The house is a Shingle Style home built in 1905 on a street peppered with similar houses. It feels like you’ve time travelled to a hundred years ago, where there were no computers or phones, where most of what the Silicon Valley was just orchards run by Hispanics. And two important institutions: Stanford University and a lot of military establishments.

In 1938, a newly married Dave Packard hired the one-car garage at the end of this house’s driveway and began an electronics company with his classmate Bill Hewlett. Both had been encouraged by their professor, Dr Frederick Terman at the Stanford University, to start their own electronics company.

Packard and Hewlett named the company after a coin toss. Packard won the toss, but decided to put his classmate’s name first, starting what we know today as a company called Hewlett Packard. Perhaps it was this little generous gesture for his co-founder that helped them solder their first electronic product in this garage: the HP200A audio oscillator. They sold this sound system to Walt Disney Studios which used it for their first major film released in stereophonic sound, Fantasia. Since then, HP has become a global company producing desktops and laptops, with 60000 employees in 170 companies. Its headquarters still remains a few miles away from this garage. In 2000, HP restored the house and the garage of its founder and now has a museum of sorts inside it which includes the original work benches, the oscillator radio and even Packard’s first HAM radio.

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As I linger in front of the plaque, stepping aside as other tourists come to take a quick photo, I try to imagine how this tiny garage gave ambitious wings to generations of Americans looking to build technology companies. Intel and Cisco started out of a garage, as did Amazon and the other two companies—whose garages I’m visiting next.

Ten minutes away by drive is 232 Santa Margarita Avenue in Menlo Park where Susan Wojcicki used to live. Wojcicki who recently died as the CEO of YouTube, was the person who rented her garage to two young Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the winter of 1998. It was the first Google office, now a $2.26 trillion company.

The house, which now belongs to Google, is a small nondescript one, painted lemon yellow and white. Frankly, it was a bit anticlimax in real life. In the virtual one though, you can visit its messy inside, geek out on a cluttered desk with a CRT computer monitor, an open CPU, a bike, a washing machine and dryer with haphazard cables piles and piles of boxes thanks to a Street View version the company released in 2018. The only archival video of the company from those days was taken by an employee a year later, when they were a team of six (Wojcicki included) and had spread out of the garage into the ground floor of this house.

Outside, a cat hunts for a mouse in the garden, with not much luck. I greet a neighbour gardening on her front yard as we head back to the car. Behind her Porsche in the driveway, is another man, cleaning their garage. Deeper inside their real-life garage is a poster of a satellite launching into space.

Software companies are the biggest disappointment for tourists, for there’s nothing really to see. We park our car a few minutes later at the childhood home of Steve Jobs at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos. This rather boring suburb house has been called the “birthplace of Apple” by the San Jose pamphlet we’re reading from. We take a photo halfheartedly, snigger at the plaque warning others to stay away as it’s private property (and not to ring the bell), and read more. It was here, claims our pamphlet, that Jobs and Wozniak put together the boards of the first Apple computer, the Apple I, in 1976. Wozniak has repeatedly said in interviews that Apple didn’t really start out of this garage, they just ideated here and ate food since they had no money. “The garage is a bit of a myth,” he said when asked by Bloomberg Businessweek. “We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there.”

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Wozniak might try it hard, but the garage myth is quite pervasive, not only in the Silicon Valley but across the world. Even in India where not many houses come with garages, and almost no one knows what the idea of an American garage means: A space without heating or insulation which is made for the sole purpose of stocking unwanted, unused, impulsively-bought junk.

Over generations, these garages have given hope to startup founders. That they can build a global company from a scrappy, rough beginning. The garage myth is a romanticized version and a much loved, much-touted American dream of entrepreneurism with hustle. A founder with an innovative idea, making it big with old-fashion Puritan hard work, bootstrapping resources to chase a dream, rejecting status quo and winning it big time. It’s the Silicon Valley dream. As ambitious as it comes.

What these garages have not implied is the privilege and support of a country’s federal resources and scientific support. Hewlett and Packard benefitted from federal grants and a world-class engineering laboratory in Stanford University to develop their prototype of the oscillator. Ironically, even having a car garage in 1937 was a massive privilege – that meant you had a car, and the means to make a covered parking for the car. Even in the 1970s, Steve Job’s garage shows he grew up in an educated family which could afford a personal computer for him, and had a strong network to help him build his company. Both the Google founders were students at Stanford University.

But then in the land of Silicon Valley, what works is the urban legend of a tortured, lonesome founder, a drop-out, standing against the world, and winning. And that’s exactly the kind of a story the garage myth weaves -- and we all fall for its deliciously woven illusions.