CAPITOL OF PUNK. NovaRUG. DC Area Geeky Groups. Conrad Barski. A Tech Stable, But Hardly A Staple. Back in May 2001, Manny Friedman, one of the founders of the investment firm Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, spoke for most of the Washington business community when he explained to The Post that the regional economy had reached a tipping point -- that it had so many hot tech companies, so many successful tech entrepreneurs and so much intellectual and financial capital that Washington had secured a place as one of the country's top technology centers, alongside Boston, Austin and Silicon Valley.
Those were the days when AOL and MicroStrategy loomed large in the dot-com space, when Celera and Human Genome Sciences were going to revolutionize medicine and when UUNet, Sprint, MCI and Ciena were going to turn Washington into the telecommunications capital of the world. Much has changed since then, of course -- fortunes lost, companies bought off or closed, products fizzled -- but the myth that Washington's future lies in technology has remained remarkably persistent.