Toasting tech in Telluride tech in Teulluride.

• Author: LAINSON, SUZANNE
• Position: Brief Article

FESTIVAL LOOKS BACK TO THE FUTURE

Telluride as Colorado's tech hotbed? Well, it has been and perhaps could be again.

"Telluride was the Silicon Valley of the 1890s," pronounced Scott Brown, producer of Telluride's first Tech Festival, held August 11-14. He cited a number of inventions with Telluride connections, the most notable of which came in 1891; when the world's first AC power plant was built by L.L. Nunn with the help of Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. Telluride was the first electrified city.

"It was an odd place for it to happen," muses Brown. "One of the mysteries was why here -- in a town of a few thousand people and truly in the middle of nowhere." He suspects there is something about the town's beauty and isolation which fosters creative thinking. As a result, he created a festival celebrating Telluride's connection to the past, present, and future of technology.

At the festival, homage was paid to Westinghouse, Tesla, and Nunn and to three current tech visionaries: Richard Stallman (father of Gnu/Linux), John Perry Barlow (cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), and Raymond Kurzweil (inventor of speech recognition, music synthesis, and reading technology). According to Brown, everyone who came for the festival was energized by it. "They were so happy to collect in someplace other than a traditional convention center. There was nobody rushing to get phone calls. Within a few hours people left their cell phones back in their hotel rooms because there were too many neat things going on here to be taking phone calls."

That atmosphere appears to be Telluride's tech trump card. In 1993, Telluride was one of the first wired communities in the country, thanks to a grant from the Colorado Advanced Technology Institute to install public access Internet connections. Yet, while it was an Internet pioneer then, right now Telluride doesn't have the high-speed infrastructure it needs to support lots of high tech companies. Its first T-1 line didn't come to town until 1998.

Still, Telluride's reputation as a center of high-tech culture is growing.

One reason is the number...