Techno Spot: It's all geek to me

'The Internship' is the latest in a series of films set in a fictional Silicon Valley. But what's the real one like? Christopher Beanland went to find out

'People think that mound is where Leland Stanford is buried," the tour guide said, sweeping an arm to the left and drawing my eye to a wide expanse of manicured green grass. "It's actually the wireless row-ter." She grinned with the mischievousness of youth. "The wi-fi coverage is so good that I love to study outside."

The Stanfords made their money in the railways that swept west in the 1800s, railways for which American-Indian lands were cleared so investors could make millions. Like many other rich families of the era, they feared the wrath of God in the afterlife and wanted to make amends - and so they bequeathed a university and had the grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who laid out Central Park in New York.

"The Farm" - or Stanford University, at Palo Alto, 48km south of San Francisco - is the resulting enormous campus, and its lush fields stretch as far as the eye can see. At its centre is a church that looks as though it has been airlifted from a Mexican pueblo. The stained-glass windows refract the sunlight and mystery hangs in the air.

Leland Stanford embraced "his" west and wanted California to become self-sufficient, not reliant on the established east coast. Frederick Terman, a professor at the university in the '30s, was of the same mind. He encouraged two of his students, David Packard and William Hewlett, to stay on in Palo Alto.

Just 10 minutes' drive from The Farm, I found myself in the picture-book suburbs of the American dream. At 367 Addison Avenue sits a bucolic Arts and Crafts-style house made of wood and painted green and gold. The garage in the driveway is where Hewlett and Packard decided to form their own company in 1939 and build the HP200A - an audio oscillator. Walt Disney bought eight and put them to work making the movie Fantasia.

So Silicon Valley fuelled the film-makers' craft, but it's only recently that it has fired film-makers' imaginations. First there was The Social Network, a slow-burning examination of the Facebook phenomenon. Now we have The Internship, in which two losers played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson lark around at Google. Later this year, we should see a biopic of Apple's founder Steve Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher.

All these films give a glamorous sheen to Silicon Valley. The reality is more run-of-the-mill. The HP garage has been christened "the Birthplace of Silicon Valley", and outside a handsome plaque testifies to the importance of the site.

It was the middle of the day but the place was deserted. Silicon Valley is still, for now, a mystical place that few bother to explore. A hundred years from now, though, a pilgrimage there might be as essential as one is now to Rome, Athens or Istanbul. This is where a new society, a new way of living, is being created.

I met Jesse Warr, a fixer and guide, who drove me past the property Jobs made his family home. His widow, Laurene Powell, and three children, still live in the Dordogne-style house. Pointedly, there are no electric gates or high walls.

Palo Alto is a perfect dormitory town with perfect houses and perfect-looking people. We passed the office block in its centre, where Facebook once rented space, and stopped at Pizza My Heart, a Hawaiian-themed joint where Stanford students and app designers eat lunch and talk about rock music or surfing.

Like Leland Stanford, Mark Zuckerberg (one of the founders of Facebook) and so many more, Warr came to California from the east in search of a new life.

Zuckerberg once rented a house nearby, as did Larry Page and Sergey Brin - two Stanford students who didn't just want to make a search engine, they wanted to make something with artificial intelligence. Their company seems set on world domination from its base up the road. The nondescript houses of the suburbs, with fanciful names such as Sunnyvale and Mountain View, are still the incubators of the next big thing in the digital world.

Needing more space, Facebook recently relocated to a sprawling office complex that Sun Microsystems used to call home. It's on reclaimed flatlands surrounded by marsh. I couldn't stop staring at the birds, the kind of birds John James Audubon painted and documented in Birds of America. The road running around the perimeter gives only a tiny clue to what's inside: its name is Hacker Way. On the corner of Hacker Way and the Bayfront Expressway is a sign that usually displays a giant "thumbs up" - the "Like" logo from Facebook - but that day workers were putting up a new poster.

We passed the offices of Oracle, eBay, Microsoft and McAfee - all strung along Highway 101. Just beyond the road, Warr pointed to the HQ of Yahoo, whose "fathers", Jerry Yang and David Filo, studied together at Stanford.

Silicon Valley used to be called the Valley of Heart's Delight because of the blossoms on the fruit trees. In downtown San Jose, neat squares and boxy office blocks squat where orchards used to bloom. Adobe's HQ towers over the city centre. The Tech Museum of Innovation has a series of child-friendly exhibits exploring the world of science, with Segways and astronauts featuring largely.

No one mentions the wars. Defence has made California rich: Hewlett Packard sold its systems to armies and the internet was developed initially as a military machine. It is a great paradox of the online world that, while it has led to a new era of dissent, it also concentrates power in the hands of a few corporations and allows the spooks to do their jobs from a desk with a cool drink in one hand and a mouse in the other. The enormous hangars at Moffett Federal Airfield, where airships used to be stored, are graphic reminders of the area's military presence, past and present.

We diverted back through Palo Alto. Posters lined the road - Oliver Stone was due to give a talk that night at Stanford about his new television show, Untold History of the United States, in which he examines at length how modern America has been shaped by commercial interests.

The fetishisation of technology brands reaches its apotheosis at Apple's HQ in Cupertino. In the shop there, I deliberated whether to buy a T-shirt saying "Cupertino - Home of The Mothership" or a Babygro with an Apple logo on it. Apple aficionados were bulk-buying souvenirs all around me.

The shop at the nearby Computer History Museum is better - a paean to progress, to nerds and to geeks. You can buy books with titles such as Punched-Card Systemsand the Early Information Explosion and posters of Google's first server and the 1984 Apple Macintosh.

The museum's zoomed-in photos of diodes and circuits and chips fascinated me and I was mesmerised by the man-made patterns.

As my eyes went dizzy, I imagined the future, a future in which computers would be legion and key to everything; a future that was imagined and created here in northern California.

People will come here in the future. People will come in droves - to worship, to protest and to see where it all started.

When to go

From May to October, temperatures are around 20°C-27°C, with low rainfall; winter can be cool.

Jesse Warr will take you on a full day's tour (eight hours) of Silicon Valley for $600. The price is the same for up to six people and he'll pick you up and drop you off at your hotel (toursanfranciscobay.com; e-mail afriendintown@hotmail.com).

Further information

Go to visitcalifornia.co.uk; smccvb.com.

 © The Sunday Telegraph