Palo Alto, Calif. – Hewlett-Packard Co.’s newest leader visited the computermaker’s oldest monument Tuesday, honoring the restoration of the garage that started Silicon Valley.
“It’s kind of a humbling thing,” chief executive Mark Hurd, who joined in April, said Tuesday at the event outside the garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard worked on their first product 66 years ago.
Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest printer maker and the No. 2 personal-computer seller, hosted the founders’ families and industry luminaries such as Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak, who met Steve Jobs while working at Hewlett-Packard.
Hewlett-Packard bought the property in 2000, 13 years after the garage was designated California Registered Landmark No. 976.
The restoration project was started in April 2004.
Workers removed the 12-by-18-foot garage’s original 52 boards, sanded them and dipped them in a preservative before nailing the planks to a reinforced frame designed to weather earthquakes, archivist Anna Mancini said.
The company was started with $538 in capital, including cash and the value of the used Sears, Roebuck and Co. drill press owned by Packard.
Hewlett-Packard had earnings of $2.4 billion on sales of $86.7 billion last year.
Hewlett and Packard, who met as students at nearby Stanford University, chose the house at 367 Addison Avenue because it had a garage they could use as a workshop, Mancini said. They shared the $45-a-month rent.
Packard and his wife, Lucile, shared a three-room apartment on the first floor of the house, built in 1905.
Then unmarried, Hewlett lived in the garden shed, an 8-by-18-foot bunkhouse with a dirt floor, a few yards from the garage. After Hewlett married and moved out, the bunkhouse became the company’s first office.
The restoration team had a single photo showing Hewlett and Packard at work in the garage around the time they developed their first product, an audio oscillator used by sound engineers.
Mancini used the image to figure out how the place looked, with its exposed wiring and pitched roof.
Packard died in 1996, Hewlett in 2001.
