Facebook: will stock markets "unfriend" investors buying now? If you go through the archives of the former Association of Unit Trusts & Investment Funds, you will discover that there were up to 20 technology unit trusts in 1985, including funds offered by then household names Allied Dunbar and Save & Prosper. But the funds disappeared after the stock market crash of 1987, which saw shares in the likes of IBM fall by 80pc. This is why there were just three technology funds left in the run-up to the tech boom, which began to gather pace in 1999. But by March 2000 there were more than 28 funds as fund groups scampered to get a piece of the action. Sadly, for private investors who bought into the hype, the vast majority of funds came to the party so late that they didn't make investors a penny. The bursting of the bubble in 2000 caused sheepish investment groups to quietly close their technology funds or ditch the tech tag to merge them with other funds. Today there are barely half a dozen dedicated technology funds remaining. You wonder whether the fund groups acted in haste. Look at the sales figures of technology funds to prove the point. They show that, between 2000 and 2008, investors were net sellers of technology funds (more money was withdrawn from these funds than was invested by new buyers). Yet the few remaining tech funds have experienced some significant gains over the past few years. If you had invested in Axa Framlington Global Technology as recently as three years ago, you would have doubled your money. If you had invested in 2007, you would have seen returns of around 66pc - not bad considering that the period takes in the financial crisis and subsequent global recession. There will be many investors who will regret not buying into the likes of Apple and Google - two companies that have defined the way many of us live our lives today, and which have made early-bird investors a tidy fortune. This is why Facebook's IPO attracted such interest - and, to be fair, many experts don't believe that the technology sector is facing another bubble. Brian Dennehy at FundExpert, for instance, said he believed the bubble prerequisites of extreme investor appetite and extreme valuations that caused the dotcom collapse in 2000 were missing today. "Recall the dotcom business model: capture market share at all costs - and the costs were huge," he said. Pets.com raised $82m in February 2000. It was all spent before the end of the year, and they were bust. Imagine how much dog food they needed to sell to make a profit. But profits were not an objective. In contrast, Apple enjoys fat profits, said Mr Dennehy. The company might be vulnerable to competition from the likes of Samsung, but that doesn't make it a bubble - it merely means Apple is making hay - profits - while the sun shines. Mr Dennehy has a point. But for most of the past decade investors chose to shun technology - even though they were busy replacing their Sony Walkmans with iPods, swapping clunky PCs for sleek laptops and catching up with old friends on social networks, rather than by picking up the telephone. Unlike 900million people worldwide, Facebook has so far passed me by, but as I write this on my MacBook, hooked up to the web via a dongle, sitting opposite a fellow commuter watching a movie on his iPad (with another reading a Kindle), there is no doubt that technology has changed the way we live our lives. All of this makes me wonder whether the easy money from the technology we have been embracing has been made (see the graph, which shows the spike in the Nasdaq since mid-2008). Perhaps, if you are one of the reported four in five investors tempted by the technology hype today, you should ask yourself this question before you take the plunge. If you haven't invested in technology before, why are you tempted now?