About 18 months ago, Baltimore shares were trading around £14 sterling (€22.14) and the company was a glamour stock on the London market. Today the shares have fallen to around £0.24. The company, which once had a market capitalisation of £7.5 billion - higher than the Bank of Ireland - is now valued at just about £120 million.

With the drop in the share price, former Baltimore chief executive Mr Fran Rooney has seen the paper value of his stake in the company drop from about £93 million to just under £2 million. He is nursing a hefty loss on share options he exercised last December when he bought 607,000 shares at the option price of £1.50.

Mr Rooney was not alone in suffering a sharp drop in his paper wealth as investors turned their backs on the once high-flying technology, media and telecoms (TMT) sector. As the markets rerate the value of TMT shares, other Irish entrepreneurs who brought technology companies to the market have seen sharp falls in their paper wealth.

Horizon Technology Group founder, Mr Samir Naji, has seen the share price of his profitable internet services company fall from €14 on February 29th, 2000, to their current low of €0.80. At the beginning of this year the shares were trading at €7.50 but a profit warning and job cuts in May compounded the negative impact of already difficult stock markets. The value of Mr Naji's Horizon stake has fallen from €475 million to about €27 million.

The McGuire brothers, John and Cyril, have seen the share price of Trintech tumble. Trintech shares fell sharply when the loss-making software developer failed to meet analysts' first-quarter expectations. The shares, which floated on Nasdaq and on the Neuer Markt in Frankfurt at €11 in September 1999 and reached a high of €75.44 in March 2000, are now trading at just €1.56.

Datalex chief executive Mr Neil Wilson has seen the shares of the Dublin-based provider of e-services for the travel industry fall from the flotation price last October of €6.84 in Dublin to just €0.90 this week and from $11.50 (€12.51) on Nasdaq to just $1.66, well off their 52-week high of $12.50.

Shares in Dublin-based microchip designer Parthus Technologies are trading around £0.45 sterling, a long way short of their 52-week high of £4.19 and just off their 52-week low of £0.32.

Riverdeep, a player in the e-learning sector that is backed by federal rather than corporate spending and expects to become profitable this year, is trading around $23 per share, roughly in the middle of its 52-week range of $15.75 to $30.

As stock markets react to the slashing of corporate spending on technology worldwide, even profitable TMT companies have suffered falls in their share prices.

Iona, run by Dr Chris Horn, is currently trading at around $15 well off its 52-week high of $87.50 and SmartForce is trading around $37, the middle of its 52-week $18 to $57 range.

Despite current woes in the sector, some technology entrepreneurs have managed to turn some of their paper wealth into hard cash along the way.

Mr Rooney realised £5.8 million sterling in May 2000 when he sold one million shares at £5.80 - though that price was well off the market high. In September 2000, when Horizon shares were trading in a range of €9 to €11.50.

Mr Naji and three other Horizon directors realised almost €25 million by selling shares to institutional investors - about three-quarters of the shares sold belonged to Mr Naji.

His remaining stake in the company was then valued at about €304 million.

Parthus Technologies chief executive Mr Brian Long raised more than £27 million from share sales last year. In November 2000, he sold £16.5 million worth of shares at £2.10 per share. This followed his sale of 13 million shares for £11 million when Parthus floated in May 2000 at £0.85. He retains about 21 per cent of the company.

In June, Riverdeep non-executive chairman Mr Pat McDonagh sold more than 29 million shares at €4.97 each to raise more than €146 million. That reduced his stake in the company from 38.7 per cent to 24.4 per cent.

Many of the early investors of TMT operations have also made healthy profits on their high-risk investments. Financier Mr Dermot Desmond, who backed Mr Rooney when he bought the company in 1996, sold two million Baltimore shares for up to £55 million in late 1999. Earlier he had received some £6.5 million and 3.5 million Zergo (now Baltimore) shares when Zergo acquired Baltimore.

Some private clients of stockbrokers and corporate finance houses, who advised the fledgling technology and internet companies in the run-up to their flotations, have managed to make profits on their investments.

And some investors, who bought in at the time the companies floated or shortly afterwards and sold before the technology bloodbath, have been lucky. Those who got the timing of their exit right were the winners.

Horizon, for example, floated in Dublin and London at just €1.64 per share in December 1999. In their early months on the market the shares shot up to €14 - they hit their high on February 29th, 2000 - before easing back.

Up until May this year the shares have remained above their flotation price so shareholders who bought early and sold in February/March would still have made a profit.

The big losers in the TMT bloodbath have been the private and institutional investors who bought into the sector at or around its peak or when the shares were on the way up and held on to their shares.

Encouraged by spectacular returns earned by some early investors, private investors and some institutions piled into the sector driving up share prices.

In a market awash with cash, where TMT companies were the flavour of the day, share prices boomed ahead. Investors were not fussy where they put their money as long as the company had an "e" in it. Pressure from the venture capitalists and private investors who wanted to take their profits meant some companies came to the market at too early a stage in their development.

It did not matter that most of these companies were still in the relatively early stages of development, were generally loss-making, and operating untried and untested business models. It did not matter that there was often no clearly laid out business plan to bring the company to profitability.

It didn't matter even that these developing companies were burning cash at a spectacular rate. The money just piled in. Shares were ramped by the irrational exuberance for internet and technology shares. In the new world of investing, the old rules no longer applied.

The trouble was that these early spectacular returns were not sustainable. Early investors were able to get out at a good profit as new investors bought in. Like a pyramid selling scheme, the early entrants made money at the expense of the later entrants.

The big losers have been private investors, clients of institutional funds and pension funds that invested in the TMT bubble, and employees of TMT companies whose remuneration included share options that, in many cases, are now worthless.

At Trintech, some employees are understood to have options exercisable at a share price of up to $15 when the market value of the shares has fallen to $1.46.

Who is to blame? Private investors were probably driven by greed for a slice of the huge gains apparently available and took little account of the associated high risks in a notoriously volatile TMT sector.

But they would have been encouraged by the institutional investors, including many pension funds in the US, who bought into the sector, and by the investment banks and venture capitalists who advanced huge loans to companies without viable business plans and pushed companies to the market too early.