Silicon Alley and the idea of New York City as a dot-com center. In 1997, over 200 members and leaders of Silicon Alley joined NYC entrepreneurs, Andrew Rasiej and Cecilia Pagkalinawan to help wire Washington Irving High School to the Internet. This response and the Department of Education's growing need for technology integration marked the birth of Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education (MOUSE), an organization that today serves tens of thousands of underserved youth in schools in five states and over 20 countries. The rapid growth of internet companies during the 1990s, known as the Dot-com bubble, came to a
Silicon Prairie park, which is located in Champaign. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is in Urbana. The Chicago Metropolitan Area is home to several companies in the industrial automation, consumer electronics, telecommunications and online services industries. The Illinois Technology and Research Corridor along Interstate 88 and the Golden Corridor along Interstate 90 have particularly high concentrations of such businesses. Among the Chicago area companies and organizations that comprise the Illinois Silicon Prairie are: An area of the Midwestern United States is often referred to as the Silicon Prairie. This region can loosely be defined as the states bordering along Interstate 29