Biographies of the Silicon Valley

Biographies

of significant high-tech innovators of the San Francisco Bay Area (in roughly chronological order)

An appendix to the book "A History of Silicon Valley"

Please contact me if you know the missing birthplaces and birth dates.

Leland Stanford

After a fire destroyed his house, Wisconsin-based lawyer Leland Stanford (New York, 1824) decided to move to the Bay Area in 1852, three years after gold had been discovered and echoes of overnight fortunes were spreading through the nation. In those days the trip by ship implied a stop in Nicaragua. After a few years running stores and legal offices among the gold diggers of El Dorado County, near Sacramento, in 1856 he founded the Republican Party in Sacramento with his friends Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins. At the end of that year he settled in San Francisco, already a wealthy and powerful man. In 1857 he ran for governor of the young state of California for the first time. In 1861 he was first appointed president of the Central Pacific Railroad by his partners (the same friends who had founded the party with him) and finally elected governor of California. In 1868 he joined a group of railroad magnates, including Hopkins and Crocker, to form the Pacific Union Express Company, which built the western portion of the first transcontinental railroad (inaugurated in may 1869). His railroad empire acquired the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1868 and Wells Fargo in 1870. In 1876 the Stanfords purchased a large piece of land south of San Francisco to build a country home and a stock farm. Just before he was elected a senator in 1885, Stanford decided to create a university near his stock farm. He donated land and money, and had a station built on the Southern Pacific route, the station of University Park, later renamed Palo Alto. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who had designed New York's Central Park, was hired to plan the campus. Stanford University opened in 1891 and its first student was Herbert Hoover, who would become the country's 31st president. Leland's express goal was to create the Harvard of the West, and he hired the best he could find, half of them from New York State's Cornell University. Despite the huge sums of money offered to them by Leland, neither the president of the MIT in Boston, nor the president of Cornell, William Anthony, were willing to move to such a primitive place as the Bay Area from their comfortable East Coast cities; so Leland had to content himself with a humbler choice: a relatively young Cornell graduate recommended by Anthony: David Starr Jordan.

David Starr Jordan

David Starr Jordan (new York, 1851) graduated from Cornell University in upstate New York and in 1885 he became president of Indiana University, the nation's youngest. In 1891 the president of Cornell University advised Leland Stanford to hire Jordan as president of the newly founded Stanford University. He proceeded to hire bright talents from Cornell (ten out of the first twenty appointments). Despite his background in biology, the university's emphasis was firmly in mechanical and civil engineering. In 1892 he hired Albert Pruden Carmen from the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton University) to teach electricity (at the time still a new discipline) within the Physics Department, and the following year another Princeton graduate, Fred Perrine, became the first professor of electrical engineering within a department furnished with equipment donated by local electrical firms. Until 1905 Jordan had to compete with Leland Stanford's widow Jane who was giving priority to completing the campus over funding research, and in 1906 he had to cope with the damage caused by the earthquake. Jordan helped shape the intellectual mood of the region. As a biologist, he endorsed Darwin's theory of evolution at a time when it was still highly controversial. In 1892 he became a director of the environmentally minded Sierra Club, as soon as it was founded by the legendary explorer John Muir. Last but not least, Jordan was a pacifist who was elected president of the World Peace Foundation in 1910 as soon as it was founded by Boston's tycoon and philanthropist Edwin Ginn, and who opposed his country's intervention in World War I (1917). In 1909 Jordan also helped a Stanford alumnus, Cyril Elwell, found the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto to commercialize the Poulsen arc. He thus became the first "angel" investor in a Palo Alto "start-up".

Harris Ryan

Harris Ryan (Pennsylvania, 1866) studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University under William Anthony. After graduating in 1887, Ryan became a professor of engineering at Cornell, specializing in high-voltage power transmission. In 1905 he was hired at Stanford, where he trained a generation of electrical engineers. He awarded the first PhD in the field in 1919. The Bay Area needed electricity and California had plenty of water, coming down from its mighty Sierra Nevada. The problem was how to carry high-tension voltage over such long-distances and distribute it to the cities of the Bay Area. Stanford staff and students under the leadership of Harris Ryan helped solve the problem, thereby inaugurating a cooperative model between university and industry. The Bay Area's electrical power companies used the Stanford High Voltage Laboratory (the first one in the West, established by Ryan in 1913) for the development of long-distance electric power transmission. He retired from Stanford in 1931. Among his students was Frederick Terman.

Lee DeForest

Lee DeForest (Iowa, 1873) grew up in Alabama. He graduated in physics from Yale University in 1898 with a dissertation on radio waves. He then moved to Chicago where he worked for Western Electric and other companies. In 1902 he also tried to start his own company, De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company, to sell wireless telegraph devices for the Navy. In 1904 British scientist John Ambrose Fleming, who was a consultant to the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, invented a two-element "electronic valve" (a diode) that was capable of detecting wireless signals, such as Morse code. In 1906, while at the Armour Institute of Technology, DeForest invented a three-element version of it, the "audion" (a triode), which was not only a detector but also as an amplifier. The audion simply had a third electrode between the cathode and the anode, but the difference was enormous: it could be used to transmit sound, not just Morse signals. However, he didn't realize it at the time. In 1907 DeForest formed the DeForest Radio Telephone Company and proceeded to promote his broadcasting feats (that still employed the old technology): in july 1907 he carried out the first voice transmission from a ship and in january 1910 he broadcast from New York a live performance by legendary Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. The company, however, got into trouble. In 1910 DeForest moved to San Francisco and got into radio broadcasting in earnest, while being investigated for fraud after his company went bankrupt. FTC hired Lee DeForest at its Palo Alto laboratory and exploited the audion to become a leader in communication systems. In 1913 DeForest sold the patent for the audion to Graham Bell's AT&T in New York, and AT&T used it to set up the first coast-to-coast telephone line (january 1915), just in time for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to be held in San Francisco. The audion was still used only for receivers, while most transmitters were arc-based. It was only in 1915 that DeForest realized that a feedback loop of audions could be used to build transmitters as well. DeForest moved to New York to found the Radio Telephone and Telegraph Company, which began to use his audion also for transmitting and not only for receiving, and in 1916 shocked the nation by broadcasting the results of the presidential elections with music and commentary from New York to stations within a range of 300 kilometers: this time he used his audion and not the Poulsen arc. In march 1920 he returned to San Francisco to set up a broadcasting station (6XC, later KYZ in Oakland). DeForest is also credited with using the term "radio" to refer to wireless transmission (in the name of his 1907 company). DeForest's audion was later used to manufacture consumer radios, radars, early television sets and early computers until the transistor finally made it obsolete. In 1919, again on the East Coast, DeForest pioneered a system to make "talking movies", and in 1922 founded the DeForest Phonofilm Company in New York. He showed the first films with sound in small alternative theaters because the big ones were controlled by Hollywood companies that did not endorse his system. When Hollywood finally began to make talking movies, different systems would be employed. During the Great Depression he sold his business to RCA and was marginalized by the establishment. He spent the rest of his life as a hardcore right-wing Republican, ranting against socialism.

Charles Herrold

Charles Herrold (Illinois, 1875) grew up in San Jose. He studied physics at Stanford, and in 1901 he duplicated Guglielmo Marconi's famous wireless transmission although on a much shorter distance. He started an electrical business in San Francisco that was destroyed by the earthquake and fire of 1906. In 1909 he opened his own College of Wireless and Engineering in San Jose. In that building he also started the first radio station in the USA with regularly scheduled programming, including songs. In 1912 Herrold applied his knowledge of radio telephony to connect San Francisco and San Jose daily for about eight months. During World War I (1917-18) his school was used by the Navy and the Army to train wireless operators. After the war he tried to return to commercial radio broadcasting but failed miserable. He died extremely poor.

Cyril Elwell

Cyril Elwell (Australia, 1884) grew up in Palo Alto and graduated from Stanford in electrical engineering under Harris Ryan. Ryan encouraged him to continue experimenting with wireless transmission and Elwell set up the Poulsen Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Company in Palo Alto, later renamed the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC). In 1903 the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen had invented an arc transmitter for radio transmission, but no European company was doing anything with it. Elwell understood its potential that was not only technological but also legal: it allowed one to create radio products without violating Marconi's patents. In 1909 Elwell acquired the rights for the USA of the Poulsen arc. His radio technology, adequately funded by a group of San Francisco investors led by Beach Thompson, blew away the competition of the East Coast and in 1912 won a contract with the Navy, which was by far the biggest consumer of radio communications. The "start-up" was initially funded by Stanford's own president, David Starr Jordan, and employed Stanford students, notably Edwin Pridham. Elwell also brought back from Denmark one of the engineers who had experience with the Poulsen arc, Peter Jensen. Then FTC hired Lee DeForest, who by 1912 had finally realized that his audion could be used as an amplifier, and the company began applying the audion to develop a geographically distributed radio telegraphy system. However, Elwell had lost control of FTC to Beach Thompson, and in the summer of 1913 he quit and joined a British company.

Peter Jensen

Peter Jensen (Denmark, 1886), one of the earliest successful immigrants to the Bay Area's high-tech industry, had started his career in 1903 as an assistant to the inventor Valdemar Poulsen. They developed an arc transmitter for voice broadcast that was first demonstrated in 1905. FTC's boss Elwell hired him in 1909. At FTC Jensen met another young talent, Edwin Pridham, who had just graduated from Stanford in electrical engineering. In 1911 Jensen and Pridham founded the Commercial Wireless and Development Company in Napa to work independently on arc transmitters, but made little progress until 1915 when they almost accidentally invented an electronic loudspeaker, which they called "Magnavox". It became the name of the company that they started two years later. During World War I Magnavox benefited from numerous military contracts. After the war, they moved into consumer radios and phonographs. In 1925 Jensen left to found another company in Chicago, which eventually evolved into Jensen Car Audio, the company that brought many innovations to car stereo.

Alexander Poniatoff

Alexander Poniatoff (Russia, 1892) was born in a wealthy family that could afford to send him to study in Germany. Fleeing the civil war that would install the communists in power, Poniatoff immigrated from Russia to China, where it worked for several years as an electrical engineer. In 1927 he was caught again in a civil war and had to move again, this time from China to the USA. He found work at General Electric in New York. Poniatoff joined the Dalmo Manufacturing Company in San Carlos in 1934. The company had evolved from the shop that Tim Moseley had opened in 1921 in San Francisco to manufacture simple electrical appliances. During World War II it developed the first airborne radar antenna, which was crucial for the air force to win the war. The invention was largely the work of Poniatoff. In 1944 Mosley himself invested in Alexander Poniatoff's new company Ampex, located in San Carlos, to manufacture electrical parts for radars that were hard to find. Poniatoff, however, moved into a new field, the tape recorder, a novelty that a USA soldier, Jack Mullin, had brought back from occupied Germany. It was one of Germany's fields of excellence: the magnetic tape had been invented by Fritz Pfleumer in 1927, and the first tape recorder (later dubbed Magnetophon) had been introduced by AEG in 1935 (using tape made by IG Farben, also manufacturer of the lethal gas used in Nazi extermination camps) and perfected into a high-fidelity system in 1941. In 1947 Ampex delivered its own tape recorder, which had been requested by pop star Bing Crosby and soon became a favorite among pop and movie stars. Poniatoff then put together a team to develop a videotape recorder, a team led by Charles Ginsburg that included the young Ray Dolby. In 1956 Ampex unveiled the VR-1000, the first videotape recorder, a device that changed the way television programming worked (previously, all programs had been broadcast live, and, obviously, at the same time in all time zones).

Russ and Sigurd Varian

Russ Varian (Washington, 1899) moved to California with his family when he was still a teenager, living in a farm near San Luis Obispo. Despite having been mostly illiterate at home, Russell Varian got a master in physics from Stanford in 1927. He couldn't finish his graduate studies and took jobs at many other companies. In the early 1930s he worked for Philo Farnsworth's laboratory in San Francisco. His brother Sigurd (California, 1901) was even more illiterate. He never even tried to obtain a degree. He simply took a number of jobs and eventually, in 1924, bought an airplane to become a professional pilot. He joined Pan American but in 1935 had to retire because of poor health (tuberculosis). Russ quit his job and joined Sigurd on a project to design a system that would allow an airplane to detect another airplane. They wanted to use high-frequency signals (beams of electrons) and they designed an electronic device that worked as an amplifier for generating electromagnetic waves at higher frequencies than radio frequency (microwaves). Stanford granted them use of the physics laboratory and in 1937 Stanford University's professor William Hansen helped them develop the klystron tube, the first generator of microwaves. This invention revolutionized and greatly improved radar technology. It enabled airborne radars, which had been Sigurd Varian's original motivation. The radar dish broadcasts pulses of microwaves, which bounce back whenever they hit an object in a time interval that reveals the distance of the object. During the war they followed Hansen to Sperry in New York, designing klystron tubes for the military. In 1945 Sigurd remained at Sperry, while Russ returned to California. However, in april 1948 the Varian brothers opened their own business in San Carlos to work on radio, radar and television. The new company was named Varian Associates and included Ed Ginzton, an alumnus of the klystron project, who was both a director at Varian Associates and a Stanford professor. In 1951 the rapidly growing company asked Stanford for office space, and indirectly caused Stanford to come up with the idea for the Stanford Industrial Park on Page Mill Rd, the southern border of the campus. When completed in 1953, its first tenant was Varian Associates. Varian (whose revenues had increased more than tenfold during the Korean War) went public in 1956, the first IPO of a Stanford-related high-tech start-up. Russell, a passionate environmentalist, bought farmland in Cupertino to create a commune of the employees of Varian Associates. Sigurd died in a plane accident in 1961. Ginzton led Varian Associates to become a billion-dollar company.

Frederick Terman

Frederick Terman (Indiana, 1900) grew up in Palo Alto, the son of a Stanford professor. As a teenager he operated an amateur radio station in 1917. He studied electrical engineering under Harris Ryan and then moved to the MIT in Boston to study under Vannevar Bush. After graduating in 1924, Terman was hired by Ryan at the radio communications laboratory. Within two years the young apprentice had become a visionary on his own, fostering the new science at the border between wireless communications and vacuum-tube electronics. In 1932 he published a milestone reference book titled "Radio Engineering". Terman didn't just perfect the art of radio engineering. He encouraged his students to start businesses. Many of those students were coming from the East Coast. He encouraged them to start businesses in the Bay Area. He viewed the university as an incubator of business plans. In 1938 Terman organized a research team around Russ Varian, with Charles Litton reporting to him and Dave Packard reporting to Litton. In 1939 his students Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto. During World War II in 1942 Terman was assigned by the government to lead the top-secret Radio Research Laboratory at Harvard University. Terman was basically in charge of electronic warfare, a new kind of warfare that was fought in labs instead of tanks, ships or planes. At the end of the war in 1946 Terman returned to Stanford University as the dean of the engineering school, and used his connections with the military (notably the recently instituted Office of Naval Research) to found and fund a new Electronics Research Lab (ERL). The Korean War (1950) brought another huge infusion of money from the Office of Naval Research to carry out research in electronics, which Terman used to open an Applied Electronics Laboratory (AEL). In 1951 he conceived the Stanford Industrial Park, where companies could lease space from Stanford for their research laboratories. In 1953 he facilitated a contract by the Army for Sylvania to build a missile detection system that led Sylvania to set up an Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View. In 1955 Stanford merged the Applied Electronics Laboratory and the Electronics Research Laboratory into the Systems Engineering Laboratory under the direction of Fred Terman to focus on electronic warfare. Terman became Stanford's provost in 1955. He decided to invest in the chemistry department, foreseeing the potentiality of biotechnology. In 1956 Terman lured William Shockley from Bell Laboratories to set a laboratory in Palo Alto. It helped that Terman had already recruited several top-notch scientists from Bell Labs, notably John Linvill, who built Stanford's semiconductors program.

Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Lawrence (South Dakota, 1901) graduated from Yale in 1925 and was hired in 1928 by U.C. Berkeley. In january 1931 he designed the first successful cyclotron (a particle accelerator). A former FTC executive, Leonard Fuller, had become the head of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California and had managed to obtain from FTC a 1000-kilowatt generator that Lawrence used to build his monster (actually quite small, just 66 centimeters in diameter). The Radiation Laboratory that Lawrence opened that year in august right halfway between LeConte Hall and the campus' bell tower (and later moved up the hill and renamed Lawrence Berkeley Lab) became one of the most celebrated research centers for atomic energy and would bring several of the world's most promising scientists to Berkeley. In 1939 Ernest Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, the first time the prize came to the Bay Area. Lawrence's team included four future Nobel Prize winners (Edwin McMillan, Luis Alvarez, Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segre) as well as mechanical engineers such as William Brobeck, as well as the physicians who followed his brother John. During World War II he was involved in the Manhattan Project. Lawrence designed an electromagnetic process to separate the explosive U-235 isotope from the U-238 isotope of uranium.

Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 1904) graduated in 1926 from Harvard University, where he had studied not only physics and chemistry, but also art and literature, a rare case of interdisciplinary mind, and in 1927 from the University of Gottingen, supervised by Max Born. He worked with Wolfgang Pauli in Switzerland and with Linus Pauling in Los Angeles. In 1929 he was hired by U.C. Berkeley, which at the time did not have any theoretical physicist that could compete with his European tutors. He and Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch, who arrived at Stanford in 1934, organized a joint Berkeley-Stanford seminar on theoretical physics that brought European science to the West Coast. He also helped shape the intellectual mood of the campus with his passion for Eastern philosophy and his donations to socialist causes. During the 1930s several of his friends, relatives (including the woman he married in 1940) and students were affiliated with the Communist Party. In 1942 the USA government launched the "Manhattan Project" to build a nuclear bomb, and appointed Oppenheimer in charge of it. Oppenheimer applied Lawrence's concept of "big science" and assembled a large team of physicists to design the weapon. The project soon exceeded the capacity of the Berkeley campus and was moved to Los Alamos in New Mexico. Even after he successfully delivered the atomic bomb, he was investigated by the FBI for his left-wing connections. After the war he resigned from Berkeley and joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Philo Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworth (Utah, 1906) grew up in a farm in Idaho. He had to take numerous jobs to support his family after his father died. Eventually, still a teenager, he settled in Salt Lake City and opened a radio repair store. He couldn't afford to complete his studies at Brigham Young University, but he told his ideas for television to San Francisco-based philanthropists Leslie Gorrell and George Everson, who accepted to funded a laboratory in California. At the age of 20 he moved to San Francisco, founded the Crocker Research Laboratories (named after his main venture capitalist, William Crocker), and in september 1927 he carried out the first successful all-electronic television broadcast. The first human image ever transmitted was the face of his wife Elma in october 1929. The company was first renamed Television Laboratories and then in may 1929 Farnsworth Television. His team included the young Russ Varian and Ralph Heintz. The power of RCA, however, was such that the Russian-born scientist Vladimir Zworkyn of their New Jersey laboratories was credited by the media with inventing television. Farnsworth's reputation was saved by his good San Francisco friend Donald Lippincott, formerly a Magnavox engineer and now an attorney, who in 1930 defended the young inventor's intellectual property against RCA. In 1931 the investors decided to cash in, and they sold the company to the Philadelphia Storage Battery Company (later renamed Philco), at the time the main maker of home radios in the USA and therefore in a much better position to mass-manufacture television sets. In june of that year Farnsworth moved to Philadelphia to work at Philco's laboratories. RCA's power was such that, even if vindicated in court, Farnsworth's invention was commercially unsuccessful. He left Philco in 1933 and returned to San Francisco trying to launch a career as a television broadcaster. Philco had not done much with his technology: the first public demonstration of his television was held in Philadelphia in august 1934 when Philco had already terminated his project. In 1938 he decided to move to Indiana and opened the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation. In 1939 RCA finally bought the rights on Farnsworth's technology for its TV sets. In 1951 Farnsworth's company was acquired by another colossus, International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). In their labs Farnsworth engaged in several research projects, including nuclear fusion. In 1967 ITT decided to shut down his laboratory and Farnsworth was hired by Brigham Young University in Utah to continue his research on nuclear fusion. He also tried to start his own business but instead went bankrupt and died having lost all his money.

Bill Hansen

Bill Hansen (California, 1909) graduated from Stanford in 1933 and immediately joined the Physics Department. Research at the department was boosted by the arrival of Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch, who fled the Nazis in 1934. Bill Hansen imported know-how about Lawrence's accelerator and set out to find a way to use high-frequency waves to accelerate electrons to high energy. In 1937 he teamed up with two hobbyists, the brothers Sigurd and Russ Varian, who were refining an electronic device that worked as an amplifier for generating electromagnetic waves at higher frequencies than radio frequency (microwaves). Hansen's laboratory developed the klystron tube, the first generator of microwaves. This invention revolutionized and greatly improved radar technology on the eve of World War II. The radar dish broadcasts pulses of microwaves, which bounce back whenever they hit an object in a time interval that reveals the distance of the object. In 1940 the rich Sperry Corporation of New York, which specialized in aircraft navigation equipment, basically "bought" Hansen and the klystron from Stanford. After the war Bill Hansen returned to Stanford to continue his research into accelerating electrons with klystron tubes, and in 1947 inaugurated his first linear accelerator, the Mark I (3.6 meters long, 6 MeV energy). He technically co-founded the business that the Varian brothers opened in 1948. However, he died a few months later at the young age of 39 as a result of a laboratory incident.

William Shockley

William Shockley (Britain, 1910) grew up in an aristocratic Palo Alto family. His mother had graduated from Stanford and his father was an MIT-trained mining businessmen. After studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he graduated in electrical engineering from the MIT in 1936. He joined Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he worked on solid-state physics. During the war he worked for the military with a lab at Columbia University and frequent sojourns in Washington. In order to improve vacuum-tube amplifiers, Bell Labs created a team under Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan to study solid-state amplifiers. The team included John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, Gerald Pearson, Robert Gibney and Hilbert Moore. They all contributed something to the invention of the transistor, officially announced in december 1947. Shockley continued to develop the transistor while alienating the rest of the team. Eventually in 1953 Bell Labs became a hostile environment for him and he decided to move back to California. His old friend Arnold Beckman had opened an electronics firm, a CalTech spin-off called Beckman Instruments. Beckman offered to open an entire research laboratory for transistors. At the same time Fred Terman convinced Shockley to return to his hometown of Palo Alto, where Stanford had put together one of the nation's top electrical engineering departments. In 1956 the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division opened in Mountain View to work on semiconductor-based transistors that would replace vacuum tubes. Shockley's transistors had used germanium but he was aware that in 1954 Texas Instruments had introduced silicon transistors, and knew it was the right direction. He tried in vain to convince former coworkers at Bell Labs to follow him west. Eventually he settled on hiring young local engineers, such as Philco's physicist Robert Noyce and CalTech's chemist Gordon Moore. However, his paranoid manners quickly led to a divorce from which Fairchild Semiconductor was born. Forced to abandon his own lab, in 1963 Shockley was hired by Stanford, where he began a completely different line of research: eugenetics.

David Packard

David Packard (Colorado, 1912) went to study at Stanford in 1930, where he became an amateur radio operator. In 1936 he landed a job at General Electric in New York, where he completed his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1938. Fred Terman brought him back to Stanford in 1938 to work with Hewlett. The two friends started working on an audio-oscillator in his Palo Alto garage. When Hewlett left for the war, Packard had to run the company alone. There were 17 employees in 1941 when they moved to the new HP offices on Page Mill Rd. By the end of the war business had improved dramatically and there were 250 employees, but many had to be laid off. Packard ran the business side of things, while Hewlett remained closer to the engineers. In 1956 it introduced its first oscilloscope and it went public in november 1957. In 1960 the company, which now employed 3,000 people, moved to the Stanford Industrial Park. In 1962 it entered the ranking of the Fortune 500. The company always concentrated on instrumentation, and got into computers (the HP 2116A in 1966, its first machine that used integrated circuits) and desk calculators (the 9100A in 1968) and hand-held calculators (the HP-35 in 1972) only because they were the natural evolution of instrumentation. In 1964 the Packards founded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which donated money for local projects. Packard also held several positions in the federal government, notably in the USA-USSR Trade & Economic Council's committee on science and technology (from 1975 to 1982).

William Hewlett

William Hewlett (Michigan, 1913) moved to San Francisco with his family when he was only three. He graduated in engineering from Stanford in 1939 under Fred Terman. By then he had met David Packard and started working on an audio-oscillator in David and Lucille Packard's Palo Alto garage. The two founded a company called Hewlett-Packard in january 1939. Their first customer was Walt Disney: the Hollywood animation company purchased their oscillator in 1939 for the animation film "Fantasia". He served as an Army officer during World War II. The company began to generate significant revenues after the war and eventually went public in 1957. In 1966 the Hewletts created the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, one of Silicon Valley's richest philanthropic organizations.

Ed Ginzton

Edward Ginzton (Ukraine, 1915), the son of a Russian mother and a USA father, moved to San Francisco in 1929 with his family graduated from Stanford in electrical engineering in 1941 at Bill Hansen's physics department, working on the klystron with the Varian brothers. During World War II he followed Hansen at Sperry Gyroscope in New York. After the war Ginzton was hired by Stanford. In 1948 he helped the Varian brothers found Varian Associates. Continuing Hansen's work on a particle accelerator propelled by ever more powerful klystron tubes, by 1952 he built a one-billion electron-volt (1GeV) particle accelerator, the Mark III, which was the most powerful in the world, and founded Stanford's Microwave Laboratory. Ginzton's laboratory became for laser technology what Terman had been for electronics; it spun off several start-ups. In 1951 Pief Panofsky had been hired away from the Berkeley's Radiation Lab, where he had designed the latest proton accelerator. The two joined forces to launch "Project M" for building a more powerful machine. The result was the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the longest linear accelerator in the world, which started operating in 1962. Just before its inauguration, in 1961 Ginzton quit Stanford to concentrate on running Varian Associates. Ed Ginzton and David Packard chaired the Stanford Mid-Peninsula Urban Coalition, and association that encouraged and supported minority-owned small businesses.

Harry Huskey

Harry Huskey (North Carolina, 1916) grew up in Idaho. He graduated in mathematics in 1943 from the Ohio State University and was hired by the University of Pennsylvania's Math Department. In 1945 he briefly worked at the Moore School on the ENIAC computer. In 1946 Huskey briefly worked at Britain's National Physical Laboratories (NPL) on Turing's Pilot ACE computer. Back to the USA, in 1947 he briefly worked at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) on the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC). Based on these unique combination of computer experience, in december of 1948 he was hired by the Institute of Numerical Analysis (INA) at UCLA to build the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). In 1953 at Wayne State University he designed the Bendix G15 drum computer, one of the many candidates to first personal computer. In july 1954 Huskey moved to U.C. Berkeley and then U.C. Santa Cruz in 1966.

Carl Djerassi

Carl Djerassi (Austria, 1923) immigrated to the USA with his mother in 1939 after the Nazi takeover of Austria. From New York he moved to San Francisco. In 1941 he joined Ciba. In 1945 he graduated in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1949 he joined Syntex in Mexico City where in 1951 he accidentally discovered the first oral contraceptive pill (progestin norethindrone). He moved back to the USA in 1952 to teach chemistry at Wayne State University, returning to Syntex in 1957. In 1959 Stanford University hired Carl Djerassi, who convinced Syntex to open a laboratory at the Stanford Industrial Park. Djerassi collaborated with the Dendral project of Artificial Intelligence applied to organic chemistry. In 1972 he left both Stanford and Syntex to found Zoecon. In 1989 he started writing novels about the moral dilemma of real-life scientists ("science-in-fiction").

Alejandro Zaffaroni

Alejandro Zaffaroni (Uruguay, 1923), the son of a banker, grew up in Uruguay where he studied medicine, and graduated in biochemistry from the University of Rochester in 1949. In 1951 he joined Syntex in Mexico City to work on synthetic steroid hormones. Syntex' scientists invented the oral contraceptive pill. Zaffaroni became president of the company and transferred the research labs to Palo Alto in 1963. In that year he also founded the non-profit Zaffaroni Foundation to support public education in matters of nutrition and genetics. In 1968 he quit to found his own company, Alza (an acronym of his own name), in Palo Alto (in Stanford's Research Park) to invent new ways to deliver drugs, notably through a timed-release process and through the skin (eventually in 1991 Alza would deliver the first nicotine patch). In 1980 Zaffaroni prompted Stanford professors Arthur Kornberg, Paul Berg and Charles Yanofsky to establish the DNAX Research Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology in Palo Alto to work on recombinant DNA technology applied to immunobiology. Schering-Plough acquired it in 1982. In 1988 Alza spun off Bio-Electro Systems to study deliver of drugs into the skin via electrical currents. In the same year Zaffaroni founded Affymax in Palo Alto to develop methods for the simultaneous and combinatorial testing of chemical compounds. This led its scientists to the fabrication of DNA chips using the same manufacturing techniques used to make semiconductors. One such scientist, Stephen Fodor, joined Peter Schultz, a pioneer in combinatorial chemistry at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, to start Affymetrix in Santa Clara in 1992 to produce "gene-chips", the biological equivalent of electronic chips, by printing a huge number of DNA molecules on a silicon wafer. Zaffaroni help them get started. The first DNA chip came out in 1994. In 1994 Zaffaroni and Schultz founded Symyx in Santa Clara (at the Affymetrix building) to apply the same Darwinian method of combinatorial chemistry to the discovery of new materials. Affymax was acquired by Glaxo in 1995. In 1997 Zaffaroni founded Maxygen to commercialize the technology of molecular breeding: triggering the evolution of a DNA sequence to improve the function of the protein it generates. Zaffaroni retired in 1997 from both Alza and Affymetrix. Alza was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2001.

Edgar Codd

Edgar Codd (Britain, 1923), an Oxford mathematician who served as a pilot in the British Air Force during World War II, relocated to the USA after the war to teach mathematics at the University of Tennessee. He was hired by IBM in New York in 1948 as a programmer for the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC) and for the STRETCH computer. In 1953 he left the USA for Canada. He returned in the USA to graduate from the University of Michigan with a thesis on cellular automata, and in 1967 was hired by IBM's San Jose laboratories. In 1970 Codd wrote an influential paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks", in which he explained how one could describe a database in the language of first-order predicate logic. A Relational Database group was set up in San Jose, although Codd never had any direct power on it. In 1974 Donald Chamberlin defined an algebraic language to retrieve and update data in relational database systems, SEQUEL, later renamed SQL (Structured Query Language). It was part of the development of the first relational database management system, code-named System R, started in 1973 and eventually unveiled in 1977 (running on a System 38). Codd had been largely excluded from this project, and in fact very few of his ideas had been incorporated in it. Since IBM was not eager to adopt the relational technology (it was making plenty of money with its existing database system), it did not keep it secret and the idea spread throughout the Bay Area. Only in 1981 did IBM announce its first relational database product, SQL/DS, followed by DB2 in 1983. By then a few start-ups had already commercialized the idea. Codd retired in 1984 and founded a database consulting company with his British coworker Chris Date.

