One of the most famous modern locations was in Småland in southern Sweden. Ingvar Kamprad was raised on “Elmtaryd,” a farm near the small village of Agunnaryd. Even as a young boy Ingvar knew he wanted to develop a business. The IKEA story begins in 1926 when, at the age of five, he began selling matches to his nearby neighbors and by the time he was seven, expanded his horizons, using his bicycle. He learned that he could buy matches in bulk cheaply in Stockholm and re-sell them individually at a very low price but still make a good profit. From matches he expanded to selling flower seeds, greeting cards, Christmas tree decorations, and later pencils and ball-point pens. He stored his wares in a shed. IKEA is an acronym for Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, and Agunnaryd.
More recently, in 1938, David and Lucile Packard got married and rented the first floor of the house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto. The simple one-car garage became a start-up’s workshop and the little shack out back later became Bill Hewlett’s home. Dave Packard had gone to Schenectady to work at General Electric. He was told that there was no future in electronics at General Electric and that he should instead concentrate on generators, motors and other heavier equipment. Hewlett was finishing up his graduate work at Stanford. He and Hewlett decided to pursue their earlier plan of starting their own business. The name HP (vs. PH) was chosen by a coin toss. For $45 per month, the Packards rented the first floor of the house, which was chosen specifically because it had a garage that they could work in. Bill Hewlett moved into the little shack next to the garage. Hewlett and Packard launched the company that bears their name in that garage. In 1989 California named the garage “the birthplace of Silicon Valley” and made it a California Historical Landmark.
Then there is another garage located at 2066 Crist Drive. in Los Altos, California, where two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak (along with others) developed the very first Apple computers. Built in 1952, the 61-year-old house is not only the birthplace of Apple, but also Jobs’s childhood home. Apple Computers, Inc. was founded on April 1, 1976, by the two college dropouts who brought to the new company a vision of changing the way people viewed computers. Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers small enough for people to have them in their homes or offices. Simply put, they wanted a computer that was user-friendly. Just as Henry Ford envisioned an automobile (i.e. the Model T) that almost anyone could own, Jobs and Wozniak had the same vision for what became the personal computer. They started out building the Apple I in Jobs’ garage and sold them without a monitor, keyboard, or casing (which they decided to add on in 1977). The Apple II revolutionized the computer industry with the introduction of the first-ever color graphics.
There is one other garage, however, that few people know about, owned by Alex Schure who acquired mansions on Long Island to comprise the campus of what he named the New York Institute of Technology. He hired Ed Catmull who hired Alvy Smith to help him convert illustrations into an animated film, Tubby the Tuba. Catmull and Smith — joined by John Lasseter — worked in a converted two-story, four-car garage on the former Vanderbilt-Whitney estate where they developed the most advanced computer graphics laboratory in the country. It marked the beginning of a computer graphics dynasty. Catmull, Smith, and Lasseter eventually realized that their dream of computer-generated filmmaking would never come true with Schure on Long Island so they agreed to join George Lucas in California.
Over a period of several years, the Lucasfilm Computer Division developed much of the hardware and software that has since transformed filmmaking: 3D rendering, digital editing, optical scanning, laser film printing, and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Steve Jobs purchased the Lucasfilm Computer Division, intending to concentrate on industrial applications of the technologies (e.g. oil and gas exploration, automobile design) rather than making animated films but the great success of Toy Story changed his mind. What began in an old garage on Long Island became Pixar, Inc.
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The material just provided was synthesized from more than a dozen resources to which I express my deep gratitude.
I also highly recommend three books for further reading: Walter Isaccson’s Steve Jobs and The Innovators, and, Safi Bahcall’s Loonshots.