A healthy chunk of the population here ended up working in technology thanks to a childhood fascination with all things robotic. So it's surprising to find how little robots have permeated what we like to think of as the Gadget Center of the Universe.

My neighbour Susan has a robot vacuum cleaner. You go over for a cup of tea, and suddenly you find it bumping your feet. Plenty of local children have quasi-robotic dinosaur toys, or programmable Lego. But the robot-strewn future that inspired so many of us? It's pretty much yet to materialise.

We're working on it, though. First of all, the fascination hasn't died. Geeky Valley parents may have stuck out like sore thumbs as they grew up in Minnesota, New Jersey or Mumbai. But here their children attend schools where the coolest teams aren't the basketball or football squads but the robotics teams. Local high-school robot wars get a ton of media attention. 

This is also home to Stanley, Stanford's robot car, which won the $2 million (£1.4 million) Darpa Challenge by driving itself across 132 miles of desert, as well as Stanley's slightly less-successful offspring Junior, (which came second in the succeeding race, winning a mere $1 million).

In Mountain View, meanwhile, is Anybots, maker of what Popular Mechanics magazine called "the best humanoid robot yet". This is the QA, a stripped-down "telepresence" robot designed to rove around your office, letting you "meet" colleagues, or even showing them around your facility, while they are thousands of miles away. Yours for $30,000.

Other local companies are already making serious money from robots. Sunnyvale's Intuitive Surgical makes the $1 million Da Vinci system, where a surgeon controls a robot that does the actual surgery. Intuitive's stock is up 500% in the past five years.

* Hobby stores that supply local robot tinkerers haven't been doing so well, thanks to the internet. But Berkeley's Boss Robot survives. It's the place to go for genuine robot spare parts, and for the retro-bots we all need for decoration.

* Today is 1234567890 day. The powerhouse programming language Unix counts time in seconds from midnight on 1 January 1970. That means that at 3.13 pm Pacific Time (11.13pm UK time) today, Unix time will equal 1234567890. We're excited.