David Evans

David Evans (Utah, 1924) graduated in 1953 in physics from the University of Utah, worked for Bendix from 1956 until 1963 (participating in the development of the Bendix G15), and then in 1962 joined U.C Berkeley (participating in the development of the time-sharing system Genie). In 1966 he established the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah and obtained a huge ARPA grant for interactive design and computer graphics that turned his department into one of the top research centers in the world for those topics. In 1968 he formed Evans & Sutherland with Ivan Sutherland, the MIT pioneer of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) who was then at Harvard University and whom Evans had just convinced to transfer to the same university. The funding was provided by Venrock, the venture-capital arm of the Rockefeller family, and the objective was to sell software for flight simulation. In 1969 the company unveiled a pioneering LDS (Line Drawing System, but not coincidentally also the name of the religion Evans belonged to, Latter-day Saints) that in 1973 evolved into their Picture System, a graphics system for Computer Aided Design (CAD). However, the company's main line of products was the Novoview simulator, an expensive piece of hardware and software that they sold to aviation companies and government agencies. In 1974 they resigned from the university and in 1978 they took the company public. Bob Schumacker, whom they had hired in 1972 from General Electric, designed a general-purpose version of their simulators, CTS, introduced in 1981. That same year they also introduced the PS300, the most famous model of their Picture System. They employed bright young engineers such as Jim Clark, Ed Catmull, Alan Kay and John Warnock who went on to establish the field of computer graphics in Silicon Valley. In 1986 they decided to establish a Computer Division in Mountain View. In 1988 they co-developed with DEC a color workstation, the VAXstation 8000. In 1989 Evans retired.

Donald Glaser

Donald Glaser (Ohio, 1926) graduated in physics and mathematics in 1949 from the California Institute of Technology. After working at the University of Michigan, where in 1952 he invented the "bubble chamber" to study elementary particles, in 1959 he moved to U.C. Berkeley and in 1960 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. In 1962 he abandoned physics and embraced molecular biology to develop methods to process DNA. In 1971 he founded Cetus, the first biotech company of the Bay Area and possibly in the world. In 1989 he changed field again, turning to neurobiology with the goal to construct computational models of the human visual system.

Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner (South Africa, 1927) was raised in South Africa by humble and illiterate Jewish immigrants from the Baltic republics. He studied medicine until 1951 at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. In 1952 he moved to Oxford's Physical Chemistry Laboratory. After graduating in 1954, he returned to South Africa to establish the Department of Physiology at the Medical School. In december 1956 he was hired by Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the DNA structure) at Cambridge University. When Crick left Cambridge in 1976 to start a career in neuroscience at the Salk Institute in California (San Diego), Brenner became the de facto boss of Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. In 1992 he moved to California to join the Scripps Research Institute near San Diego. In 1992 Brenner and Sam Eletr founded Lynx Therapeutics in Hayward, a company that developed a massively parallel method for simultaneously analyzing different DNA samples. In 1996 Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley. In 2001 Brenner was offered a position at the Salk Institute where he finally rejoined his old boss Crick. In 2002 Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Meanwhile, Brenner continued to work on his techniques for simultaneous interrogation of multiple genomes in a single test. In 2004 Sydney Brenner, Sam Eletr and Philip Goelet (a former student of Brenner) founded Compass Genetics, a spin-off from Cambridge University in Britain that evolved into Population Genetics Technologies to commercialize Brenner's inventions, a company managed by Eletr. Brenner and Goelet also founded Acidophil, an incubator of biotech start-ups.

Paul Berg

Paul Berg (New York, 1926) studied chemical engineering at New York City College, biochemistry at Pennsylvania State University until 1948, with a brief stint in the Navy during World War II, and finally graduated in biochemistry from Ohio's Western Reserve University in 1952. After a year in Denmark at the Institute of Cytophysiology and six years at Washington University in St Louis, Berg in 1959 accepted a position at Stanford University's Medical Center where his Washington University boss Arthur Kornberg was setting up a new biochemistry lab. In 1972 Berg's team synthesized the first recombinant DNA molecule. The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, organized by Paul Berg in february 1975 near Monterey, set ethical rules for biotechnology. In 1980 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Also in 1980 Zaffaroni prompted Berg, Kornberg and Charles Yanofsky to establish the DNAX Research Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology in Palo Alto to work on recombinant DNA technology applied to immunobiology. In 1985 Berg co-founded the multidisciplinary Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at Stanford. In 1991 he was appointed to supervise the Human Genome Project Scientific Advisory Committee.

Stanley Cohen

Stanley-Norman Cohen (New Jersey, 1935) graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1960. He joined Stanford University in 1968. In 1973 Cohen and U.C. San Francisco's biochemist Herbert Boyer invented a practical technique to produce recombinant DNA. They transferred DNA from one organism to another, creating the first recombinant DNA organism. That experiment virtually launched the discipline of "biotechnology", the industrial creation of DNA that does not exist in nature but can be useful for human purposes.

Herbert Boyer

Herbert Boyer (Pennsylvania, 1936) grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania. After studying medicine, biology and chemistry at St Vincent College in Pittsburgh, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1963. After three years at Yale University he moved to U.C. San Francisco in 1966. In 1973 Boyer and Stanford University's medical professor Stanley Cohen invented a practical technique to produce recombinant DNA. They transferred DNA from one organism to another, creating the first recombinant DNA organism. That experiment virtually launched the discipline of "biotechnology", the industrial creation of DNA that does not exist in nature but can be useful for human purposes. Boyer had just discovered that an enzyme named EcoRI allowed him to slice DNA molecules to produce single strands that could be easily manipulated. Cohen had just devised a way to introduce foreign DNA into a bacterium. They put the two processes together and obtained a way to combine DNA from different sources into a DNA molecule. Cohen decided to continue research in the academia, while Boyer opted for getting into business. The age of biotech started in earnest in the Bay Area with Genentech, formed in april 1976 by Boyer and by (28-year-old) venture capitalist Robert Swanson, who set up offices at Kleiner-Perkins' offices in Menlo Park (their investor) and subcontracted experiments to the laboratories of U.C. San Francisco, City of Hope and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (whose student Richard Scheller became one of their early employees) to genetically engineer new pharmaceutical drugs. Genentech's first success came in 1977 when they produced a human hormone (somatostatin) in bacteria, the first cloning of a protein using a synthetic recombinant gene. In 1978 Genentech and City of Hope produced human insulin, and in 1979 Genentech cloned the human growth hormone. Biotech business began with human proteins made in bacteria. In 1990 Boyer donated $10 million to the Yale School of Medicine to establish the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine.

Jean Hoerni

Jean Hoerni (Switzerland, 1924) graduated in physics first from the University of Geneva in 1950 and then from Cambridge University in 1952. He traveled to Los Angeles in 1952 to conduct research at the California Institute of Technology, and in 1956 he accepted the offer to join Shockley in Mountain View. In october 1957 he was one of the eight engineers who quit the Shockley Transistor Laboratories to form Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1959 he invented the planar process that enabled great precision in silicon components. In 1961 he co-founded Amelco (a division of Teledyne) and in 1967 Intersil.

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart (Oregon, 1925) grew up on a small farm in Oregon and, after serving two years in the Navy as a radar technician in the Philippines, he studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University. He moved to the Bay Area in 1948 to work for NASA's Ames Aeronautical Laboratory in Mountain View. In 1951 he enrolled in U.C. Berkeley's electrical engineering graduate program and in 1953 was part of Paul Morton's team that was building the California Digital Computer (CALDIC). After graduating from Berkeley in 1955, he started his own business but in 1957 decided to join the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). There he developed the first prototype of a "mouse", part of a much bigger project to reinvent the human-computer interaction. In 1962 NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology in the person of Bob Taylor decided to support him. Then in 1963 ARPA decided to fund Engelbart's project. He used the funds to create the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) where he experimented with graphical user interfaces and hypertexts. In 1967 Engelbart's lab at SRI became one of the original Arpanet nodes, responsible for the Network Information Center (NIC). In december 1968 Engelbart unveiled his NLS ("oN-Line System") during one of the most celebrated "demos" of all times: Engelbart in front of the audience in San Francisco interacted live with a computer in Menlo Park (at the SRI's offices). NLS featured a graphical user interface and a hypertext system running on the first computer to employ the mouse. When the Apollo program ended and ARPA and NASA ended funding to Engelbart's team at the SRI, SRI sold the team and its NLS to Tymshare (1977). Tymshare built a commercial version of NLS, renamed Augment, as part of its office automation offering. Many of the engineers migrated to Xerox PARC (that would implement Engelbart's ideas in the Alto) while Engelbart himself moved to Tymshare, which in 1984 was purchased by McDonnell Douglas. In 1989 Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute with funding from the Kapor Family Foundation, Apple Computers and SUN, and hosted since 1992 at Logitech's headquarters (Logitech having become the world's premier vendor of computer mice). In 2005 his institute received funding from the National Science Foundation for the open-source HyperScope project. In 2007 SRI offered its facilities to Engelbart's Bootstrap Institute.

John McCarthy

John McCarthy (Boston, 1927) grew up on the road during the Great Depression until his family settled in Los Angeles. After studying mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, in 1951 he graduated in mathematics from Princeton, where he met Marvin Minsky. He then joined the MIT in Boston. In 1956 he organized the first conference on artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College. In 1958 he invented the programming language LISP. In 1959 McCarthy and Minsky, who had joined the MIT in 1958, founded the Artificial Intelligence Lab. When in 1963 the time-sharing system Project MAC (actually a laboratory) opened at the MIT, Marvin Minsky was appointed director but John McCarthy was its visionary. In 1963 McCarthy moved to Stanford from the MIT, and in 1966 he opened the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) on the hills a few kilometers away from the campus. It became a West-Coast alternative to Project MAC.

Charlie Sporck

Charlie Sporck (New York, 1927) grew up in the countryside of upstate New York. He studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University and joined General Electric in 1950. In october 1959 he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View as a production manager. In 1967 he joined National Semiconductor where he became CEO. He retired in 1991.

Bill Perry

Bill Perry (Pennsylvania, 1927) served in the Army until 1947. He then studied at Stanford, but returned to the Army from 1950 to 1955. He graduated in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University in 1957. Meanwhile he had already been appointed director of the Electronic Defense Laboratories (EDL) of Sylvania in Mountain View in 1954. In 1964 he took most of his staff and formed Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL) in Palo Alto. In 1977 he went into politics in Washington and eventually became secretary of defense under president Bill Clinton. In 1981 Perry left the Pentagon and joined venture capitalist firm Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco as well as Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce (Iowa, 1927) graduated in physics at the MIT in 1953. He started working at Philco in Philadelphia, but in 1956, disappointed with Philco's programs, he fly to California and asked for a job at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. In october 1957 (then only 29) Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner and four other engineers quit the Shockley Transistor Laboratories to form Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, using funding from Sherman Fairchild's New York-based Fairchild Camera and Instrument thanks to the help of a young investment banker, Arthur Rock. In 1959 Noyce led the team that invented a silicon integrated circuit, six months after Kilby at Texas Instruments. Ten years later Fairchild Semiconductor had 12,000 employees. Noyce and Moore decided that it was time to cut the ties with their owner and in 1968 they started Intel (originally Integrated Electronics Corporation) in Mountain View to build memory chips, funded with $2.5 million again collected by Arthur Rock. The price of magnetic core memories had been declining steadily for years. The founders of Intel, however, believed that semiconductor computer memory could fit a lot more information (bits) and therefore become a cheaper method to hold large amounts of data. Intel introduced its own in 1970, the 1103. By 1972 Intel had more than 1,000 employees and posted revenues of $23 million. Meanwhile, in 1971 Ted Hoff and Federico Faggin had built the first universal micro-processor, a programmable set of integrated circuits, i.e. a computer on a chip.

Gordon Moore

Gordon Moore (California, 1929) was born and raised in San Francisco. He studied at San Jose State University and U. C. Berkeley and graduated in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1954. He was one of the first employees selected by Shockley in 1956. In october 1957 he was one of the eight engineers who quit the Shockley Transistor Laboratories to form Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1965 he predicted that the number of components on a computer chip would double every year ("Moore's Law"), later revised a few times. In july 1968 he and Robert Noyce started Intel. He was the one in charge of research and development. Moore and his wife donated huge sums to research institutes, notably $600 million to CalTech in 2001, an all-time record.

Alan Shugart

Alan Shugart (California, 1930) grew up in Los Angeles and graduated in physics from the University of Redlands. He joined IBM in 1951 as a technician for punch card machines. In 1955 he was transferred to IBM's San Jose lab working on the first disk drive, the RAMAC 305, which IBM started selling in 1959. He eventually became the manager of a group in charge of storage media. He left in 1969 to join Memorex, taking with him dozens of IBM engineers. In 1971 his former employee David Noble came up with a cheap read-only 80-kilobyte diskette: it was nicknamed the "floppy disk". One year later Shugart at Memorex built the first read-write floppy-disk drive, the Memorex 650. He founded Shugart Associates in 1973. In 1976 Wang commissioned them a smaller disk and Shugart delivered the 5 1/4" flexible diskette. He was ejected from Shugart Associates in 1974 (the company was eventually acquired by Xerox), but he and Finis Conner formed Shugart Technology in 1979, later renamed Seagate Technology. In 1980 Seagate introduced the first hard-disk drive for personal computers. In 1996 Shugart tried to have his god elected to Congress. Shugart retired in 1998.

Ray Dolby

Ray Dolby (Oregon, 1933) grew up in the Bay Area and worked at Ampex as a teenage intern before joining it in earnest in 1952 remaining until 1957 while studying electrical engineering at Stanford. He graduated in physics from Cambridge University in Britain in 1961. He worked in India for the United Nations in 1963-64. In 1965 he founded Dolby Laboratories in London to commercialize his noise-reduction technology that rapidly became a world standard for both audio and video recording. In 1968 the first cassette recorders came out with the option to recorded in Dolby mode. The first film to use Dolby sound was Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971). In 1976 he opened Dolby's offices in San Francisco.

Pierre Lamond

Pierre Lamond (France, ????) was the top engineer at in 1957 at Transitron Electronics before joining (1963) Gordon Moore's engineering team at Fairchild Semiconductor and then Jerry Sander's sales team. Pierre left Fairchild in 1967 to co-found National Semiconductor. He went on to lead Coherent Radiation and Advent. Pierre returned to National Semiconductor in 1977 as chief technology officer. In 1981 Lamond joined Sequoia Capital. Lamond joined Khosla Ventures in march 2009.

Frank Wanlass

Frank Wanlass (Utah, 1933) graduated in physics from the University of Utah in 1962 and immediately joined Fairchild in Mountain View. In 1963 he invented a new technique to build integrated circuits, Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS). However, he quit in december 1963 to join General Microelectronics (GMe), where the first MOS product was completed in 1964, a few months ahead of Fairchild, and first used in a commercial product in 1965. MOS was initially sold only to government agencies (NSA and NASA). Wanlass left GMe in december 1964 to join General Instruments in New York and create their integrated-circuit business. GI eventually let him set up a lab in his home state of Utah. The gospel of CMOS spread thanks to Wanlass' continuous job changes and to his willingness to evangelize.

