The origins of Silicon Valley’s garage myth | Web Designing

To understand the enduring mythology of the Silicon Valley garage, you have to go back to the one that started it all: a converted shed in suburban Palo Alto, where in 1938 William R. Hewlett and David Packard began developing their first product.

The mythology of the garage as a space for invention started in a valley where taxpayers’ money was being converted into silicon. Even though much has been said about Silicon Valley emerging from the shared geographies of Stanford and venture capital, its real history stems from military research during WWII funded by public money. The garage is central to the origin of many corporate success stories in the twentieth century, from chauffeur to entrepreneur; the space originally intended for the storage of automobiles has become a symbol, a myth, a banal object in the domestic landscape that gave birth to the industrial tech complex.

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