There was a point in my life, having grown up in north-east England, when I thought this Sun-SGI strip sounded like the most wonderful otherworldly place you co

There was a point in my life, having grown up in north-east England, when I thought this Sun-SGI strip sounded like the most wonderful otherworldly place you could possibly be. Sun workstations were the first machines I'd used that had seemed to be really limitless. And while wasting time at work in 1993 or so, I'd read Usenet posts by people like CJ Silverio at SGI that (though often seriously dissatisfied) had a mood that seemed to highlight how far away that world was from the one I'd grown up in. I pictured Silicon Valley as a real valley, with low orange sunlight picking out the slabs and flat roofs of the research centres, roads winding to the valley floor below, the sea at the end of the valley. How disappointed I was when I finally visited the place and found an extended grid-plan office park on flat reclaimed land with the odd hill in the distance.