Bob Taylor

Bob Taylor (Texas, 1932) studied psychology at the University of Texas. After working for defense contractors (mainly aviation companies), he was hired by NASA in 1961. In 1962 he became the head of NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology, and funded Douglas Engelbart's project at SRI. NASA was interested in using computers for flight control and flight simulation, not purely "number crunching". In 1963 he met Joseph Licklider, the head of the new Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at ARPA. Licklider was succeeded at IPTO in 1963 by Ivan Sutherland, who in 1965 hired Bob Taylor away from NASA. Taylor used ARPA to promote his philosophy: he wanted computers to be more useful than for just rapid large-scale arithmetic, and one way was to connect them in a network. In february 1966 Taylor launched an ARPA project to create a computer network, later named Arpanet. In 1968 he and Licklider coauthored a paper titled "The Computer as a Communication Device." In 1970 Xerox PARC hired Taylor to lead the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) of their new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he oversaw development of the Ethernet and of the windowing graphical user interface. In 1983 he was hired away by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to lead their new research center in Palo Alto, the Systems Research Center (SRC).

Don Valentine

Don Valentine (New York, 1933) grew up near New York and, after the military, worked for Sylvania Electric in upstate New York. He got transferred to their Bay Area location in 1957 and joined Fairchild in 1959 as their Los Angeles sales manager. In 1967 he joined National Semicondutor. In 1972 Valentine founded Capital Management Services, later renamed Sequoia Capital. He was one of the first investors in Apple, Atari, LSI Logic, Oracle, Cisco, Electronic Arts and Google.

Andy Grove

Andras Grof (Hungary, 1936) fled Hungary in 1956 for New York where he assumed the Anglosaxon name Andy Grove. He studied chemical engineering at the City College of New York till 1960, and then moved to the Bay Area, graduating in chemical engineering from U.C. Berkeley in 1963. He worked at Fairchild Semiconductor and left in 1968 to join the newly formed Intel as its third employee. Initially only the director of operations, Grove climbed the hierarchy of the company becoming president in 1979 and CEO in 1987. He oversaw Intel's rapid growth to become the company with the highest capitalization in the world. His most famous motto was "Only the paranoid survive". He retired in 2004.

Regis McKenna

Regis McKenna (Pennsylvania, 1939) grew up near Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, where he studied liberal arts. In 1962 he moved to Silicon Valley. In 1965 he joined General Micro Electronics and in 1967 he moved to National Semiconductor. In both companies he worked in marketing. In 1970 he founded the most famous Silicon Valley marketing firm, Regis McKenna.

Sam Eletr

Sam Eletr (France, 1939?) studied electrical engineering at the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble in France. After graduating in biophysical chemistry from U.C. Berkeley. he was visiting professor in 1969 at the Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal. He joined Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, where he became the manager of a medical instruments team. Meanwhile, his friend and fellow countryman Andre Marion (who had graduated in engineering from the French Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Ingenieurs Arts et Metiers) had become product development manager at the same company. In 1979 the two founded the biotech start-up GeneCo, later renamed Applied Biosystems, in Foster City to build biotech instrumentation: first a protein sequencer and later a DNA synthesizer. In 1986 Leroy Hood's team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena refined an automated method to sequence DNA, i.e. the first automated DNA sequencer, which made it possible (not just theoretical) to sequence the entire human genome. Lloyd Smith was the main developer of the machine thanks to his background in both engineering and chemistry. Within one year that sequencer was launched on the market by Applied Biosystems, which also provided an automated protein synthesizer, protein sequencer and DNA synthesizer (these were easier technologies to develop). Leroy Hood's team included a young Mike Hunkapiller, who was also one of the first employees of Applied Biosystems. Eletr resigned from Applied Biosystems in 1987. From 1992 to 2000 Eletr was an executive at genomics company Lynx Therapeutics. In 2004 Sydney Brenner, Sam Eletr and Philip Goelet founded Compass Genetics, a spin-off from Cambridge University in Britain that evolved into Population Genetics Technologies to commercialize Brenner's inventions, a company managed by Eletr.

Adam Osborne

Adam Osborne (Thailand, 1939) grew up in India and Britain and moved to the USA to graduate in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware. He found a job with Shell Oil in California. In 1972 he set up his own business in the Bay Area to write technical manuals for microcomputers, notably for IMSAI. He became a publisher of computer books and a journalist for computer magazines. He became a member of the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975. In 1980 he founded Osborne Computer in Hayward. In april 1981 they delivered the Osborne 1, a portable computer running the CP/M operating system that weighed only 11 kilograms and cost $1,800, designed by hardware engineer Lee Felsenstein, a fellow member of the Homebrew Computer Club who had already integrated a video and a keyboard in the Sol-20. Basically, it was a commercial version of the Xerox NoteTaker. It also came bundled with the BASIC language, the WordStar word processor and the SuperCalc spreadsheet program. The Osborne became a runaway success, but the company collapsed as fast as it had grown in 1983. Osborne returned to India in 1992.

Lee Boysel

Lee Boysel (????, 1939?) studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan until 1963. In 1964 he migrated to California to work for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica (later renamed McDonnell Douglas). There he met Frank Wanlass of General Microelectronics (GMe) and learned about MOS technology. In 1965 Lee Boysel moved to IBM's Alabama laboratories to apply his MOS skills. In 1966 Fairchild hired Boysel from IBM to start a MOS group. Boysel perfected a four-phase clocking technique to create very dense MOS circuits, and in 1968 achieved a 256-bit dynamic RAM. In 1969 he founded Four Phase Systems in a former dentist's office in the infamous Whiskey Gulch area of East Palo Alto, but soon relocated to Cupertino. They initially built 1024-bit and 2048-bit DRAMs. In 1970 Four Phase Systems designed the AL1, an 8-bit Central Processing Unit (CPU), one of the earliest commercial microprocessors. Motorola acquired Four Phase in 1982. Lee Boysel became a private investor based in San Francisco.

John Warnock

John Warnock (Utah, 1940) studied mathematics at the University of Utah until 1964 when he was hired by IBM. He then returned to school and graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Utah in 1969. He started his own business in Canada, but then joined the Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington. In 1970 the Illiac IV (a project for a supercomputer started in 1965) was moved from the University of Illinois to the newly established Advanced Computing division of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field. In 1972 Warnock joined Evans & Sutherland that sent him to California to work on that project. In 1978 Warnock joined Xerox PARC, where he and Charles Geschke worked on a page-description language InterPress for Xerox's laser printer. In december 1982 the two left Xerox and founded Adobe in Mountain View to commercialize a simpler language, PostScript. In 1985 Apple introduced PostScript for its LaserWriter. PostScript rapidly became popular, but in 1986 Apple still accounted for 80% of Adobe's revenues. That year Adobe ported PostScript to printers for PC-compatible personal computers, thus greatly expanding the user base. In 1987 Adobe introduced Illustrator, a PostScript-based drawing application. In 1993 Adobe Systems introduced the file format PDF (or Portable Document Format) to create and view professional-quality documents, and the free Acrobat reader for it.

In 1994 Adobe acquired its rival Aldus and therefore PageMaker. In 1999 Adobe's sales passed the $1 billion mark.

Alan Kay

Alan Kay (Massachusetts, 1940) studied mathematics and biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder while making a living as a jazz guitarist. In 1966 he moved to the University of Utah where he studied with Ivan Sutherland, where he was exposed to Sketchpad and Simula, and he graduated in engineering in 1969. He lectured at Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) in 1969-70 and Xerox PARC hired him in 1971 to work on his visions of a mobile computer (that he named Dynabook), and of "object-oriented" (a term that he invented) educational software. He was crucial to the development of both Smalltalk and the Alto. In 1981 he left Xerox and joined Atari's Sunnyvale Research Laboratory. In 1984 he joined Apple, which had commercialized many of his old ideas, but spent most of the time applying his theory of education at the Open School in West Hollywood. In 1996 he moved to Walt Disney. In 2001 he founded the non-profit Viewpoints Research Institute to foster innovative educational programs. His most famous motto is: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

David Duffield

David Duffield (Ohio, 1941) grew up in New Jersey and studied business administration at Cornell University until 1964. After working as a systems engineer for IBM in Rochester, mainly serving the higher education market, in 1968 he co-founded his first company, Information Associates, consulting for colleges on software. Duffield founded Integral Systems in 1972 in New Jersey to commercialize a package for payroll and human-resources management developed at Rutgers University. In 1976 the company won a major contract from U.C. Berkeley and Duffield decided to move offices to the Bay Area, in Walnut Creek. In 1987 Ken Morris and David Duffield founded PeopleSoft in the east bay with the idea of taking the human-resource management system developed for the mainframe by Integral Systems and port it to a client-server architecture. The product rapidly overtook the mainframe-based competition, generating revenues of $1.9 million in 1989 and $6.1 million in 1990. PeopleSoft went on to overtake JD Edwards and eventually absorb it. Duffield sold PeopleSoft to Oracle for $10 billion in 2005 and then started Workday to offer on-demand software services to companies. He had become one of the 500 richest people in the USA.

Federico Faggin

Federico Faggin (Italy, 1941) started working after high school at Olivetti in Italy where he worked on transistor calculators. After studying physics at the University of Padova, in 1966 Faggin was hired by SGS in Italy to work on MOS technology. In 1967 he was assigned to a joint project with Fairchild Semiconductor. In february 1968 he relocated to Fairchild's Palo Alto labs to refine silicon-gated MOS transistors, the technology that he had invented in Italy. Silicon control gates are faster, smaller and use less energy than the metal (aluminum) control gates that had been commonplace until then. Now that both contacts and gates were made of silicon, the manufacturing process was simpler. It was this invention that allowed for the exponential growth in chip density (in number of transistors that could be packed into a chip). Fairchild introduced the first silicon-gate integrated circuit in october 1968. It had been theoretically possible for years to integrate the CPU of a computer on a chip. Ted Hoff at Intel bet on silicon-gated MOS technology to hold a 4-bit CPU onto a chip. In 1970 he hired Federico Faggin. Faggin implemented Hoff's design in silicon, and in november 1971 Intel unveiled the 4004, a small thumbnail-size electronic device containing 2,300 transistors and capable of processing 92,000 instructions per second. He served at Intel as project leader for the 8008 (1972), the world's first 8-bit microprocessor, and for the 8080 (1974). In 1974, having convinced Exxon to make a generous investment, Faggin left Intel to found Zilog, which became a ferocious competitor of Intel thanks to the Z80 microprocessor. In the following years he continued to launch start-ups: Cygnet Technologies in 1981, Synaptics in 1986 (that in 1991 unveiled the first single-chip optical character recognizer, based on neural-network principles), and Fovoen in 2003.

Mike Markkula

Mike Markkula (California, 1942) studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California and then worked for Hughes Aircraft Company in the Los Angeles area. In september 1967 he was hired at Fairchild Semiconductor and quickly became marketing director. He then joined Intel, again as marketing director. Markkula retired a rich man in 1975 (at the age of 32) thanks to the stocks of those two companies. In 1977 Steve Jobs brought him back into action to fund Apple. Later Markkula founded the Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

Ralph Ungermann

Ralph Ungermann (California, 1942?) studied electrical engineering at U.C. Berkeley until 1964, and computer architecture at the U.C. Irvine. Initially he worked for Collins Radio but in 1969 he joined Intel, where he became the manager of the 8080 project. In 1974 Ralph Ungermann left Intel with coworker Federico Faggin right after finishing the 8080, taking Shima with them, and, having convinced Exxon to make a generous investment, started his own company, Zilog, which became a formidable competitor of Intel when (july 1976) it unveiled the 8-bit Z80 microprocessor, which was faster and cheaper than the 8080 (designed at transistor level by the same Shima). In 1979 Ungermann and one of his engineers at Zilog, Charlie Bass, formed Ungermann-Bass in Santa Clara to specialize in local-area networks, particularly in Ethernet technology. In 1993 he co-founded First Virtual Communications in Redwood City to develop videoconferencing products. Ungermann also joined the venture-capital firm China Seed Ventures (CSV).

Gary Kildall

Gary Kildall (Washington, 1942) grew up in the Seattle area. Drafted during the Vietnam war, he started working as an instructor in 1969 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Meanwhile, he graduated in computer science in 1972 from the University of Washington. Hired by Intel as a software consultant, in 1973 he developed the first high-level programming language for microprocessors, PL/M. Intel marketed it as an add-on that could help sell its microprocessors. However, when Kildall developed an operating system for Intel's 8080 processor, CP/M, which managed a floppy drive, Intel balked, and Kildall had to start his own company, Digital Research, and sell his product on hobbyist magazines. The publicity helped Digital Research find bigger customers: companies that were using microprocessors to build small computers. CP/M soon became a standard until 1981, when the IBM/Microsoft alliance began to rule the personal-computing world. Kildall always maintained that Microsoft had robbed him of his invention because DOS was so similar to CP/M. Nonetheless, he still became very rich when he sold DRI to Novell in 1991. He became an alcoholic and died in tragic circumstances at the age of 52.

Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell (Utah, 1943) often worked in an amusement park as a teenager. In 1968 he graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, where he had a chance of playing with Steve Russell's game "Spacewar" on DEC minicomputers. Right after graduation Bushnell moved to the Bay Area to work for Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney. In 1971 the two quit their jobs and created the first arcade videogame, "Computer Space": a free-standing terminal powered by a computer and devoted to an electronic game (a clone of "Spacewar") that anyone could use. When, in may 1972, Magnavox introduced the first videogame console, Ralph Baer's transistor-based "Odyssey", Bushnell was inspired again, this time by an electronic ping-pong game. He founded Atari in Santa Clara and asked his engineer Allan Alcorn to create a similar game, which became "Pong" in november 1972, a runaway success. In 1976 Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million. Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari 2600) In october 1977 Atari introduced a videogame console, the VCS, for Video Computer System (later renamed 2600). Previous generations of videogame machines had used custom logic, but this one used MOS Technology's 6502 microprocessor. In november 1978 Bushnell left Atari. He first concentrated on a chain of videogame arcades and then on his own venture-capitalist firm, Catalyst Technologies, formed in 1981 with Alcorn. Bushnell continued to start companies, notably uWink, a chain of restaurants (inaugurated in 2006) in which customers can order from screens embedded in tables. He had already run into financial troubles that almost bankrupted him.

Vinton Cerf

Vinton Cerf (New Haven, 1943) grew up in Van Nuys, near Los Angeles, He studied computer science at Stanford University's Department of Mathematics until 1965. He then joined IBM for two years. He graduated in computer science from UCLA in 1972. While at UCLA he worked in the lab run by Leonard Kleinrock, the man who had invented the theory of packet switching for communications among computers. It was also one of the first four nodes of the Arpanet when it launched in 1969. In was Cerf who nicknamed it "Internet". In 1972 Cerf was hired by Stanford to teach electrical engineering and computer science. The following year Cerf and Robert Kahn published the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the new standard for computer communications over the Arpanet/Internet. In 1982 he left Stanford for MCI. In 1986 he joined Kahn's Corporation for National Research Initiatives. In 1994 Cerf rejoined MCI. In 1999 he joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In 2005 he was hired by Google.

