Net Results:I grew up in Palo Alto, the city with the funny name adjacent to Stanford University that has since become known around the world as an epicentre for technology innovation, writes Karlin Lillington.
The city, established by former California governor Leland Stanford on land near his family ranch, began life in 1889. He had wanted to place his proposed university at a nearby town called Mayfield (now annexed to Palo Alto). But Mayfield was full of saloons and part of Stanford's deal was that Mayfield would shutter the saloons and go dry.
Mayfield residents baulked, so Palo Alto was born as a city proper (a settlement there already had the name, which came from Spanish explorers who were impressed by a towering old redwood tree, a "palo alto" or "tall stick"). The city would become a home for the professors and lecturers at Stanford's new university, which he would name after his only son, who died at 16 in Florence of typhoid fever.
Mayfield's loss was Palo Alto's gain. The city is full of beautiful old houses, some quite whimsical in design, filling city blocks named after writers: Homer, Chaucer, Cowper, Kipling and Addison. More than 25 streets honour literary figures.
One chamber of commerce pamphlet from the 1930s extolled the city's virtues: "Altogether, a charming place in which to make a home, to share in the reciprocal benefits of a cultured community, to bask in the sun, to surround oneself and family with the rare beauty of trees and flowers, and to add precious years of life in the healthful climate that Palo Alto enjoys."
Nowadays, the precious extra years are more likely to come from working for tech companies with excellent medical benefits, from inhabiting a place where cigarette smoke is unlikely to have ever touched one's lungs and where a spirulina algae smoothie is always a short walk away.
None of this was much in evidence when I was a child (though my mother tells me Palo Alto remained an alcohol-free area until around the time my family moved there at the start of the 1960s). Palo Alto was pretty sleepy then and hardly anyone outside the area had heard of the place. Technology simply did not feature much in most residents' minds. The only technology company that most people could name was Hewlett-Packard, now HP.
Return visits as an adult, such as the one I am making now, are always a bit strange. I moved to another California town early in my high-school years, so I never drove a car here. Hence my knowledge of its geography is still heavily based on sitting in a back seat and being driven by a parent - in other words, arriving at places but not having any idea how to get to them.
Thus I know street names quite well, and even where places are, but not how to get to them. When I come out here to stay with family and do a bit of work, it is always slightly embarrassing to have to get directions for what is, after all, my hometown.
Then there's the general though pleasant oddness of being in a location so immersed in technology.
Most obviously, there are the companies filling up the available office spaces downtown. This is prime real estate to have as your business address if you are a tech anything, which means the Valley's premium office rents are charged here, in the 94021 zipcode.
And this city, rolling in tech millionaires, is without doubt the most upmarket, adulatory place in the world to be a geek. Stroll through the old downtown area and what in my childhood were nondescript buildings filled with auto-repair shops, bottling plants, warehouses and a range of light industry are now companies connected in some way with the worship of the microchip.
Then there are the people who work for those companies. These are a mix of veteran geeks - based on my own observations during the week, Palo Alto must have one of the largest populations of men with grey hair in ponytails - and younger, aspirational geeks.
The latter (still mostly male) come in two types: classic geeks with baggy tech T-shirts, glasses and maybe long hair (which will some day end up in one of those greying ponytails), or the sleek geeks with neatly trimmed hair and tucked-in shirts. Pocket protectors as a badge of geek identity are long gone, but Valley tech companies' short-sleeved polo shirts are very much the hallmark of the sleek geek.
More geeks these days seem to be sleek geeks, which makes sense when the industry offers jobs to tens of thousands of people beyond the small arch-geek circles we all knew in school.
How geeky is Palo Alto? Well, where else would you see a car with a bumper sticker that reads, "Beware of quantum ducks. Quark! Quark!"?
Recently, I was sitting with a family member in a waiting room at the Palo Alto medical clinic and among the out-of-date golf and fashion magazines left there for patients was a copy of Tom's Hardware, which is about as hardcore as tech magazines get. And yes, it was very well thumbed.
Blog: www.techno-culture.com
