Garages are frequently mentioned in the popular literature about innovation in the Silicon Valley area. They are also being quickly memorialized: the Palo Alto backyard shack where William Hewlett and David Packard started their company is now listed on the US National Register of Historic Places as “the birthplace of Silicon Valley”, while the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents house (where he and Steve Wozniak built the first batch of Apple I computers) has been recently designated as a “historical site” by the city of Los Altos. My paper has two goals. The first is to understand the features of the garage as a space of innovation and knowledge-making, and to assess whether the analogy that is often drawn between the garage and the laboratory is an appropriate one. The second is an analysis of the garage as a rhetorical figure in contemporary discourse of innovation – especially information-based innovation of the Silicon Valley kind.