William Millard

William Millard (California, ????), a college dropout, worked several blue-collar jobs in the Oakland area before moving to Los Angeles in 1958 to work as a programmer on a Univac. He then worked on data centers for the county of San Francisco. In 1969 Millard started the software publisher Systems Dynamics. In 1972 he founded Information Management Science Associates or IMSAI. a consulting company for mainframe users founded in San Leandro, on the east bay. His engineers realized that a number of microprocessors tightly coupled together could match the processing power of a mainframe at a fraction of the price. In october 1975 they introduced the Hypercube II, which cost $80,000 (an IBM 370 mainframe cost about $4 million). Ironically, they were more successful with IMSAI 8080, a clone of the Atari 8800 that they sold to the hobbyist market starting in december 1975, while only one Hypercube was ever sold (to the Navy). In 1976 Millard opened the "Computer Shack", a store located in Hayward (again in the east bay) that offered everything a personal computer user needed. That store would soon become a nation-wide chain, ComputerLand, selling computers to the public, a proposition that only a few years earlier (when computers were astronomically expensive and impossible to use) would have been unconceivable. Even at the peak, when its revenues exceeded $1 billion from 800 franchised outlets all over the world, ComputerLand remained a family-run operation. In 1987 Millard sold Computerland but got engulfed in litigations with his former employees and lost much of his fortune.

Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker (????, 1943) studied at Princeton University and in 1971 graduated in philosophy from the University of Michigan. In 1971 he joined the Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley. IBM's work on relational databases triggered interest in a group of Berkeley scientists led by Stonebraker, who started the Ingres (INteractive Graphics REtrieval System) project in 1973. Ingres was first demonstrated in 1979. For all practical purposes, Ingres looked like a variant of IBM's System R for DEC minicomputers running the Unix operating system. Being open-source software like Berkeley's Unix (BSD), within one year Ingres was deployed by many universities around the country, as the first available relational database system (IBM's System R was not available outside IBM). In 1980 Stonebraker himself started a company, Relational Technology, later renamed Ingres, to market the system. That same year Roger Sippl and Laura King, who had implemented an experimental relational database system, started Relational Database Systems in Menlo Park, a company that was later renamed Informix. Meanwhile, Stonebraker launched a new project, Postgres, to create an object-relational DBMS, and in 1992 spawned a commercial entity, Illustra, to sell this new technology. Informix acquired Illustra in 1996 and Stonebraker went to work for Informix. In 2000 Stonebraker moved to the MIT where he worked on a number of projects: Aurora, about "push" technology for streaming data, C-Store, a new kind of database management system, Morpheus, for data integration, etc. He also started new companies to commercialize some of these ideas.

Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison (New York, 1944), the son of a teenage single mother whom he didn't meet for 48 years, was raised in Chicago by adoptive parents. He dropped out of college and moved to California in 1966. In 1967 Ellison joined Amdahl in Sunnyvale (where he worked on the first IBM-compatible mainframe) and then in 1971 Ampex in Redwood City, where he worked on a database management system for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) codenamed "Oracle" under the management of his boss Bob Miner. In 1977 Ellison joined Precision Instruments (later Omex), also a manufacturer of tape recorders, based in San Carlos, mainly serving NASA and the Navy. They needed software engineers to fulfill a contract and Ellison prompted his former boss Bob Miner and Ed Oates to set up a software company, of which he (Ellison) retained the majority stake. In august 1977 Software Development Laboratories opened offices. When Ellison joined them, he convince them to use the money from that contract to fund an SQL relational database management system of the kind that IBM had just unveiled in San Jose but targeting the minicomputer market. Miner and their fourth employee Bruce Scott wrote most of it (in the assembly language of the PDP-11), the company was renamed Relational Software, and in 1978 the CIA purchased the first prototype. In 1979 Relational officially shipped the first commercial SQL relational database management system, Oracle. In 1982 the company was renamed one more time and became Oracle Corporation.
In 1983 Oracle announced that its engineers (basically Bob Miner and Bruce Scott) had rewritten its database management system in the C programming language, the language preferred by all Unix systems, an achievement that made Oracle's product easily portable across computer platforms. It was therefore ported to the most popular minicomputers and even to mainframes (that already had C compilers). It was also the first 32-bit relational database management system. In 1982 (before IBM introduced the DB2) Oracle had 24 employees, a customer base of 75 companies and revenues of $2.5 million. In 1987 revenues had reached the $100 million mark. In 1989 they skyrocketed to $584 million, and then they almost doubled in one year, just short of a billion dollars for the fiscal year ending in may 1990. By the end of the 1980s Oracle had become the largest software company in the Bay Area.
In 1997 Ellison donated $250 million to establish the Ellison Medical Foundation, devoted to biomedical research on aging.
Oracle then attacked the ERP market. In 1997 the total revenues for the ERP software market was $7.2 billion, with SAP, Baan, Oracle, J.D. Edwards, and PeopleSoft accounting for 62% of it, and the Germans dominating it. Oracle proceeded to acquire PeopleSoft (2004) and Siebel (2005). Now Oracle could literally connect the plant of a company to its corner offices and even to its traveling salesmen. In 2005 the total revenues of ERP software were $25.5 billion, with SAP making $10.5 billion and Oracle $5.1 billion.
In 2004 Ellison was estimated to be worth $18.7 billion, one of the richest people in the world. He also became a professional yacht racer.
In 2009 Oracle, still aiming mainly at the corporate world, decided to enter the hardware market by purchasing a struggling SUN.

Bill Raduchel

Bill Raduchel (Michigan, 1946) studied economics at Michigan State University until 1966, and graduated in economics from Harvard University in 1972. He became professor of Economics at Harvard University, where one of his students was Scott McNealy. Eventually, in 1980 he started a company started in Silicon Valley, Onyx, to build a microcomputer running UNIX. He also hired Scott McNealy, who had moved to Stanford. The Onyx C8002 was based on a Zilog Z8000, had 256-kilobyte RAM and included a 10-megabyte hard disk for the price of $11,000, a cheaper alternative to the PDP-11. He joined SUN in 1988, where he became chief strategy officer. He left SUN in 1999 and joined American OnLine (AOL). In 2002 he left AOL. From may 2004 to february 2006 Raduchel led Ruckus Network. He became an angel investor with executive positions in several start-ups (notably Blackboard, Chordiant, Opera and Silicon Image).

Bill Haseltine

William Haseltine (Missouri, 1944) grew up at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert of California. He studied at U.C. Berkeley until 1966 and graduated in biophysics from Harvard University in 1973. He worked at the MIT and in 1976 joined the Dana Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School. While at Harvard, Haseltine pioneered research on AIDS in collaboration with Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (who a few years would discover the cause of AIDS, HIV), and then formed several biotech start-ups during the 1980s. In 1992 Craig Venter set up the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Maryland, funded by venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg, and Steinberg hired Haseltine to run a new company named Human Genome Sciences (HGS), the business plan being that Venter's TIGR would create a database of genetic information and Haseltine's HGS would sell it to pharmaceutical companies. In 1993 HGS sold its genetic database to SmithKline Beecham for $125 million. When Steinberg died in 1997, Venter and Haseltine parted ways. Haseltine retired from HGS in 2004.

Jim Clark

Jim Clark (Texas, 1944), who had enrolled in the Navy as a teenager to escape the boredom of his Texas hometown, studied physics at the University of New Orleans until 1971 and graduated in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974, where he had a chance to work at Evans & Sutherland. After a brief stint at the New York Institute of Technology, Clark went to work at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1974 and in 1979 was hired by Stanford University. At the same time he consulted for Xerox PARC on three-dimensional graphics. Evans & Sutherland's Picture System had pioneered hardware implementations of computer graphics. At Stanford University in 1980 Clark and his student Marc Hannah developed an improved version called the "Geometry Engine". In november 1981 Clark and Abbey Silverstone of Xerox started Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, with funding from Mayfield Fund, to manufacture graphic workstations. The original idea was to have Motorola 68000-based workstations connected to a DEC VAX minicomputer that boasted high-performance graphics needed for engineering design. Later those workstations became stand-alone Unix computers. Silicon Graphics started growing rapidly, but Glenn Mueller of the Mayfield Fund quickly shifted real power towards a trusted business man. Clark was a figurehead until 1994 when he resigned to found Netscape with Marc Andreessen. The Netscape IPO launched the dotcom bubble. Clark had invested $5 million in Netscape and earned $2 billion within weeks of the IPO. He later started several more companies: Healtheon in 1996, MyCFO in 1999, and, after moving to Florida, Hyperion Development Group in 2003. In 1999 Clark funded Stanford University's Bio-X program in biomedical engineering.

Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull (West Virginia, 1945) graduated in computer science from the University of Utah in 1974 after studying with Ivan Sutherland. In 1975 Ed Catmull was hired to establish the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology. Ed Catmull helped create a computer animation in a scene of the film "Futureworld" (1976) that was the first ever to use 3D computer graphics. In 1979 filmmaker George Lucas hired Catmull to open a laboratory devoted to computer animation for his San Francisco firm Lucasfilm. In 1986 Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's division that had worked on computer animation, Pixar, and turned it into an independent film studio run by Catmull. Pixar introduced the Pixar Image Computer, the most advanced graphics computer yet, although a commercial flop. John Lasseter, a former Walt Disney animator, worked at Lucasfilm under Ed Catmull at a groundbreaking computer-animated short, "The Adventures of Andre and Wally B" (1984), for which they used even a Cray supercomputer. When Jobs purchased Lucasfilm in 1986 and turned it into Pixar, Lasseter was given the power and freedom to invest in that technology, but it took almost a decade to come out with a full-length film: "Toy Story" (1995), the first feature-length computer-animated film. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006 and Catmull became president of Disney Animation Studios.

Lee Felsenstein

Lee Felsenstein (Pennsylvania, 1945) studied at U.C. Berkeley during the turbulent early 1960s. He became an activist of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement in 1964. He then worked at Ampex and became a hobbyist in the nascent microcomputer field. In 1973 Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein at U.C. Berkeley started the "Community Memory", the first public computerized bulletin board system, using a Scientific Data Systems' time-sharing machine. In 1975 he joined the Homebrew Computer Club in march 1975, which originally met in Gordon French's garage but later moved to the SLAC's auditorium, where Felsenstein became the moderator. Felsenstein used the Intel 8080 to design the Sol-20 for Bob Marsh's Processor Technology, one of the first personal-computer makers. It was released in june 1976, the first microcomputer to include a built-in video driver, and the archetype for mass-produced personal computers to come. In 1976 he built the Pennywhistle 103 kit modem, which greatly reduced the cost for a personal computer to go online. Felsenstein joined fellow Homebrew Club member Adam Osborne and designed the portable computer Osborne 1, released in april 1981. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Felsenstein started a consulting company for Soviet customers, Glav-PC. In 1992 he was hired by Interval Research, the think tank founded by Microsoft's founder Paul Allen in Palo Alto.

Manuel Fernandez

Manuel Fernandez (Cuba, 1946) grew up in Cuba and immigrated to the USA in 1959. He studied electrical engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology until 1967. He worked for ITT and Harris before moving to the Bay Area's Fairchild Semiconductor laboratory. He became president of Zilog in 1979. Then Fernandez founded Gavilan and in may 1983 introduced the first portable MS-DOS computer marketed as a "laptop". He then moved to top-management positions at information-research firms DataQuest (1984) and Gartner (1990). In 1996 Fernandez founded venture-capital firm SI Venture in Florida. In the 2000s he became technological advisor to president George W Bush. In 2009 he went to manage Sysco in Texas.

Craig Venter

Craig Venter (Utah, 1946) grew up in the Bay Area. He studied biochemistry at College of San Mateo until 1972 and graduated in physiology and pharmacology from U.C. San Diego in 1975. Venter joined in 1984 the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, at the time still run by James Watson as a traditional biomedical center. In 1992 Venter, frustrated that the center wouldn't move faster towards automation of genetic processing, quit his job and the Human Genome Project to set up the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) a few kilometers away, in Rockville, funded by venture capitalist Wallace Steinberg of New Jersey with $70 million over seven years and staffed with many of Venter's old coworkers at the NIH. Meanwhile, Steinberg hired William Haseltine, who had pioneered research on AIDS at Harvard University since the 1970s in collaboration with Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute (who a few years would discover the cause of AIDS, HIV), and then had formed several biotech start-ups during the 1980s. Steinberg put Haseltine in charge of a new company named Human Genome Sciences (HGS), the business plan being that Venter's TIGR would create a database of genetic information and Haseltine's HGS would sell it to pharmaceutical companies. This was a bold plan because until then no biomedical company had ever made a profit by simply selling information, and corresponded to a vision of future medicine as "bioinformatics". The first sequencing ("mapping") of a living being's genome was carried out at this institute in 1995. Venter parted ways with Haseltine after their mutual investor Steinberg died in 1997, since Venter was more interested in the science and Haseltine in creating a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical conglomerate. In may 1998 Venter joined Michael Hunkapiller president of Applied Biosystems, to set up a new company, Celera Genomics, which soon relocated to the Bay Area (Alameda, near Oakland), to launch a private project to decode the human genome before the Human Genome Project. Celera Genomics filled a staff of distinguished scholars, including Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, and bought 300 of Applied Biosystems' most advanced machines to create the world's largest automated factory for mapping DNA. In 2000 the government-funded Human Genome Project and the privately funded Celera made peace and jointly announced that they had succeeded in decoding the entire human genome. After disagreements with Celera's main investor Tony White, in january 2002 Venter left Celera taking Hamilton Smith with him. In 2003 they synthesized the genome of a virus (just eleven genes) which, unlike the artificial polio virus at Stony Brook, truly behaved like a virus. In september 2004 Craig Venter started his own non-profit institute in both Maryland and California (San Diego) to conduct research in synthetic biology and biofuels. In particular, they worked on building the genome of a bacterium from scratch and on inserting the genome of one bacterium into another. Venter's new venture heralded the birth of synthetic biology as a business. In may 2010 Hamilton Smith's team at the Craig Venter Institute in Maryland achieved another milestone in synthetic biology by building a bacterium's DNA from scratch in the lab and then transplanting it into the cell of a host bacterium of a different species, where the artificial DNA took control of the host cell and started replicating. The resulting living being behaved like the species of the synthetic DNA. They had just managed to reprogram a living being.

Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe (New York, 1946) studied at the electrical engineering MIT, business management at the Sloan School, and computer science at Harvard, where he worked on Project MAC and graduated in 1973. A year earlier he had already joined Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, where he had just invented the local-area networking technology Ethernet. The first Ethernet was finally operational in 1976. Metcalfe also enunciated his law: the value of a network of devices increases exponentially with the number of connected devices. This was popularly translated in terms of users: the value of a network increases exponentially with the number of the people that it connects. In 1976 Metcalfe joined the Xerox division that was working on the Xerox Star workstation. In 1979 Metcalfe left Xerox PARC to found 3Com (Computers, Communication and Compatibility) in his Palo Alto apartment (but the first offices were in Santa Clara). The idea was to provide personal computer manufacturers with Ethernet adaptor cards so that businesses could connect all the small computers in one local-area network. He left 3Com in 1990 and started writing about technology. In 1995 he predicted the Internet would collapse within one year. In 2001 he joined the venture-capitalist firm Polaris Venture.

