As one sharp-eyed Bay Area local pointed out, the map almost certainly dates to the late '90s, not 2006: "It doesn't mention Apple OR Google. Google had already had its much heralded IPO by 2004, and there's no way this would have included Yahoo but not Google." Fair point. By 2006, Google was already a Wall Street darling and Apple was about to drop the iPhone on an unsuspecting world. Leaving them off a Bay Area tech map would be like making a map of San Francisco restaurants and forgetting the burritos.

Still, the underlying nostalgia hit is real. As another local put it: "This is a reminder that 2006 was two decades ago. In millennial terms: 2006 is now 1976." Let that one sink in while you ice your knees.

But the map — whatever its actual vintage — does highlight something worth thinking about. The Bay Area's tech ecosystem has undergone a complete metamorphosis in the span of a generation. Companies that seemed invincible (Sun Microsystems, SGI, Palm) are dust. The survivors consolidated, and the newcomers — your Metas, your OpenAIs, your Stripes — look nothing like their predecessors.

What hasn't changed? The cost of being here. The housing crisis was already brewing in the early 2000s, and two decades of tech wealth pouring into the region without commensurate building has made it exponentially worse. The map is a charming artifact, but it's also a reminder that we've had twenty years to prepare for the pressures that tech growth brings — more housing, better transit, smarter infrastructure — and we've mostly spent that time in committee meetings and environmental review.

The companies on the map are gone. The bureaucratic inertia that made it impossible to build around them? That part's timeless.