Tucked away down a narrow driveway on a leafy, quiet street here is perhaps the most famous garage in the valley and, arguably, in all of the technology industry.

It is the garage in which David Packard and William Hewlett launched Hewlett-Packard Co., now the world’s second-largest computer maker and the biggest printer maker, which they founded in 1939 and named with a coin toss.

“It’s kind of a humbling thing,” HP Chief Executive Mark Hurd said on Tuesday at a small ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Addison Avenue garage to celebrate the completed restoration of the HP garage and the house with which it shares the lot. HP now has nearly $90 billion in annual revenue and some 151,000 employees. Its current headquarters are a 10-minute drive from the house that Hewlett, then a bachelor, Packard and wife Lucile, rented for $45 a month in 1939.

Hewlett slept on a cot in an 8-by-18-foot shed in back of the unassuming Shingle Style house – built in 1905 – that was split into two flats, one downstairs, one upstairs. Packard and his wife lived in the first-floor flat and Lucile Packard paid the bills and did the accounting from the living room for the fledgling business the two men started with $538.

The article mentions in passing a couple of other Valley businesses started in local garages, as well — Apple and Google.