Gary Hendrix

Gary Hendrix (Texas, 1948?) studied at the University of Texas until 1970 and then began work on robotics at the same university. In 1973 he was hired by SRI's Artificial Intelligence group chaired by Charlie Rosen, a pioneer of perceptron (neural-network) machines and the brain behind "Shakey the Robot". In 1978 Rosen and his associates (including Hendrix) started Machine Intelligence Corporation to commercialize SRI's research on vision. In july 1981 Hendrix resigned from SRI to work full-time at Machine Intelligence. However, Machine Intelligence decided to spin off the natural-language processing team that Hendrix managed, and Hendrix opened Symantec in march 1982 in Sunnyvale with funding from John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. Hendrix hired a group of specialists from Stanford University and SRI and tried to deliver a database with a natural-language user interface. In september 1984 Kleiner Perkins arranged a merger between Symantec and another company they had funded, the start-up formed by Denis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks of DRI, which was developing a suite of software tools. In a few months Symantec introduced its first product, Q&A (Questions and Answers), a database management system for personal computers with a natural-language user interface. Symantec went on to specialize in development tools for software engineers, i.e. software to help build other software.

James Sachs

James Sachs (California, 1949) grew up in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. He enrolled as a pilot of the Air Force for six years. Returning to civilian life, he began to draw artistic backgrounds for videogames, notably "Saucer Attack" for the Commodore 64 (published by Lotus Soft in 1984) and "Defender of the Crown" for the Amiga (published by Cinemaware in 1986). He worked for Commodore on the first CD-ROM game machine, the Amiga-based CDTV ("Commodore Dynamic Total Vision"), released in march 1991. SoftBook Press, founded by Sachs and by publishing industry executive Tom Pomeroy in 1996 in Menlo Park, introduced one of the earliest e-book readers (eventually purchased by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate).

Michael Hunkapiller

Michael Hunkapiller (????, ????) studied chemistry at Oklahoma Baptist University until 1970 and graduated in chemical biology from CalTech in 1974. 1986 Leroy Hood's team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena refined an automated method to sequence DNA, i.e. the first automated DNA sequencer, which made it possible (not just theoretical) to sequence the entire human genome. Within one year that sequencer was launched on the market by the Bay Area start-up Applied Biosystems. Leroy Hood's team included a young Mike Hunkapiller, who had joined Applied Biosystems in 1983. PE Biosystems, the new name of Applied Biosystems after being acquired (in february 1993) by East-Coast colossus Perkin-Elmer, became a wealthy company with revenues of $871 million in 1998. Michael Hunkapiller became its president in 1995. He decided to launch a private project to decode the human genome before the Human Genome Project and hired Craig Venter of Maryland's Institute for Genomic Research. In may 1998 Hunkapiller and Venter set up a new company, Celera Genomics, which soon relocated to the Bay Area (Alameda, near Oakland). Technically, both Biosystems of Foster City and Celera Genomics of Alameda were owned by Applera, a spin-off of Perkin-Elmer's Life Sciences Division which in 2000 also became the official new name of Perkin-Elmer, except that in 2006 Applera renamed itself Applied Biosystems and spun off Celera Genomics; a confusing business story that still left two tightly related companies, one engaged in building machines and the other one in using those machines to sequence DNA. The main investor of both was the Cuban-born businessman Tony White, the head of their parent company (what used to be Perkin-Elmer) who had brokered the deal between Venter and Hunkapiller. Celera Genomics filled a staff of distinguished scholars, including Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, and bought 300 of Applied Biosystems' most advanced machines to create the world's largest automated factory for mapping DNA. In 2000 the government-funded Human Genome Project and the privately funded Celera made peace and jointly announced that they had succeeded in decoding the entire human genome. Hunkapiller joined the venture-capital firm Alloy in 2004.

Marc Porat

Marc Porat (Israel, 1950?) studied at Columbia College until 1972 and graduated in communication and economics from Stanford University with a thesis on the "information economy" (1976) that became an influential study. After working for the government and for the Aspen Institute, where he learned about "greentech", Porat moved to the private sector in 1983 when he founded Private Satellite Network. In 1988 Apple hired him to lead a project code-named Paradigm that aimed at building an innovative hand-held mobile device. In may 1990 Porat and two legendary Apple software engineers, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, decided to start a company to develop the idea, General Magic. Their vision was now more ambitious: they wanted to put the power of a real computer into the hands of a casual mobile user. At the time this was technologically impossible, so they thought of creating a "cloud" of services running on interconnected devices: by roaming the cloud, even a simple, weak device could muster the computing power of a real computer. They came up with the Telescript programming language to write applications for hand-held device (a "personal intelligent communicator") that would physically and opportunistically spread onto remote computers but eventually deliver back a result to the user of the hand-held device. Telecom and IT (Information Technology) giants such as Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T invested in the idea. Commercially, it was a spectacular flop, but a new paradigm had indeed been introduced: "cloud computing". After founding the web-based ERP and supply-chain start-up Perfect Commerce (1998), Porat then turned to building materials for the "green" economy focused on reducing energy consumption and carbon emission: Serious Materials (2002) in Sunnyvale for eco-friendly materials, CalStar Cement (2007), a spin-off of the University of Missouri based in the east bay (Newark) that manufactures eco-friendly bricks, Heliotricity (solar panels), Zeta Communities (2007) in San Francisco for pre-assembled homes that operate at net-zero energy. He also built for himself a "netzero" house that produces more energy than it consumes.

Jerry Kaplan

Jerry Kaplan (????, ????) studied history and philosophy at the University of Chicago until 1972, and graduated in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. He then joined Stanford University's Computer Science Department in 1979. In 1981 he co-founded Teknowledge with other Stanford staff. He then became the chief technologist at Lotus. In 1987 Jerry Kaplan and others started GO Corporation to manufacture portable computers with a pen-based user interface. GO never delivered anything of any consequence, but went down in the history of the valley for the impressive amount of venture capital that it managed to amass: $75 million. In 1994 he co-founded the online auction site Onsale.

Scott Fisher

Scott Fisher (????, ????) studied at the MIT, working both at the Center for Advance Visual Studies in 1974-76 and at Negroponte's Architecture Machine Group in 1978-82, and contributing to the Aspen Movie Map. He moved to the Bay Area to join Alan Kay's research group at Atari. Michael McGreevy had started a project at NASA Ames Research Center for the Virtual Planetary Exploration Workstation, a virtual-reality system for which he built the first low-cost head-mounted display, the Virtual Visual Environment Display system (VIVED). The system was hosted on a DEC PDP-11 interfacing an Evans and Sutherland Picture System 2. In 1985 Fisher joined NASA Ames and built the VIrtual Environment Workstation (VIEW), incorporating the first "dataglove". By moving the dataglove the user moved in the virtual world projected into her head-mounted display. In 1990 Fisher and Brenda Laurel founded Telepresence Research. After a stint at the Graduate School of Media and Governance of Keio University, in 1997 he directed the Virtual Explorer Project in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at U.C. Diego, and in 2001 Fisher founded the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California.

Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak (California, 1950) studied at Cupertino's Homestead High School, where he was introduced to electronics by his teacher John McCollum. In 1973 he dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley and joined Hewlett-Packard to work on calculators, his first experience with microprocessors. He met a summer intern, Steve Jobs, who gave him the idea to build a pre-assembled computer. Wozniak became a member of a club of Bay Area-based hobbyists, the Homebrew Computer Club, founded in march 1975 in Menlo Park. Wozniak who demonstrated the first prototype of his Apple at their meeting of december 1976. In april 1976 Wozniak and Jobs started Apple Computer in Cupertino. Wozniak had built their first microcomputer in Jobs' garage in nearby Los Altos using MOS Technology's 6502 microprocessor ($20) because he could not afford the more advanced Motorola 6800 or Intel 8080 (both about $170). The user had to provide her/his own keyboard and monitor. Their friend Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop was the first one to promote it (he paid Apple $666.66 for each unit). It was, however, the Apple II, still based on a 6502 and released in april 1977, which stood out from the competition. Funded by former Fairchild's and Intel's marketing executive Mike Markkula, this desktop computer was fully assembled, requiring almost no technical expertise, and boasted the look and feel of a home appliance. It had a monitor and a keyboard integrated with the motherboard shell, as well as a ROM hosting a BASIC interpreter and a RAM of 4 kilobytes (but no operating system). When Apple went public in 1980, Wozniak and Jobs became multimillionaires (Apple's market value during the first day of trading reached $1.2 billion). In february 1981 Wozniak was the victim of a plane accident that temporarily damaged his memory. He went back to Berkeley to complete his studies in computer science. In 1982 he sponsored a music and technology festival. In 1983 he returned to Apple but in 1985 Wozniak left Apple after the company posted its first quarterly loss and had to lay off 20% of its workforce. In 1986 he finally finished his undergraduate studies at Berkeley. Wozniak founded CL 9, a company that introduced the first universal remote control in 1987. He founded Wheels of Zeus for wireless GPS technology (2001), Acquicor for incubating start-ups (2006), and Fusion-io (2009). He also taught children and defended hackers.

Bill Atkinson

Bill Atkinson (????, 1951) studied at U.C. San Diego and at the University of Washington in Seattle. He joined Apple in 1978. In 1987 Apple demonstrated the HyperCard software, which allowed Macintosh users to create applications using interconnected "cards" that could mix text, images, sound and video. The cards constituted a hypertext. Designed by Bill Atkinson, it was another idea derived from Xerox PARC, which had built a hypertext system called NoteCards in 1984, based in turn on the old experiments of Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. HyperCard also pioneered the idea of "plug-ins", of external software that is allowed to access the application's internal data in order to extend its functionalities. In 1990 Marc Porat at Apple started a project code-named Paradigm that aimed to build an innovative hand-held mobile device. In may 1990 Porat and two legendary Apple software engineers, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, decided to start a company to develop the idea, General Magic. Their vision was now more ambitious: they wanted to put the power of a real computer into the hands of a casual mobile user. At the time this was technologically impossible, so they thought of creating a "cloud" of services running on interconnected devices: by roaming the cloud, even a simple, weak device could muster the computing power of a real computer. They came up with the Telescript programming language to write applications for hand-held device (a "personal intelligent communicator") that would physically and opportunistically spread onto remote computers but eventually deliver back a result to the user of the hand-held device. Telecom and IT (Information Technology) giants such as Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T invested in the idea. Commercially, it was a spectacular flop, but a new paradigm had indeed been introduced: "cloud computing". In 2007 Atkinson joined Numenta, an Artificial Intelligence start-up founded in 2005 in Redwood City by Palm's founder Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky and Stanford's student Dileep George.

Leonard Bosack

Leonard Bosack (Pennsylvania, 1952) studied at La Salle College High School until 1969 and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania until 1973. He joined DEC as a hardware engineer. In 1979 he went to study computer science at Stanford University. In 1981 Stanford had a team working on a project to connect all their mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos. William Yeager designed the software (on a PDP-11) and ubiquitous student Andy Bechtolsheim designed the hardware. Leonard Bosack was a support engineer who worked on the network router that allowed the computer network under his management (at the Computer Science lab) to share data with another network (at the Business School). In 1984 he and his wife Sandy Lerner (manager of the other lab) started Cisco in Menlo Park to commercialize the Advanced Gateway Server, which was a revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. The product was developed in their garage and first sold in 1986 through word of mouth. The company became one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. However, in 1990 Cisco's management fired Lerner and Bosack resigned.

Thomas Siebel

Thomas Siebel (Illinois, 1952) grew up in Chicago and studied engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1983. In 1984 Siebel joined Oracle, where he became a sales executive. In 1990 he moved to a multimedia start-up, Cayenne Systems, later renamed Gain Technology and sold to Sybase in 1992. In 1993 he and Patricia House started Siebel to market a software application for sales force automation, the first step towards Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It was an evolution of a project implemented at Oracle and called OASIS (Oracle Automated Sales Information System). Siebel's IPO made Siebel a billionaire on paper. He also founded the Siebel Foundation (1996) to fight homelessness and drug addiction. In 1999 Siebel owned almost 50% of the CRM market. Oracle acquired Siebel in 2005 for $5.8 billion. Siebel campaigned for a right-wing candidate in the 2008 elections.

Craig Newmark

Craig Newmark (New Jersey, 1952) studied computer science at Case Western Reserve University until 1977. He immediately joined IBM in Florida. In 1983 he became a sales person for IBM in Detroit. After 17 years at IBM he quit and moved to San Francisco to join the financial firm Charles Schwab. In 1995 he launched Craigslist.com from his San Francisco residence, a service that provided a regional advertising platform (initially only for the Bay Area). It became a cult phenomenon, spreading by pure word of mouth. Newmark refused investments and offers to sell. While Craigslist was spreading to dozens of cities around the world, between 1995 and 1998 Newmark took small consulting jobs to support himself. Despite having one of the most visited websites in the world, his staff was typically 20 people. Perhaps more than anyone else on the Web, Newmark embodied the anti-corporate and communal spirit of the alternative crowd.

Trip Hawkins

Trip Hawkins (California, 1953), a hobbyist of computer games, joined Apple in 1978 as a marketing manager. In 1982 he founded Electronic Arts in Redwood City with funding from Don Valentine to market home computer games, viewed not as mere games but as a form of interactive digital media. In 1983 he hired Nancy Fong to be the company's art director. Both their business plan and their ethics treated game publishing just like book publishing, and treated videogame production just like a movie studio treats movie production. In 1991 he left EA to start 3DO, whose mission was to develop a better gaming console. In 2003 Hawkins started another venture, Digital Chocolate or D-Choc, in San Mateo to develop games for cell phones.

Michael West

Michael West (????, 1953?) studied physics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (New York State) until 1976 and biology at Andrews University (Michigan) until 1982 before graduating from Baylor College of Medicine (Texas) in 1989. He then joined the University of Texas' Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. In 1990 he started Geron with funding from oil-industry tycoon Miller Quarles who wanted a "cure" against aging (in other words, immortality). In 1992 the company relocated to Menlo Park where West had found more venture capital, and in 1998 its scientists, led by Calvin Harley, would isolate human embryonic stem cells (but never get any closer to marketing immortality). In october 2001 the Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced that it had cloned the world's first human embryo. ACT was a spin-off of the University of Massachusetts founded by James Robl whose lab there had been the first to clone calves from somatic cells. The team included Michael West, who had joined ACT in 1998. West continued his stem-cell research at BioTime in Alameda (near Oakland) while teaching at U.C. Berkeley.

Don Eigler

Don Eigler (California, 1953) graduated in physics from U.C. San Diego in 1984 and worked at Bell Labs until 1985. In 1986 he joined IBM. In 1989 Eigler at IBM's San Jose Almaden labs carried out a spectacular manipulation of atoms that resulted in the atoms forming the three letters "IBM", the first major result of nanotechnology.

John Hennessy

John Hennessy (????, 1953) studied electrical engineering at Villanova University in Philadelphia until 1973, and graduated in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1977. He immediately joined Stanford where he became a pioneer of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer), starting his own RISC project in 1981. Three years later Hennessy founded MIPS that in 1985 released the first major RISC processor, the R2000. He went on to become provost and then president of Stanford University.

Pradeep Sindhu

Pradeep Sindhu (India, 1953) studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur until 1974 and then moved to the USA. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Hawaii until 1976, and graduated in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1982. In september 1984 he joined the Computer Science Lab at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he remained until february 1996. Sindhu, Dennis Ferguson and Bjorn Liencres founded Juniper Networks in 1996 in Sunnyvale to manufacture high-end routers in direct competition with Cisco. When it went public in 1999, its IPO was one of the most successful in history, turning it overnight into a $4.9 billion company.

