Original Startup Garage: Hobbyists, Hackers, and Home PCs

Walk through the mythology of Silicon Valley, and you keep running into the garage. A suburban structure meant for cars and lawnmowers became the birthplace of empires. Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Google claim garages as their first homes. It is the story of hobbyists, hackers, and home PC tinkerers who seeded a culture that Silicon Valley still worships.

The Garage as Origin Myth

In 1939, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard scraped together $538 to start a company in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto. They built audio oscillators there. Their “garage startup” is now a California Historical Landmark.

Decades later, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the first batch of Apple I computers in Jobs’ parents’ garage in Los Altos. The myth was sealed when Wozniak admitted the “garage” was primarily for show. Real work happened in bedrooms and dining rooms. But perception mattered.

By the late 1990s, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park to set up Google, the symbolism was deliberate. By then, the garage was less a practical workshop and more a rite of passage.

The garage became shorthand for scrappy beginnings: a place where rules do not apply, rent is cheap, and you can solder, code, and dream without permission.

Hobbyists as Catalysts

The real cultural engine was not the garages but the people who gathered in them. In 1975, in a Menlo Park garage, a group called the Homebrew Computer Club held its first meeting. It became legendary.

Members included Wozniak, Jobs, Lee Felsenstein (designer of the Osborne 1 portable computer), and many others. They swapped schematics, demoed software, and shared technical hacks. The atmosphere was part science fair, part underground club.

At one meeting, Wozniak showed off a simple design for a personal computer. Jobs saw commercial potential and pushed him to sell it. That partnership, forged in the spirit of hobbyist exchange, gave birth to Apple.

The ethic of Homebrew was to share knowledge. In fact, Bill Gates’ “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in 1976 was written after he realized too many club members were pirating Microsoft’s Altair BASIC. Gates’ complaint was that free sharing hurts innovation and foreshadowed the tension between open collaboration and proprietary software that still defines the tech industry.

Hobbyists were not chasing unicorns. They were trying to make computers more affordable and more enjoyable. But in the process, they created the foundation for an industry.

Hackers and Improvisation

The garage environment encouraged hacking in the truest sense: clever, makeshift, and resourceful. You built with spare parts, repurposed circuits, and soldered until something worked.

Wozniak was famous for his frugality in design. He figured out how to make the Apple I use fewer chips than competitors, saving money and making it more accessible. Jobs, meanwhile, was already thinking about packaging, convincing Wozniak to put the boards in a polished enclosure. The tension between hacker minimalism and founder vision defined Apple from the start.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates hacked together their BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 before they even had a machine to test it on. They wrote and debugged code on a Harvard mainframe, then crossed their fingers when running it for the first time at MITS headquarters. That improvisation set Microsoft on its path.

This hacker culture still echoes in today’s “minimum viable product.” Build something rough that barely works but shows potential. Fix it later. The garage was not about polish. It was about proof.

The Home PC Revolution

Garages were staging grounds for the personal computer boom. The Altair 8800, introduced in 1975, was sold as a mail-order kit. You had to assemble it yourself. But for thousands of hobbyists, it was a revelation: a computer you could own.

The sight of blinking lights on the Altair’s front panel was enough to spark the imagination of Gates and Allen. They dropped out of school to write software for it. Wozniak’s response was to design something better.

Soon, Commodore, Atari, and IBM brought mass-market machines to living rooms. A new generation of teenagers learned to code in BASIC on home machines. In bedrooms and garages, they wrote games, utilities, and demos. Some sold them through the backs of magazines. A few grew into companies.

The revolution was not just technological. It was cultural. Computers became personal, not institutional. A curious kid with a keyboard could dream of building the next big thing. The myth of the garage democratized entrepreneurship.

The Garage Culture That Endures

Silicon Valley never let go of its garage roots. Incubators and accelerators borrow their imagery: folding chairs, whiteboards, pizza boxes, and sleeping bags. Y Combinator began with founders living in shared spaces that functioned like communal garages.

Venture capitalists valorize “scrappiness.” Founders are told to be lean, to prove they can stretch a dollar, to show that their hunger matters more than their burn rate. Scarcity itself is seen as a badge of authenticity.

But the myth oversimplifies. Jobs and Wozniak could not have scaled Apple without Mike Markkula’s early investment. Gates and Allen had the advantage of elite education and access to institutional computing resources. Page and Brin were PhD students at Stanford when they coded the first version of Google’s search engine.

The garage mattered, but networks, timing, and capital mattered more. What endures is not the physical garage but its symbolism.

Anecdotes That Stick

• Steve Wozniak’s “blue boxes”: Before Apple, Wozniak and Jobs built blue box devices that allowed free long-distance phone calls by mimicking AT&T tones. Wozniak later said, “If it hadn’t been for the blue boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple.” The garage spirit was about bending systems until they broke.
• Jobs’ obsession with design: In the garage era, Jobs insisted the circuit boards be beautiful even though no customer would see them. It was irrational perfectionism, but it set a tone for Apple’s culture.
• Google’s rented garage: Susan Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to Page and Brin in 1998 to help pay her mortgage. She became Google’s first marketing manager and later CEO of YouTube.

These stories reveal how garages were more about the scrappy collisions of people, ideas, and risk, rather than just tools.

What founders can still take from the garage myth?

• Start small, think big. Hewlett and Packard built oscillators, not empires. But they thought beyond the garage.
• Share with peers. The Homebrew spirit lives in open-source communities and hackathons.
• Build ugly first. Early products were fragile. That did not stop them from changing the world.
• Don’t wait for permission. Hobbyists bent rules, broke licenses, and hacked their way forward.

The modern garage is digital. GitHub repos, Discord servers, and no-code platforms are where scrappy builders experiment today. A small team with cloud credits has more leverage than Jobs and Wozniak ever dreamed of.

The garage endures because it captures something essential: world-changing ideas often start in unglamorous spaces. Hobbyists and hackers working on home PCs created a culture that prized curiosity, resourcefulness, and community.

That culture, more than any suburban garage, is what made Silicon Valley. It is why every founder staring at a half-baked prototype still feels the thrill of possibility, “This could be something.”