Ever wondered where were the foundation stones of today’s technology giants laid? What were the places where the seeds of some of the biggest technology innovations first germinated?

No they were not plush offices, but small garages, apartments or hostel rooms where these companies were set up. These buildings today mirror the journey of a dream.

Network World recently carried a list of 12 holy sites of IT which it termed Tech Meccas because of their significance in the technology world today. Some of these are birth places of today’s IT giants while others are centres which exemplify technology prowess that world has attained over the years. Here’s over to the technology’s holy shrines.

367 Addison Ave, Palo Alto, California

The tree-lined residential street near Stanford University leads to a 12×18-foot garage where in 1939 college friends Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard laid the foundation of today’s largest personal computer manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard.

The garage served as research lab, development workshop and manufacturing facility for the company’s early products including Model 200A audio oscillator. In 1940, HP moved into larger quarters on Page Mill Road.

The garage was dedicated as the Birthplace of Silicon Valley in 1989, and the property was acquired by HP in 2000. The company paid $1.7 million for the 3.6×5.4 metre garage which William Hewlett had originally rented for $45 per month.

In 2007, the property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

2066 Crist Dr, Los Altos, California

Apple Computer Inc was born in the company’s CEO Steve Jobs’ parents spare bedroom. The room was basically a garage attached to his home at 2066 Crist Dr, Los Altos, California.

It was here that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, along with Ronald G Wayne joined together to build Apple Computer in 1976. The day was incidentally Fool’s day.

The garage room served as Apple’s first manufacturing base, with the first 50 Apple 1s built here. The consignment was sold to Paul Jay Terrell’s Byte Shop for $500 each.

Talking about his initial days at Apple, Jobs reportedly said in an interview “It was just the two of us, Woz and me. We were the manufacturing department, the shipping department and everything.”

232 Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park, California

This is the address where in the year 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin joined hands to build what eventually became the world’s no. 1 search engine and Internet company, Google.

The company’s co-founders rented the garage from Susan Wojcicki, who later also became a Google employee. The duo took the 2,000 square feet, a four-bedroom home, for $1,700 a month. It was than Google hosted its first data center here.

In a news report they said, “The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company.”

When Page and Brin first moved into the garage, Google had just been incorporated with a bankroll of $1 million raised from a handful of investors. By 1999, Google began serving 500,000 queries a day and the company moved from the four walls garage to a mega Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California.

In 2006, Google paid an undisclosed fee for the 177-square-metre property in Menlo Park, California. Reports say that it would have cost them US$1.3 million. There are plans that they may utilize the property as a guest house. Though the garage has not turned a historic site yet, but the place has been attracting quite a number of eyeballs.

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

This is the one of the hottest hub of scientific research located astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. Called European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, it is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works.

At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

Founded in 1954, the organisation has twenty European member states. The place also holds significance as the birthplace of the World Wide Web. In 1990, physicist Tim Berners-Lee and systems engineer Robert Cailliau devised the concept of an information system based on hypertext links.

This is where father of Internet Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for information management showing how information could be transferred easily over the Internet by using hypertext.

Bletchley Park, England

Best known as the Winston Churchill’s secret intelligence and computers headquarters during World War II, Bletchley Park is also the home town of Milton Keynes. Situated in Buckinghamshire, UK, it is regarded as the site of secret British codebreaking activities during World War II and also the birthplace of the modern computer.

In 1939 during the World War II, cryptologists based at Bletchley Park successfully broke major codes used by German military and high command and those of other Axis countries. The most famous break-ins were the ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines. Today, Bletchley Park houses permanent collection of Enigma and other vintage cypher machines and equipment.

It was in Huts 3,6,4 and 8 that the highly effective Enigma decrypt teams worked. The huts operated in pairs and, for security reasons, were known only by their numbers. Their raw material came from the ‘Y’ Stations: a web of wireless intercept stations dotted around Britain and in a number of countries overseas. These stations listened in to the enemy’s radio messages and sent them to Bletchley Park to be decoded and analyzed.

Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, California

Another technology Mecca is PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc), popularly known as Xerox PARC, is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California.

Founded in 1970 as a division of Xerox Corporation, PARC is where the first graphical user interface was invented (for the Xerox Alto) and the first Ethernet cables were connected. This is also the place where first laser printer was invented and the first WYSIWYG text editors were rolled out. Ubiquitous computing also started here.

PARC currently conducts research on biomedical technologies, “clean technology”, user interface design, sensemaking, ubiquitous computing, large area electronics and embedded and intelligent systems. PARC was incorporated as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002.

These days the organisation conducts a regular Thursday lecture series open to general public.

Ames Lab, Iowa State University, Iowa

What makes Ames Lab part of the tech’s holy sites is that this is the place where John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry built the world’s first electronic digital computer between the years 1937 and 1942.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was the world’s first electronic digital computer that gave the world several major innovations including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions.

In the year 1997, researchers at Ames Lab built a working replica of the ABC, which is now on display in the lobby of Iowa State’s Durham Center for Computation and Communication.

In 1973, US Federal Judge declared Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer following a trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid.

Moore School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Regarded as the birthplace of the computer industry, the Moore School is where the first general-purpose digital electronic computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), was built between 1943 and 1946.

ENIAC was capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory, but its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb.

Not only this, the place holds special importance as the first computer course was given at the Moore School in Summer 1946.

Also, Moore School faculty John Mauchly and J Presper Eckert founded the first computer company, ENIAC, which produced the UNIVAC computer. The 3-story Moore School has now been integrated into Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

IBM’s Main Plant, Poughkeepsie, New York

Located on the Hudson River Valley, midway between New York City and Albany, this was the first building of IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY called ‘Main Plant.’ Constructed in 1948, many of IBM’s computers over the years were assembled and rolled out from this facility.

In April 1953, the most advanced, most flexible high-speed computer in the world called the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine was unveiled at Main Plant. For next 56 years, many other IBM mainframes were made and rolled out from this centre.

In 1964, the centre also rolled out IBM’s first general-purpose mainframe, the System/360 family. What made the site more special was that IBM System/360 Model 75 helped NASA get Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back 40 years ago.

Room 2713, Dobie Hall, University of Texas, Austin

Dobie Center, a privately-owned twenty-seven story residence hall located adjacent to the University of Texas at Austin campus is the birthplace of today’s second largest PC maker, Dell.

CEO Michael Dell founded the company at this centre in the room No 2713 of Dobie Center. From here Michael began selling computers via mail in 1984.

Kirkland House, Havard University

Ever wondered where is the birthplace of the world’s most popular social networking site Facebook that today boasts of 250 million users.

At third floor of Kirkland House room, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with fellow computer science major students and his room mates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University in the year 2004.

Kirkland House is one of the 12 undergraduate houses at Harvard University, located near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lyman Residence Hall, Stanford University, California

Even before Google brothers rented a garage at 232 Santa Margarita Avenue, California, to set out the task of building what is today’s most powerful internet company, it is said that the duo began working from Larry Page’s room in Stanford’s Lyman Residence Hall in 1997.

It is widely believed that the room also housed Google’s first server farm. However, unlike the Menlo Park property, Google has not so far bought the property.