Bill Joy

Bill Joy (Michigan, 1954) studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and computer science at U.C. Berkeley. In the fall of 1975 Ken Thompson of the Bell Labs began a one-year sabbatical as a visiting professor at Berkeley, his alma mater. Thompson basically took Unix with him. Bill Joy started graduate studies at about the same time and focused on Unix. He became the reference point for the local version of Unix, the "Berkeley Software Distribution" (BSD). The second BSD of 1978 included two pieces of software developed by Joy himself that became even more popular: the "vi" text editor and the "C shell". Joy went on to assemble the third BSD on the 32-bit VAX in december 1979 that the 16-bit PDP-11 version obsolete. When in 1980 DARPA commissioned Berkeley an enhanced version of the third BSD to be used by the entire DARPA community, Bill Joy decided to ditch his graduate studies (he never graduated) and to accept a position as manager of the newly created Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG). That group integrated Rob Gurwitz's first implementation of the TCP/IP protocol and produced 4.2BSD, which was released in august 1983. Bill Joy had already left the group, surrendering the leadership to Sam Leffler. SUN Microsystems was founded in february 1982 in Palo Alto by two foreign Stanford students, German-born Andy Bechtolsheim and Indian-born Vinod Khosla. They hired Bill Joy to develop a dialect of Unix, SunOS, based on BSD. In 1999 Joy and Andreas Bechtolsheim founded the venture-capital firm HighBAR Ventures. In 2005 he joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to invest in green technology.

Scott McNealy

Scott McNealy (Indiana, 1954) grew up in the Midwest and became familiar with the plight of the automotive industry. He studied economics at Harvard University under Bill Raduchel until 1976, worked humble jobs for a couple of years, and then graduated in business administration from Stanford University in 1980. He worked for defense contractor FMC and in 1981 joined Onyx. Then Khosla recruited it to join SUN. When Khosla left in 1985, McNealy succeeded him as the company's boss. SUN reached $1 billion in revenue in 1988. In 2006 McNealy stepped down from SUN and Oracle acquired SUN in april 2009.

Condoleezza Rice

Condoleezza Rice (Alabama, 1954) grew up in Colorado and graduated in political science from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver in 1981 (at the young age of 27). She was immediately hired from Stanford and went on to become the youngest ever provost as well as the first female and black provost of the university in 1993. She joined the administration of president George W Bush in 2001.

Carly Fiorina

Cara Sneed (Texas, 1954), the daughter of a judge and an artist who relocated several times during her childhood, studied philosophy at Stanford University until 1976, marketing at the University of Maryland until 1980 and management at the MIT Sloan School until 1989. Meanwhile, she worked as a receptionist and assistant. She joined AT&T in 1980 for a humble job but, married in 1983 to executive Frank Fiorina, she steadily climbed up the hierarchy until she became a top executive, ranked as the most powerful woman in business. In 1999 she became CEO of Hewlett-Packard. In 2005 she was de facto fired. In 2008 Carly Fiorina entered the national political scene and in 2010 she ran for senator of California.

Judy Estrin

Judy Estrin (California, 1954) grew up in Los Angeles. The daughter of two UCLA professors, she studied computer science at UCLA and electrical engineering at Stanford until 1977. There she worked in Vint Cerf's team while he was inventing TCP/IP. In 1978 she joined Zilog as an engineer, working on one of the first local-area network products under Bill Carrico. After a brief stint at Ungermann-Bass, in 1981 Estrin and Carrico (now wife and husband) started a company to sell routers, Bridge Communications, in Mountain View, which was acquired in 1986 by 3Com. In 1988 she joined Network Computing Devices as an executive. In 1995 she co-founded Precept Software, which was acquired by Cisco in 1998. She was an executive of Cisco until 2000. In 2000 Estrin co-founded Packet Design, an incubator of networking start-ups, later renamed JLabs.

Andy Bechtolsheim

Andreas Bechtolsheim (Germany, 1955) studied engineering at the Technische Universitat in Munich. In 1974 he moved to the USA to study electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1977 he transferred to Stanford where he studied until 1982. In 1981 Stanford had a team working on a project to connect all their mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos. William Yeager designed the software (on a PDP-11) and ubiquitous student Andy Bechtolsheim designed the hardware. Two support engineers, Leonard Bosack and his wife Sandy Lerner, would eventually commercialize the Advanced Gateway Server with their start-up Cisco. Meanwhile, Bechtolsheim was working at the Stanford University Network. He had modified a Xerox PARC's Alto into a workstation running Unix and networking software. His goal was simply to have machines that would make it as easy as possible to be connected and share data. Khosla realized that this could become a business, and they joined forces with Scott McNealy, a former Stanford graduate and now at Unix start-up Onyx, and hired Berkeley graduate Bill Joy of BSD fame to develop a dialect of Unix, SunOS, based on BSD (Berkeley's version of Unix). Backed by venture capitalists such as Kleiner-Perkins in february 1982. SUN Microsystems was started to market that concept. The first Sun-2 workstations was released at the end of 1982.
In 1995 he quit Sun and founded Granite Systems, which was sold to Cisco in 1996 for $220 million. In 1999 he started his career as an "angel" investor by becoming the first investor in Google, when it only had eight employees. In 1999 Bechtolsheim and Bill Joy founded the venture-capital firm HighBAR Ventures. In december 2003 he quit Cisco to concentrate on Kealia, a start-up that he had founded in 2001. This one was bought by SUN. In 2005 Bechtolsheim formed Arastra, later renamed Arista Networks.

Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla (India, 1955) studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and finally graduated in business administration from Stanford University in 1980. Right after graduation he co-founded a company for computer-aided design software, Daisy Networks. However, in 1981 Khosla was the catalyst to make SUN happen, by bringing together the technological genius of Andy Bechtolsheim and the business genius of Scott McNealy. Khosla left Sun in 1985 and joined the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 1994 he funded Architext, later renamed Excite and acquired in 1999 by @Home for $6.7 billion. In 1996 he funded Cerent, acquired in 1999 by Cisco for $7.4 billion. In 2004 he formed Khosla Ventures to invest in green-technology companies.

Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler (California, 1955) grew up in Oregon graduated in molecular nanotechnology from the MIT. The term "nanotechnology" (originally introduced by Japanese scientist Norio Taniguchi in 1974) was popularized by Drexler's book "Engines of Creation - The Coming Era of Nanotechnology" (1986). Materials are built from atoms. The configuration of the atoms can produce materials with completely different properties, like coal versus diamond, or sand versus silicon. Drexler emphasized that molecular manufacturing would open a new era for the fabrication of materials. Drexler also founded the Foresight Institute in Menlo Park with his wife Christine Peterson.

Sandy Lerner

Sandy Lerner (Virginia, 1955) studied political science at Chico's State University, near Sacramento, econometrics at the Claremont Graduate School, and computer science at Stanford University. In 1981 she started working at Stanford's Business School. In 1984 she and her husband Leo Bosack started Cisco in Menlo Park. The company became one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories. However, in 1990 Cisco's management fired Lerner. In 1995 she founded Urban Decay, a manufacturer of cosmetics. She sponsored organizations and events for animal rights and for environmental farming, notably in 1996 the Ayrshire Farm in Virginia.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (California, 1955) grew up in Silicon Valley before it was called that way. He attended the same Homestead High School where Steve Wozniak had been an assistant to John McCollum and then obtained a summer job at Hewlett-Packard where he met Wozniak again. Jobs dropped out of Reed College in 1972 after just a few months. He joined Atari instead. Following a fashionable trend in the Bay Area, Jobs traveled to India, became a Buddhist, experimented with LSD and browsed Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog". In april 1976 Jobs and Wozniak started Apple Computer in Cupertino. Jobs' vision was to create a computer that was a home appliance. In 1979 Jobs had his first demonstration of an Alto at Xerox PARC, and realized that the mouse-driven GUI was the way to go: in january 1984 when Apple introduced the Macintosh, the successor to the Lisa. Meanwhile, Apple in 1982 had become the first personal-computer company to pass the $1 billion mark in revenues. In 1985 Apple also introduced the LaserWriter, the first printer to ship with PostScript. Apple had hired Coca Cola's CEO John Sculley. In 1985 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs left Apple while the company, following its first quarterly loss, had to lay off 20% of its workforce. Jobs launched a new company, NeXT, to build the next generation of computers with an even more advanced GUI than the Mac's, but opted for proprietary hardware and a proprietary operating system, which dramatically inflated the investment (the machine would not be released until 1989). In 1986 Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's division that had worked on computer animation, Pixar, and turned it into an independent film studio run by computer-graphics veteran Ed Catmull. Pixar introduced the Pixar Image Computer, the most advanced graphics computer yet, although another commercial flop. In 1996 Apple purchased NeXT and brought back Steve Jobs. This marked the beginning of Apple's second coming. In october 2001 Apple launched a consumer device, named iPod, to play music files, basically a "walkman" for mp3 files. It was a hit. Style became Apple's main weapon. By the end of 2006 a hefty 48% of Apple's revenues was coming from sales of the iPod, one of the most successful devices in history. In june 2007 Apple introduced the iPhone, which immediately captured the imagination of the young generation. It became another runaway success. In may 2010 a symbolic event took place when Apple's market capitalization ($227 billion) passed Microsoft's ($226 billion).

James Gosling

James Gosling (Canada, 1955) studied computer science at the University of Calgary in Canada until 1977, and graduated in 1983 in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1984 Gosling joined Sun Microsystems. In 1994 he completed work on the Java programming environment and language, which was released the following year.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt (District of Columbia, 1955) studied at Princeton University until 1976 and graduated in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1982. He worked for Bell Labs, Zilog and Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) before joined SUN in 1983 where he managed the Java group. In 1997 he became CEO of Novell and in 2001 he was hired by venture capitalists John Doerr and Michael Moritz to become the CEO of Google. Since 2008 he became a strong advocate of greentech in his work for the government.

Peter Schultz

Peter Schultz (Ohio, 1956) graduated in biochemistry from CalTech in 1984. After one year of research at the MIT, he joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1985. He became a pioneer in combinatorial chemistry. Schultz and Stephen Fodor of the Affymax Research Institute, a pharmaceutical company founded by Zaffaroni in Palo Alto, started Affymetrix in Santa Clara in 1992 to produce "gene-chips", the biological equivalent of electronic chips, by printing a huge number of DNA molecules on a silicon wafer. The first DNA chip came out in 1994. In 1994 Zaffaroni and Schultz founded Symyx in Santa Clara (at the Affymetrix building) to apply Affymetrix's technique of combinatorial chemistry to the task of discovering new materials. While at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Schultz had developed a technique that mirrors what Nature does: create a large number of variations and then select the fittest ones. Symyx's process enabled the simultaneous testing of a vast number of chemical compounds in one experiment, hoping to reduce the amount of time needed to discover the material that is needed for an electronic or chemical application. Schultz moved to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1994 and to the Scripps Research Institute in 1999. Schultz also became director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation.

Jeff Hawkins

Jeff Hawkins (New York, 1957) studied electrical engineering at Cornell University until 1979. He worked first for Intel and then for GRiD Systems (1982). Meanwhile he studied biophysics at U.C. Berkeley (but he never graduated) and in particular developed a hand-written text recognition system. At GRiD he spearheaded efforts to develop a pen-based user interface that eventually resulted in the tablet computer GRiDPad (1989). In 1992 he founded Palm Computing that in 1996 introduced a hand-held pen-based computer called Palm Pilot. It was the first pen-based user interface to gain wide acceptance: in 1998 the Palm Pilot had almost 80% of the market for palm-sized computers, and in 1999 it would enjoy four consecutive quarters of triple-digit revenue growth. Palm had already been purchased by U.S. Robotics in 1995, which then merged with 3Com in june 1997. Hawkins took Palm's executives Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan with him and started Handspring, another maker of personal digital assistants. Still intrigued by the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence, in 2002 Hawkins founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park. In 2005 Hawkins, Dubinsky and Dileep George started Numenta in Redwood City to create pattern-recognition software, while the Institute moved to U.C. Berkeley and was renamed the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

Radoje Drmanac

Radoje Drmanac (Serbia, 1958) grew up in Serbia and graduated in molecular biology at Belgrade University in 1988. After postdoctoral research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Britain, in 1991 he was hired at Argonne National Labs and worked on the Human Genome Project while inventing "combinatorial sequencing by hybridization". In 1994 he co-founded Sunnyvale-based biotech start-up Hyseq, where he discovered 10,000 novel genes via his hybridization-based technique. In 2001 he started Callida Genomics in Sunnyvale, with funding from Affymetrix and Intel. In march 2006 he and serial entrepreneur Cliff Reid founded Complete Genomics in Mountain View.

Clifford Reid

Clifford Reid (Pennsylvania, 1959) studied physics at the MIT until 1979 and business administration at the Harvard Business School until 1983. He worked at Advanced Decision Systems until 1988. In april 1988 he joined Sunnyvale-based information-retrieval start-up Verity, where he worked with Dave Glazer as vicepresident of engineering. He quit from Verity in july 1993 to graduate in management science and engineering from Stanford University. In march 1995 he and Dave Glazer founded San Mateo-based Eloquent, which they sold in 2003. It automatically created computer-based seminars from live seminars. In 2000 Reid also founded Rebop Media that was acquired by Eloquent in 2001. In march 2006 he and Serbian-born biologist Radoje Drmanac founded Complete Genomics in Mountain View. In 2009 Complete Genomics announced a genomic test-kit for under $5,000. By the end of 2009 only about 100 human genomes had ever been sequenced. Complete Genomics planned to sequence 5,000 human genomes in 2010, 50,000 genomes in 2011 and 1 million genomes by 2014.

KR Sridhar

KR Sridhar (India, 1960?) studied mechanical engineering at the National Institute of Technology at Tiruchirappalli until 1982, and then moved to the USA to study nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he graduated in mechanical engineering in 1989. In 1990 he started working at the University of Arizona, where he became the director of the Space Technologies Laboratory (STL) besides teaching aerospace and mechanical engineering. In 1994 he was contracted by NASA to develop a device capable of turning water into oxygen for the Mars mission. In 2001 Sridhar founded Ion America (renamed Bloom Energy in 2006) in Sunnyvale to develop fuel-cell technology to generate environmentally-friendly electricity. Within a few years it had raised $400 million in venture capital money. Its fuel cells (eventually unveiled in february 2010) were based on beach sand. Each unit cost between $700,000 and $800,000.

Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier (New York, 1960) was raised in a humble family in New Mexico. He studied At New Mexico State University until 1980. Starting in 1980, he became a self-taught videogame developer. In 1983 he worked for Alan Kay's Atari Research Lab. In 1985 Lanier established VPL Research at his house in Palo Alto, the first company to sell Virtual Reality products, notably the "Data Glove" invented by Tom Zimmerman. VPL implemented virtual-reality applications in medicine and other fields. In the 1990s he became an outspoken digital guru. In 1997 Lanier co-founded the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. Lanier has composed chamber and orchestral music. He has also created art installations and published "You are not a gadget" in 2010.

