Austin American-Statesman, Texas, Plugged In Column.

Dec. 31--AUSTIN'S STOCK SURPRISE: Who would have thought it? If, on Jan. 2, you bought $1,000 worth of shares in every Austin-based tech company -- as well as non-Austin tech companies with substantial operations here -- you would have registered a 6.25 percent gain by the close of trading Friday, the next-to-last trading day of 2001.

In other words, your $27,000 would have grown to $28,687.

We counted 27 stocks in our loosely defined Austin Tech Index -- homegrown companies such as Dell, Vignette and Active Power, but also companies with a significant presence here such as Motorola, Applied Materials, AMD and Cypress Semiconductor. We also eliminated stocks …