Maybe Athena really did spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, but things were easier in those millennia. The pagan idol of our own civilization—the Internet, god of cyberspace, highway of the New Economy—just seemed to come out of nowhere and in almost no time. In reality, the gestation period stretched over decades. And then, with astonishing suddenness, we were rabid converts, worshiping all day at our luminous screens, making offerings with our secure, encrypted credit-card numbers.
Though the Internet was popularized only in the last five years, its origins go way back. Today’s technological revolution and wealth-creation boom started with a generation of men, now in their 70s, for whom “hacking” meant tinkering with homemade radios as working-class kids during the Depression. Many of them served in World War II, the last war America fought without the aid of digital computers; others were European youths who fled the Nazis.
After the war, they settled in the western U.S. and became pioneers, like generations of risktakers before them. In 1959, when the silicon chip was invented, Silicon Valley was still known as the Santa Clara Valley, a thinly populated rural enclave of fruit-tree groves and little else. There wasn’t even a freeway going north to San Francisco—let alone the Pacific Northwest—just a slow, two-lane road by the wetlands on the bay.
On these pages, Vanity Fair looks back—and forward—assembling the surviving giants of this visionary generation, along with their most influential successors.
JACK KILBY, Inventor of the computer chip
Jack Kilby, 76, operated a ham radio as a teenager in Kansas during the Depression, then repaired radios for soldiers behind enemy lines in World War II. He didn't pass the entrance exam for M.I.T., but later wound up at a rising Dallas electronics firm, Texas Instruments, where he filed patent #3,138,743 for the microchip in 1959. (Robert Noyce, now deceased, came up with his own version of the chip, entirely independent from Kilby's; the pair share credit for its creation.)
ARTHUR ROCK, First venture-capital tycoon
Arthur Rock, 73, struggled with polio as a child, but delivered the Saturday Evening Post door-to-door in Rochester, New York, and worked the soda fountain at his father's candy store. As a junior associate on Wall Street in the late 50s, he raised the seed money for Fairchild Semiconductor, where Robert Noyce's chip was born. Rock helped bankroll the birth of Intel, the microprocessor colossus, in 1968, and invested in Apple in 1978, when it was just a cache of dreams in Steve Jobs's garage.
EUGENE KLEINER and TOM PERKINS, Venture-capital pioneers
Eugene Kleiner, 77, fled the Nazis as a child in Vienna, winding up amid the apricot orchards of Northern California, where he worked for William Shockley, one of the fathers of the transistor—forerunner of the chip; then, as part of "the Traitorous Eight," Kleiner mutinied against his overbearing Nobel-laureate boss, forming chipmaker Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1972 he teamed up with Tom Perkins, now 68, to launch what became Kleiner Perkins, the venture-capital dynasty that went on to hatch such high-tech giants as Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, and Amazon.com.
GORDON MOORE and ANDREW GROVE, Microprocessor innovators
As a child, Gordon Moore, 71, was fascinated by explosives and used his chemistry set to make dynamite, firecrackers, and rockets. After studying at Cal Tech he set the world on fire as co-founder and tech guru at both Fairchild and Intel. In 1963 he hired a Berkeley scientist named Andrew Grove, now 63, an intense Hungarian immigrant with a laserlike focus, who later helped Moore make Intel the king of chips. Moore is probably best known for his prescient 1965 edict, Moore's Law, which states that chips double in performance every year or two; Grove has become the figure many consider the éminence grise of Silicon Valley.
DOUGLAS ENGELBART, Inventor of the mouse
Douglas Engelbart, 75, was a World War II radar technician in the Philippines. At Stanford Research Institute in the 60s, he invented the computer mouse and gave the text-laden computer screen a new face, conceiving the graphic boxes and windows that now clutter desktops everywhere. Too far ahead of his time to reap a windfall from his ideas, he saw them refined by Xerox's Palo Alto wizards in the 70s, then by Steve Jobs for his Macintosh in the 80s, then by Bill Gates for Microsoft Windows in the 90s.
BILL GATES, Software pioneer
Two decades ago, many wondered whether BILL GATES, now 44, was suffering from delusions of grandeur. The prophetic software baron, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen, talked about putting a computer on every desk and in every home. Today he's more than half of the way to that goal, in America at least, though the government's massive anti-trust suit against his empire suggests that he may have been too successful.
PAUL ALLEN, Software pioneer
So much has changed: Wasn't Bill Gates supposed to be the mogul and his Microsoft partner, PAUL ALLEN, 47, the shy techie? Now Gates focuses on strategic issues and on research and development, while Allen has become the man to see in cable TV, Hollywood, sports franchises, and, naturally, the Internet sphere.
STEVE JOBS and STEVE WOZNIAK, Personal-computer visionaries
Steve Jobs, 45, and Steve Wozniak, 49, didn't build the first personal computer, but their user-friendly Apple II and their company's rebel vibe gave P.C.'s their mass appeal. Wozniak cashed out early, staged rock concerts, and finished his college degree. Now, via live Webcam, you can watch him play guitar and putter around the house—at www.woz.org. After highs (including the Mac) and lows (leaving Apple), Jobs emerged as a Hollywood player with his Pixar animation studio (Toy Story, A Bug's Life). In 1997 he returned to Apple and completely re-energized the brand through great product design and innovation, restoring its profitability and buzz.
BOB METCALFE, Networking pioneer
Bob Metcalfe, 54, worked as a cabana boy after his first year at M.I.T., then took a computer course, hoping it would lead to a more bountiful summer job. Eventually, he landed at Xerox in Palo Alto and invented Ethernet, the first technology to link a network of personal computers and connect them to the fledgling Internet. Now the Net makes it easier for Metcalfe to keep up with old Silicon Valley pals; he spends most of the year on his farm in rural Maine.
VINT CERF, Co-creator of the Internet
Vint Cerf, 56, worked on the creation of the Internet's predecessor, the Pentagon's Arpanet, while a U.C.L.A. grad student in the late 60s. He and colleague Robert Kahn invented TCP/IP, devising a common tongue for the world's babel of largely incompatible computer systems. Their labors helped spawn the Internet, a term they coined in 1973. Today, Cerf is the Net oracle at MCI WorldCom.
TIM BERNERS-LEE, Creator of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee, 45, grew up in London playing with the punched-hole tapes brought home by his parents, scientists who helped design one of the early computers, the Ferranti Mark I. In 1989, 13 years out of Oxford, Berners-Lee was working at a physics lab in Geneva when he cooked up the World Wide Web, a brilliant software system for turning the notoriously arcane Internet into a much more accessible communications medium. Scholarly, idealistic, and modest, he has never craved power or profit from his brainchild.
LINUS TORVALDS, Software revolutionary
Linus Torvalds, 31, was an undergraduate at the University of Helsinki in 1991 when he created Linux, an alternative to Microsoft's software, and gave it to the world, gratis. Since then he has served as the ringleader and referee for hundreds of unpaid volunteers (who have written additions and improvements to Linux), most of them motivated by pride in their work and by the revolutionary notion that all software should be free.