AUSTIN—In the early 1980s, as Boston's technology industry was living out the boom years, this place remained a laid-back college town and state capital.

Then, in 1984, a 19-year-old student named Michael Dell came up with the idea of building personal computers to order and selling them directly to buyers. He started his business in a University of Texas dorm room here.

Around the same time, the city successfully bid to become the home of two major computer-industry consortiums, the Semiconductor Manufacturing and Technology Institute, or Sematech, and the Microelectronic and Computer Technology Corp., or MCC.

Those projects became the foundation of a technology industry whose growth has astonished everyone, including the locals. Today Austin is expanding twice as fast as a technology center as Silicon Valley's San Jose and has about 110,000 people working at 950 tech companies.

It's competing with places such as Northern Virginia and Seattle to depose Boston as the country's No. 2 technology center, but has a ways to go -- Boston employs about 300,000 people.

Business leaders here say they're not following any grand plan to become the next Silicon Valley. "This was kind of an accident," said Cerise Blair, the executive director of the Austin Software Council. "There wasn't any deliberate effort. People starting coming to MCC to present papers or to work at Dell and they realized what a nice place this was and they stayed."

Dell, one of the world's five largest PC makers and perhaps the best-known tech company here, posted more than $7 billion in sales last year. Its success has created hundreds of "Dellionaries," many of whom have plowed their fortunes into upstart ventures here.

Austin has become a favored location among companies such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Motorola Inc. for huge computer chip plants, where workers put on airtight suits to avoid contaminating the products with dust.

Austin is also home to a growing number of software and Internet-related firms, many of which focus on interactive games and multimedia technologies. The region has about 600 software companies that employ about 18,000 people, Blair said.