Extracted from a letter from Peggy Rutherford to Bill Hill
The first home of DPI was at 745 Distel Dr. in Los Altos (the picture is too dark to show well). Ironically, our row of offices is now an Allstate Office (remember they were our first major venture capitalist). When the engineers started arriving we also had a place in Palo Alto because Los Altos did not allow even a soldering iron. We connected both locations through a "new tech" cordless switchboard that kept disconnecting everyone.
It was a pain and expensive keeping both places but Leroy Score, our founder and CEO, insisted the Los Altos address was prestigious. Jim Pike reminded him that Los Altos was only locally known while Palo Alto was known world wide because of Stanford. Finally we all moved to San Antonio Rd. and remained there until more financing allowed more hiring and we moved just next door to 490 San Antonio. (We eventually had 3/4 of the building and shipped our first demo system to Globe Union from there. That system was later transferred to GE Bloomington when the truck with their system ended up on its side in a ditch during a Nebraska snow storm).
In August of 1966 a vacant lot in Sunnyvale looked like this:
We moved into our final headquarters at 370 San Aleso Road in November 1966.
For most of you there would seem to be some buildings missing wouldn't there? But this is what the area looked like for quite awhile.