Size matters to Silicon Valley geeks

Hanging around Silicon Valley in California, you could be forgiven for thinking that being wired is the norm. Not wired, as in having had one too many double lattes before lunch (as is the wont of the typical Valley tech company cubicle worker). Wired, as in feeling the entire world revolves around a computer terminal and a modem.

For many in this part of the world, that's actually true - the San Francisco Bay Area has the highest ratio of modems to population in the world. More than 70 per cent of homes have an Internet connection, and not just a boring old 28.8k connection. Oh no - such sluggishness belongs only to the old computers with internal modems donated to schools.

Even 33.6k modems are now passe. If you are forced to go the low-tech modem route, it's 56k these days, even if many telephone lines cannot deliver anywhere near that speed. It's a bit like mountain bikes - everyone has at least 18 gears because it's the thing to own, but in reality, the average cyclist uses almost none of them.

But even 56k is considered a bit of an embarrassment, not something you'd try to impress a date with. To do that, you must use this phrase over dinner at some pricey Palo Alto eatery (say, for verisimilitude's sake, some place serving California-Japanese fusion food, meaning sushi with lots of avocado and arugula): "Thank God for my ISDN line - I downloaded the entire Starr Report in under 10 seconds and was already reading about the second Oval Office encounter while everyone else was still trying to connect to America Online." Then chuckle indulgently.

There's also the option of cable modems, and cool little wireless modems you can use to read your email off your laptop while in a cafe and various experiments with raising the speed of ordinary copper phone lines through technologies like ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber loop - don't ask). Or, like my friend in San Francisco, whose job is to sit at the right hand of that Valley god, Apple co-founder and Endlessly Interim Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, you could have your own personal T1 line.

A T1 line transfers data at the rate of 1.544 megabits per second. A megabit is a million bits; compare that to 56k, or 56,000 bits. And weep.

Advertising hoardings in the Bay Area also make you feel that everyone but you speaks some foreign techie language and subscribes to Wired magazine. Driving around the highways that enmesh the Silicon Valley area - 101 along the bayshore, 280 up along the coastal hills, 880, 85, 237 which slice sideways east to west (although to confuse everybody, exit signs describe them as heading north and south) - the adverts are for Internet services, modems, Internet search engines like Excite and Yahoo, laptops. When you are in the very heart of Silicon Valley, down near San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, the adverts trade up to routers, multiplexers, 3D graphics accelerator chipsets, and other geek esoterica. In many cases, you must be an engineer to understand the billboards. The rest of us drive by and pretend we don't feel inadequate.

The best billboards though are two along Highway 101 near the Ralston Avenue exit at Belmont. This is the turn-off for Oracle Corporation, the giant database company, whose flamboyant CEO Larry Ellison has built a row of gleaming greenish-blue mirrored glass towers along the shore of the San Francisco Bay.

For years now, Oracle and rival database company Informix have needled each other via billboard. Informix taunts Oracle workers with claims about the inferiority of Oracle databases on a billboard all the employees see as they arrive for work. Then, on the other side of the highway, Ellison slags off Informix. The two companies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars acting like small children, much to the general amusement of commuters.

Yes, it's a strange, but always entertaining part of the world. If you're visiting, just try not to feel intimidated by the other guy with the "My bandwidth is bigger" bumper sticker on the back of his car, and you'll do fine.

Karlin Lillington is at klillington@irish-times.ie