Homebrew, Again

Over Memorial Day, I drove by the HP garage. There's a plaque on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that calls a one-car garage the birthplace of Silicon Valley — California Historical Landmark No. 976. In 1938, two Stanford students, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, built an audio oscillator there by hand rather than joining established firms in the East. You could walk past it without looking up. It…