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The first thing to go was the calculator. “I always had it with me, just in case I needed to do some calculation,” he said. Now that it’s gone, he does not lament its absence. “I don’t miss it, not at all,” he said.

Similarly, he stopped wearing a watch. “The sound of the computer is the sound of the clock,” he said. “You’re always wondering how fast or slow your servers are, how you can squeeze another microsecond out of the program you’re writing.”

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Mr. Garg continued, “Gradually I realized I didn’t have to let these things infiltrate my outside life.”

A hand-held computer never had a chance. “I felt one should make only as many appointments as you can keep in your head,” Mr. Garg said. “That’s how I see myself with technology,” he said. “I make a living with it but I don’t have to let it take over my whole life.”

Karen Mathews,on the other hand, has latched onto one particular object that seems to understand what she is all about. As vice president and chief financial officer of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., Ms. Mathews is surrounded every day by the computer industry’s past — its triumphs and blunders, its flashes in the pan and its more long-lasting achievements.

Such a working atmosphere has prompted her to contemplate how she got to where she is now in her personal life, technologically speaking.

Ms. Mathews, 46, is an avid user of the Handspring Treo, which combines a cellphone with a Palm organizer and Web browser. Ms. Mathews sees her Treo as an indispensable communication tool, to be sure, but she loves having information of all kinds accessible at all times. During a recent trip to Italy, the Treo drew admiring comments from Ms. Mathews’s fellow travelers as they watched her punch up an Italian-English dictionary and a wine reference.

“It’s just who I am,” she said of the information maven in her. “The daughter of a librarian.”

Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, is another case in point. He oversees the computers, data networks and most other matters electronic on the 9,600-student campus. Yet his office, on the third floor of a historic building, is so spare, so devoid of electronics, that he could easily be mistaken for the professor he once was. His subject was international political economy and he taught it by having his students read literature of the developing world.

In fact, Dr. Gonick, 43, rather likes to be seen in a more low-tech light. After all, he said, there is still very much the liberal arts professor in him.

“We very much define who we are by the things we surround ourselves with,” he said. And so he is surrounded by some 2,500 books, dozens of photographs and original prints from Africa, and one very large black serpentine sculpture from Zimbabwe.

The only technology in sight is a two-and-a-half-pound notebook computer with a wireless connection to the Internet.

As much as Ms. Mathews links her Treo to a particular way she sees herself, Dr. Gonick links his technical spareness to his view on the role of technology in the world at large. “For me it’s a philosophical aspiration — that technology will have its largest impact on our condition when it’s invisible,” he said.

And conspicuous objects of questionable usefulness have been banished from the Gonick kitchen as well.

The electric can opener is gone, as is the fancy electronic griddle. “And this Thanksgiving we’re going to have to have a national summit on whether to replace the electric knife to cut the turkey,” Dr. Gonick said. “It hasn’t worked properly for three years.”

It is the nomad in Americ Azevedo that led him to embrace one technology — and a sense that he was suppressing his real identity that led him to eliminate another. Mr. Azevedo, 55, who teaches computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, is stuck like glue to his Palm-Kyocera cellphone hybrid. Like the Treo, the Kyocera allows Mr. Azevedo to send and receive e-mail.

“I like to be able to move around, from one office to another, or from home to a coffee shop, or just walking around,” Mr. Azevedo said during an interview from his cellphone as he sat on a bench on the university’s main plaza, watching, as he put it, “all manner of students in different states of disarray walk by.”

Ten minutes after the interview, a reporter reached Mr. Azevedo as he sipped a cappuccino at a cafe near the campus. An hour later, he called the reporter to answer a last-minute question.

At the same time, Mr. Azevedo is banishing excessive e-mail from his life. He used to try to respond to each of the 100 or so messages he received every day, but realized he was increasingly miserable at the thought of spending so much time in front of a screen.

“I realized that that isn’t who I am,” he said. “I like to be out there feeling the pulse of life.”