kitchen, the exact model of oven the inventors used to bake enamel paint onto their first products. Thick-rimmed frames hold photos of nerdy-looking people. It’s like your grandparents’ house, if they were Depression-era neat freaks who showed off hand-soldered inventions on their mantle.

As Fiorini leads me through the house, he mentions the entrepreneurs’ first meeting with a sales rep took place over the home’s kitchen table — I can see its imitation wedged in a small corner. Eventually he opens the door to the backyard, where the shed stands out like a chipped tooth. This is where Hewlett lived, for just $9 a month, while Packard and his wife took the house’s lower level flat. It’s dingy, and somehow the inside is both sparse and cramped. Even on a beautiful day, it’s hard to imagine the shed as a pleasant place to stay. Maybe it was nicer 80 years ago?

“It is depressingly similar to what he would actually have been living in,” Fiorini assured me.

Then, beside the shed: Hewlett and Packard’s garage. Fiorini said that while he was waiting for me to arrive earlier that day, a group of Japanese tourists was photographing the house from the street. He offered to let them into the backyard for an up-close look at the garage.

“I might as well have said, ‘Who wants to meet Taylor Swift?’ Everybody’s running over, really excited, getting borderline choked up,” he said.

It’s that intense mythos that brought me south from San Francisco. The tech world loves its startup stories, and Apple, Google and Amazon all cite garages in their founding lore, with varying authenticity. The startup garage is a pro-entrepreneur twist on the American Dream: With a good idea, anyone with a simple garage workbench and some spare time can create the next big thing. 

Hewlett and Packard’s garage is stout and square, with large doors and a dim interior. HP archivists have piled the space high with the founders’ tools and early inventions. The duo got their break with audio oscillators, devices that can test and calibrate audio equipment. Hewlett conjured a cheap method of manufacturing oscillators during his research at Stanford, which let him and Packard, once they started their company, undercut General Electric and build a customer base. They eventually moved on to other inventions, including the handheld calculator and movable atomic clock, and the rest was history.

A pile of oscillators was stacked in the corner the day I visited. For the first time, I felt the genuine awe of the site’s past. I’ve never used an audio oscillator; my connection to HP as a consumer is limited to the office printer. But it is downright cool to be in the same place where people made real, physical progress on useful technology. One of HP’s first customers was Disney, which used the oscillators to test sound for the 1940 film “Fantasia.”

By the end of 1940, both men had moved away from Addison Avenue, and the company was working from a larger building nearby — originally on audio equipment, though soon on radar-jamming technology for the U.S. Navy. A nascent industry was forming in the South Bay and the Peninsula, with HP as a foundational piece. (Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak both worked for the firm at varying times.) The company was one of the first to participate in a now-familiar loop: Engineering talent meets investor or research funding, company grows rapidly, the resulting tech shapes the country into hordes of eager consumers. Just as the Bay Area is now ground zero for social media and autonomous cars, it was once so for audio oscillators.

It all started in this Palo Alto garage. These days, the most action the site gets is as a backdrop for an HP interview show starring tech leaders like TaskRabbit’s Stacy Brown-Philpot and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. But as I stood among the tools, gadgets and blueprints, I understood why tourists come from around the world to stand on the street and gawk at a random, barely used house: There’s a satisfaction to remembering how it all began.

As I left, I encountered a neighbor who complained that a nearby house is going to be remodeled. They were worried about the noise, they said, and the sight of a lengthy construction project. A rental sedan arrived at the curb, and a German couple spilled out. They’d come to photograph the HP house and garage. They were between San Francisco and Yosemite on their trip through California, they told me, but they specifically drove this way to come see a piece of tech history. 

It was their lucky day: Fiorini, with a smile, opened the gate.

Hear of anything happening at HP or another tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.