Plenty of others have changed careers -- or left the Valley altogether. Santa Clara County lost 14,564 people in 2001, the most recent year tallied by the California Department of Finance. That's the biggest net exodus since at least 1970.

So, not many high-tech casualties were shocked last week when the state released new figures showing that officials had dramatically underestimated Silicon Valley's job losses since 2000. "The pain people were feeling was based on reality, as opposed to the junk the state was feeding us," said Richard Carlson, chairman of Mountain View forecasting firm Spectrum Economics Inc.

The low-ball statistics, based on sampling, had gauged Santa Clara County's losses at about 115,000 jobs. The more accurate figures peg the damage at 175,000, or about 16% of all jobs in the county outside farming. For San Francisco and Silicon Valley as a whole, the losses added up to 275,400, or 13% of the nonfarm total.

That means the Valley's comedown is worse than Los Angeles' after the aerospace industry decline that began in 1990. In L.A.'s two most desperate years, 400,000 jobs disappeared, but they amounted to only 10% of the nonfarm whole.

In fact, Silicon Valley's fall is unmatched in state history since the Great Depression, when some regions lost 25% of their jobs, according to Stephen Levy, director of the Palo Alto-based Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy. What's more, the new statistics show that the number of people working in Silicon Valley has fallen back to the level in 1996, when the dot-com boom was barely underway.