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To: Mick Mørmøny who wrote (45392)	12/4/2005 11:56:41 AM
From: Mick Mørmøny	Respond to of 306849

Humble beginnings in garage preserved at not-so-lean price By Damon Darlin NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE December 4, 2005 PALO ALTO – Million-dollar renovations of multimillion-dollar homes are not uncommon along this university town's tree-lined streets. But spending that kind of money to fix up a garage? And a 12-by-18-foot, wood-frame, one-car garage at that? When the garage in question is one of the most famous in the business world, that kind of investment may not be so odd. The little brown building with green doors at 367 Addison Ave. is often considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley. David Packard and William Hewlett set up shop there in 1938, cutting a template that thousands of fresh-faced entrepreneurs, just out of school, would use in hopes of building products and companies that could change the world – and make them rich. Only a 15-minute drive away at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos is the garage where Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs built their earliest Apple computers. More recently, Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage at 232 Santa Margarita Ave. in nearby Menlo Park to start Google. The powerful hold that the garage start-up has on Silicon Valley is the reason Hewlett-Packard spent $1.7 million to buy the property. Most of the historical evidence suggests that Hewlett and Packard never became sentimental about the place, said Anna Mancini, the company's archivist, who led the preservation project. "They preferred to look forward, not back," Mancini said. That left the restorers with little to go on. They had only six photographs: two exterior snapshots of the house from the late 1940s, one of the Packards by the fireplace, a shot of the garage's interior, one of its exterior and one of the oven. "Mostly, we worked from recollections of David, Bill and Lucille," said Mancini, referring to writings by Packard, Hewlett and Packard's wife. The property, with an assessed value of $1.84 million, remains as unremarkable as it was in the Great Depression. Mancini said the shingled house, built in 1905, was never grand. The owner had divided it into two flats to earn rental income 20 years before Packard and his wife rented the place for $45 a month, or about $635 in today's dollars. Company lore has it that Packard wrote to his Stanford classmate, Hewlett, who was in New York working for General Electric, and offered him the shed next to the garage as his lodgings. Hewlett drove out to California with a Craftsman drill press on the back seat. The drill press went into the garage next to a workbench. The two engineers – called radio engineers back in that pre-electronics era – had several ideas of what to invent to make money, like a foot-foul indicator for bowling alleys and automatic flushers for urinals at Stanford. They decided instead on a variable audio oscillator that was used to test sound quality in the booming radio and movie business. The Packards slept on a foldout bed in the dining room, which doubled as the company office. The oven in the kitchen also pulled double duty; the engineers baked the paint on the oscillators there. Lucille Packard snapped a picture of the first oscillator, the 200A, atop the fireplace in the living room and used it in brochures mailed to prospective customers. The company's preservationists, guided by architects, lavished attention on the garage. "We used kid gloves," said Montgomery Anderson, the principal architect. The structure was disassembled. Since the Douglas fir panels and frame were rotting, contractors scooped out the crumbling wood and applied epoxy to fill the holes. They put in a steel frame to earthquake-proof the garage, and installed sprinklers and new wiring. Inside, a single 40-watt bulb illuminates a workbench, a small table with a ham radio and a drill press. Mancini bought the antique machine, the same model as the one Hewlett brought back from New York, on eBay for $75. (eBay was founded in Pierre Omidyar's spare bedroom in San Jose, not in his garage.) signonsandiego.com