I have heard discussions among software millionaires about an F.E.U. of half a million dollars, for a home bought on a whim.

Silicon Valley, just to the south, is the land of memory chips, software and freshly coined millionaires, which attracts a third of all the venture capital invested in the country.

Ron Unz, the software millionaire who led successful efforts to end bilingual education in Arizona and California, announced that he planned financial support for a Massachusetts ballot initiative to replace bilingual classes.

Lunch on a cool, sunny afternoon at the home of Ridgely Evers, a software millionaire turned olive oil producer, and his wife, Colleen McGlynn, was a telling Sonoma mix.

The Austin American-Statesman ran a feature on a purple-haired 37-year-old software millionaire who spent $100,000 on a stereo.

The campaign finance reform measure was sponsored by Ron Unz, a software millionaire, whose initiative against bilingual education was approved in 1998.

Ignoring the software millionaires and the other suck-up artists, he had agreed to sell us his house--at $20,000 over the list price.

Statistical analyst Jeff Sauro looked at Gladwell's claim that between 1952 and 1958 was the best time to be born to become a software millionaire.

But in this day and age of software millionaires and dot-com billionaires, who knows?

And the technology expansion has created more assembly line workers than software millionaires.