With an initial investment of $538 and a workshop set up in a one-car garage behind a rented house on Addison Avenue, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began the partnership that became Hewlett-Packard. Their first product, an audio oscillator, soon caught the attention of Walt Disney Studios, which purchased eight units for the film Fantasia, giving the fledgling company an early and prestigious customer.
Hewlett and Packard had met as engineering students at Stanford University and, encouraged by their professor Frederick Terman, decided to start a company rather than take conventional corporate jobs. They flipped a coin to decide whose name would come first, and Hewlett won, though the two remained close, equal partners for the rest of their careers.
The garage where they worked, at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, has since been designated California Historical Landmark Number 976 and is popularly nicknamed 'the birthplace of Silicon Valley.' Inside, the two young engineers built and tested their first commercial product, a precision audio oscillator called the HP 200A, using improvised equipment and, according to company lore, working out pricing partly by guesswork since neither had much business experience.
Walt Disney's sound engineers needed instruments to test the innovative Fantasound surround-sound system for the 1940 film Fantasia and ordered eight of the oscillators, a purchase that gave Hewlett-Packard both revenue and credibility at a crucial early moment. From that garage, the company grew into one of the defining firms of American technology, and its founding is often cited as the symbolic origin of the entire Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture that followed.
Key people: Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard