The sign on the nondescript industrial building by a Highway 237 offramp still calls it a glass company, but inside is a throwback to that seminal band of Silicon Valley hackers who created the world’s first personal computers.

Welcome to Hacker Dojo, a “community center” for code monkeys, startup dreamers and anybody else with an unquenchable thirst to take technology in new directions.

A typical evening at the Dojo in Mountain View sometimes looks like chaos — two friends cobbling together a robot out of chips, circuit boards and servo motors; a clump of technical writers packed like sweaty sardines into a meeting; people squinting silently into their laptops, oblivious to the coming night.

But the nearly-2-month-old, one-of-a-kind Dojo (a Japanese term for a place martial arts practitioners gather to learn from one another) already has the support of valley heavyweights. Google and Microsoft are financial sponsors, mindful of the potential value of ideas, relationships and businesses that could be born here. And a key member of the renowned after-work hobby club that helped spawn the personal computer says the Dojo just might spark the same lightning bolt of innovation.

As the founders put it, the Dojo is a place for events, lectures, parties, hackathons, knitting circles, tinkering or brainstorming.

“This is a place where those who are passionate about creating things, who want to create something bigger than themselves, can come to meet other people like themselves,” said Brian Klug, one of the founders of the Dojo.

That’s what happened with the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, said Lee Felsenstein, an organizer of the storied Silicon Valley hobby club whose members included Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and that helped launch more than 20 tech companies.

A senior adviser and participant in Hacker Dojo, Felsenstein said he doesn’t know of anything like it before in Silicon Valley. Homebrew was a seedbed for Wozniak’s world-changing personal computer, the Apple II, and the club always intended to establish a permanent workshop, a place where people could come and cross-pollinate. But Homebrew never did.

Felsenstein thinks the boom in online social networking may have, paradoxically, made people appreciate the potential of an actual physical gathering of creative minds, as Homebrew was.

“At the early meetings, Steve Jobs was running all around the place,” said Felsenstein, whose Dojo title is Sensei — “esteemed master” in Japanese. “I never heard him say anything. He just wanted to hear everything that was said. Here we are 35 years later, and we have a lot more tools at our disposal, the Internet and so forth, but there is still no good substitute for people meeting in person.”

Culture of creativity

For the Dojo’s founders, a hacker is not the dirtbag in Latvia phishing for your credit card number. David Weekly, another Dojo founding director, said being a hacker is about embracing a culture of creativity.

“If you are digging the act of intellectual property creation, you’re a hacker — whether you are a painter or an artist or a linguist or whatever. If you dig what you’re doing, and you are doing it for the love of it, then you are a hacker.”

The idea to create a permanent, always-open “community center” for technical creativity grew out of a regular tech party on the Peninsula organized by Weekly and other friends called SuperHappyDevHouse, where young software developers would convene every few weeks with laptops, energy drinks and beer to code-up projects and hang out.

DevHouse grew and in time began to draw people in their 40s, 50s and even 60s — including Felsenstein, who designed the Osborne 1, the world’s first mass-produced, portable computer. When about 400 people showed up for the 30th DevHouse in February, Weekly had an inspiration.

“It just struck me, we need to make this permanent.”

The Dojo opened in late August, but no one felt it important to remove the stained and smoked glass and somewhat cheesy light fixtures from the former occupant, Glass Paradigm. Organizers just moved in a few desks and beanbag chairs.

With more than 80 members, the Dojo is nonprofit and all-volunteer; several founders are still shelling out as much as $500 a month to subsidize it.

Mixed bag of techies

It’s near midnight in Mountain View, and from the parking lot outside a few hackers can be seen through the Dojo’s windows, their faces washed in the ghostly light of their laptops.

It’s about the time Lecole Cole usually heads home from his second “job.” Cole has a day job as an engineering director for a Silicon Valley tech company. But he shows up at the Dojo late most weekday afternoons to start his second shift — founder and CEO of his startup — a company called Skydera that plans to offer a quick response to companies that want to lease data servers on the Internet-based “cloud.”

When Cole heard about the Dojo’s plans for 24/7 Wi-Fi, he quickly ponied up the $100 monthly membership fee. On weekends now, he might log 15 hours a day at the Dojo.

“For quite some time, I had been doing the coffee shop shuffle — bookstores, college libraries — just looking for someplace quiet where I didn’t have to move every 30 minutes,” he said. “I knew the schedule for every single library in the Bay Area.”

Cole is one of a number of regulars at the Dojo, regularly hammering away on their nascent startup. But everywhere, ideas are literally in the air. He fell into a discussion recently with three or four people kicking around ideas for iPhone and Facebook applications, and saw how a spontaneous talk between people with different areas of expertise helped trouble-shoot problems and enlarge the vision for their ideas. Dojo denizens say those creative interactions happen all the time.

For others, the Dojo is a cherished place to be with like-minded acolytes of technology — to find their tribe.

“These are my people,” said Laura Rubin, 26, of San Jose, who called herself “socially a geek” and “culturally a geek” as she tinkered in the Dojo’s hardware workshop with a friend one recent evening.

Even in Silicon Valley, a truly passionate hacker can sometimes feel like a bit of an outcast, said Jeff Lindsay, a Dojo founding director.

“To find a place to go where people don’t think you’re crazy,” said Lindsay, 24, a senior developer on Nebula, a cloud computing platform being built at NASA’s Ames Research Center, “is just the greatest thing in the world.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/swiftstories.