Martin Eberhard

Martin Eberhard (California, 1960) grew up in California and Illinois. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1983. He found a job in San Jose, at Wyse Technology, designing ASCII terminals. In 1987 he joined the newly founded Network Computing Devices in Mountain View, soon run by Judy Estrin, to make cheap Unix terminals. Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning established NuvoMedia in Palo Alto, a company that in 1998 introduced the Rocket eBook, a paperback-sized handheld device to read digital books downloaded from online bookstores. After selling it in 2000, in 2003 Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla in Palo Alto to build electrical cars, and in 2006 they introduced the Tesla Roadster, the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells. In 2007 he left Tesla.

Linda Avey

Linda Avey (South Dakota, 1960) studied biology at Augustana College in South Dakota until 1983. She then became a sales executive working for Affymetrix and Applied Biosystems, In april 2006 she and Anne Wojcicki founded in Mountain View the biotech company 23andme. Its services analyzed parts of the human genome to derive useful medical information, and its kits were priced under $500 by 2010. The company obtained $23 million in funding from Genentech, Google and New Enterprise Associates. In 2009 Linda Avey quit to start an Alzheimer's Foundation

Reed Hastings

Reed Hastings (Massachusetts, 1960) grew up in the Boston area and studied mathematics at Bowdoin College until 1983. He volunteered in the Peace Corps in Swaziland from 1983 to 1985. He then studied computer science at Stanford University until 1988. He started working on software development tools at Adaptive Technology. In 1991 he quit to start his own company, Pure Software, selling tools for programmers. In 1997 Pure was acquired by Rational Software for $750 million. In august 1997 Reed Hastings founded Netflix in Scotts Valley (between San Jose and Santa Cruz) to rent videos (initially on DVD) via the Internet. The company completely changed the business of watching videos at home. In 2007 it also introduced streaming videos. Meanwhile, Hastings had become an activist and a philanthropist for school reform.

Victoria Hale

Victoria Hale (????, 1961) studied pharmacy at the University of Maryland until 1983 and graduated in pharmaceutical chemistry from U.C. San Francisco in 1990. She worked for the Food and Drug Administration from 1990 until 1994 when she joined Genentech where she became an executive. She co-founded Axiom Biomedical in 1999. In 2000 Hale and her husband Ahvie Herskowitz started the first non-profit pharmaceutical company, the Institute for OneWorld Health, off their San Francisco home, a project that became a collaboration with Jay Keasling's Amyris Biotechnologies. In 2002 she returned to U.C. San Francisco to teach biopharmaceutical sciences. In 2008 she founded Medicines360, a nonprofit pharmaceutical company devoted to on maternal and children's health.

Steve Perlman

Steve Perlman (Connecticut, 1961) studied liberal arts at Columbia University until 1983. After brief stints as a hardware engineer at Atari and Coleco, in 1984 he joined Apple, where he worked on the Macintosh's QuickTime. In 1990 Perlman was one of the Apple engineers to follow Marc Porat, Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld to General Magic. In 1994 Perlman founded Catapult Entertainment to manufacture modems for video game consoles that enabled them to add online multiplayer features. In july 1995 Perlman founded Artemis Research, later renamed WebTV, to build a set-top box based on custom hardware and software that would allow a television set attached to a telephone line to plug into an Internet service using a dial-up modem. The goal was to turn the World-wide Web into a home appliance. The WebTV set-top box was introduced in september 1996 by Sony and Philips. In april 1997 WebTV was acquired by Microsoft. In 1999 Perlman founded Rearden, an incubator of start-ups, notably Moxi Digital (2000) to network video, audio and data inside a home, later acquired by Paul Allen's Digeo in 2002, MOVA (2004) for motion capture and Ice Blink Studios for digital art, both targeting the entertainment industry, and OnLive (2007) for on-demand video-game service.

Chris Gronet

Chris Gronet (????, ????) studied chemistry at Stanford University in the early 1980s and then graduated in semiconductor processing from Stanford University in 1989. In 1988 he founded G-Squared Semiconductor that in 1991 was acquired by Applied Materials, a manufacturer of equipments for the semiconductor industry. After eleven years with Applied Materials, in 2002 he quit and became an angel investor. In may 2005 he founded solar-energy company Solyndra in Fremont (east bay). By 2009 Solyndra had $820 million in venture funding and more than a billion dollars in product orders. In march 2009 the Department of Energy helped Solyndra build a 500-megawatt factory for cylindrical solar cells at the cost of $733 million.

Mendel Rosenblum

Mendel Rosenblum (Virginia, 1962?) studied mathematics at the University of Virginia until 1984 and graduated in computer science from U.C. Berkeley in 1991. He immediately joined the Computer Science Lab at Stanford University. In 1994 John Hennessy, Mark Horowitz and Rosenblum started the FLASH (Flexible Architecture for Shared Memory) project for an advanced multiprocessor architecture. In 1996 Rosenblum started a project for a virtual-machine monitor, Disco. In 1998 Rosenblum was working on SimOS, a project to create a software simulator of hardware platforms. Such software would be able to run the operating systems written for those hardware platforms. Rosenblum, his wife Diane Green, two Stanford students (Scott Devine and Edouard Bugnion) and Berkeley's Unix guru Edward Wang founded VMware to pursue that mission and in may 1999 introduced VMware Workstation, which was not a workstation but a SimOS-like software environment (a "virtual machine") that allowed a Unix machine to run the Windows operating system (and therefore all of its applications). Eventually they would broaden the idea to allowing one physical computer to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. Vmware was sold to EMC in 2003. Mendel Rosenblum resigned in 2008 after his wife was fired.

Andy Rubin

Andy Rubin (New York, 1963?) studied computer science at Utica College until 1986 and then joined Carl Zeiss AG. In 1989 he joined Apple, where he met Perlman. He followed Perlman to General Magic and then to Perlman's own WebTV. In october 2002 Rubin, Matt Hershenson and Joe Britt founded Danger that released the mobile phone Hiptop, later renamed T-Mobile Sidekick. Danger was acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Meanwhile, Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White (another WebTV alumnus) had founded Android in Palo Alto to develop a Linux-based open-source operating system for mobile phones. In 2005 they were purchased by Google that started distributing for free Android in 2007.

Marc Tarpenning

Marc Tarpenning (California, 1964) grew up in Sacramento and studied computer science at U.C. Berkeley until 1985. He worked for Textron in Saudi Arabia until 1990. Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning established NuvoMedia in Palo Alto, a company that in 1998 introduced the Rocket eBook, a paperback-sized handheld device to read digital books downloaded from online bookstores. Tarpenning was in charge of engineering. After selling it in 2000, in 2003 Eberhard and Tarpenning founded Tesla in Palo Alto to build electrical cars, and in 2006 they introduced the Tesla Roadster, the first production automobile to use lithium-ion battery cells. Tarpenning was in charge of the electrical engineering group.

Jay Keasling

Jay Keasling (????, ????) studied chemistry at the University of Nebraska until 1986 and graduated in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1991. After a year at Stanford, in 1992 he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley. In 2003 Berkeley scientists including Keasling and Kinkead Reiling started Amyris Biotechnologies that raised over $120 million in venture capital in a few years. He helped Victoria Hale start the first non-profit pharmaceutical company, the Institute for OneWorld Health. In 2006 Keasling inaugurated the world's first Synthetic Biology department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2008 Keasling became the head of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville (near Berkeley), a research institute funded by the Department of Energy and involving the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Sandia National Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Davis and the Carnegie Institute.

Marc Benioff

Marc Benioff (California, 1964) studied business administration at the University of Southern California until 1986. Meanwhile in 1984 he worked at Apple as a programmer. In 1986 he joined Oracle, where he became its youngest vicepresident ever, running the marketing department. In february 1999 Benioff founded Saleforce.com to move business applications to the Internet, pioneering "cloud" computing. In 2000 he also established the Salesforce Foundation to distribute 1% of the company's profits to the community. In 2003 he also worked for the government.

Victor Markowitz

Victor Markowitz (Israel, ????) studied computer science at Technion in Israel until 1987. Moving to the USA, he joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he worked on databases and eventually developed a data management system for genome databases. That constituted the basis for the bioinformatics company that he and five of his team members founded in Berkeley in 1997, Gene Logic, to market a database management system for gene expression data to biotech companies. In 2004 he returned to Lawrence Berkeley Labs to head a new Biological Data Management and Technology Center (BDMTC). In 2010 he was appointed CIO of the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek.

Samir Arora

Samir Arora (India, 1965) grew up in India where he trained and performed from 1975 to 1983 in theater, and also studied electronic engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science. He then studied business at INSEAD in France and at Harvard University. He joined Apple in 1983 and moved to Cupertino in 1986 where he became a manager involved in the development of Hypercard. In 1992 Arora was put in charge of Apple's spin-off Rae Technology. In 1995 Arora co-founded NetObjects in Redwood City, a start-up that marketed a webpage design tool. In 1997 Arora joined the venture-capital firm Information Capital, based in Woodside. In 2001 IBM (that had acquired most of the company in 1997) sold NetObjects. Expanding the concept of the female-oriented portal iVillage, Arora set up Glam Media in 2003 in Brisbane, near South San Francisco, staffing it with the old NetObjects team. They initially focused on the fashion/lifestyle website Glam.com targeting the female audience.

Tim Westergren

Tim Westergren (Minnesota, 1965), an alumnus of Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), devised a search engine for music called Savage Beast and launched the Music Genome Project with Will Glaser to archive songs based on their musical genes: the search engine simply looked for songs whose genome was similar to a given song. In january 2000 that project website evolved into Pandora, an Internet-based streaming radio simulator that "broadcast" music based on the listener's preference: given a song, Pandora produced a customized radio program of similar songs.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales (Alabama, 1966) grew up in Alabama, studied and taught finance at University of Alabama and at Indiana University, and in 1994 moved to Chicago to work in the financial industry. In 1996 he co-founded Bomis, a website of pornographic content for the male audience. At the same time he was preaching the vision of a free encyclopedia and, using Bomis as his venture capitalist, he had hired Ohio State University's philosopher Larry Sanger as the editor-in-chief of this Nupedia, which debuted in march 2000. In january 2001 Sanger decided to add a "wiki" feature to let contributors enter their texts. This method proved a lot more efficient than the traditional process of peer review, and therefore "Wikipedia" (as Sanger named it) was already surpassing Nupedia in popularity when Bomis decided to pull the plug. Wales realized that Wikipedia was the way to go, abolished Nupedia and opened Wikipedia to everybody: formally established in 2003 as a non-profit foundation based in San Francisco, Wikipedia became a free multilingual encyclopedia edited collaboratively by the Internet community. In 2004 Wales and Angela Beesley founded Wikia, a service to host wikis. Wales resigned in 2009.

David Filo

David Filo (Wisconsin, 1966) grew up in Louisiana and studied computer science at Stanford University. While enrolled in graduate studies at Stanford, he met Jerry Yang and developed "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web". When Stanford could not handle the traffic anymore, they hired Motorola's veteran Tim Koogle to run the business, they obtained funding from Sequoia Capital, and started the Yahoo website. Filo was the main brain behind Yahoo's technology that generates advertising revenues. In 2005 he donated $30 million to Tulane University.

Eric Brewer

Eric Brewer (????, 1967) studied at U.C. Berkeley before graduating in electrical engineering and computer science from the MIT in 1994. He then returned to U.C. Berkeley, which had obtained DARPA funding for a project called Network of Workstations (NOW), which envisioned a supercomputer built out of networked personal computers and workstations (a forefather of cluster computing). In 1996 Brewer and his graduate student Paul Gauthier co-founded Inktomi Corporation to commercialize the results of that research. HotBot, a collaboration with Wired Magazine launched in may 1996, was based on Inktomi's technology and quickly overtook AltaVista as the number-one search engine. In 1997 Inktomi moved to Foster City. The company also developed the leading caching technology on the Internet. Microsoft in 1997 and America OnLine in 1998 licensed Inktomi's technology, while both Yahoo and @Home adopted Inktomi's search engine in 1998. Brewer also worked for the government to create public portals, and founded the Federal Search Foundation.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel (Germany, 1967) was raised in the Bay Area (Foster City) and studied philosophy at Stanford University until 1992. While at Stanford, in 1987 he founded the conservative student magazine Stanford Review and became a successful stock trader. Thiel funded Confinity (originally Fieldlink) in december 1998 in Palo Alto with two editors of the Stanford Review, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company was the brainchild of Max Levchin, a Ukrainian Jew from Chicago who brought with him a group of University of Illinois alumni, including Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Their goal was to develop a system for Palm Pilot users to send ("beam") money to other Palm Pilot users, i.e. to make payments without using cash, cheques or credit cards. The first entities to be impressed by Confinity were European: Nokia and Deutsche Bank used Confinity software to "beam" from a Palm Pilot their $3 million investment in the company to Thiel. In 2000 Confinity and their competitor X.com merged to form PayPal, and Confinity's original concept evolved into a web-based service to send money over the Internet to an e-mail address, therefore bypassing banks and even borders. PayPal's success was immediate, beating all the competitors that had preceded it in trying to help consumers sell and buy over the Internet. In october 2001 PayPal already boasted 12 million registered users. Its IPO in early 2002 netted $1.2 billion dollars. PayPal was sold to eBay in july 2002 for $1.5 billion. Then Thiel started his own venture-capital fund, Clarium Capital. In 2006 Thiel donated money to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and to the Methuselah Foundation of gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. In 2008 Thiel donated money to the Patri Friedman's libertarian Seasteading Institute whose mission is to create communities in the middle of the oceans, outside the jurisdiction of governments.

Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar (France, 1967) was the only son of a French-Iranian family that immigrated to Washington when he was six. An Apple II hacker in his teen years, Omidyar enrolled in Tufts University (near Boston) to study computer science, but moved to California in 1988 U.C. Berkeley to complete his undergraduate degree in Computer Science while working at Innovative Data Design writing programs for the Mac. He later found a job at Claris, an Apple-funded spin-off, but lost his job in 1991. He then founded his own company, Ink Development, which later changed name to eShop, a web-based retailer. In 1994 he split from his partners and joined General Magic, a start-up founded by Apple's legendary engineers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld to create a hand-held computer and communication device. In his spare time he worked on his own website, Echo Bay, abbreviated as eBay. Omidyar held pseudo-libertarian beliefs. In particular, he detested the big corporations that owned commerce in the capitalist world, and instead trusted that people are fundamentally cooperative social animals. Therefore in september 1995 he set out to create a system that would enable individuals to sell and buy without contributing to the wealth of big business, thus indirectly creating an alternative community. He implemented a software platform for on-line auctions and called it AuctionWeb, hosted on his website www.ebay.com. The idea caught fire and Omidyar started charging a fee for each successful sale to pay for the increased traffic. His revenues doubled almost every month. In 1996 Microsoft bought eShop and Omidyar, who still owned part of it, became a millionaire. In june he quit General Magic to concentrate on his hobby, and in august he hired Jeff Skoll, a graduate from Stanford's business school, to run its skyrocketing business. In june 1997 Benchmark Capital invested several million dollars in eBay, as it was renamed in september. In march 1998 Meg Whitman, a general-purpose executive of "corporate America", was hired to run the company, and in september eBay's IPO turned Omidyar into a billionaire (and, of course, the richest Iranian). In 2004 he founded the philanthropic non-profit organization Omidyar Network, based in Redwood City, to support alternative forms of free-market capitalism.

Sabeer Bhatia

Sabeer Bhatia (India, 1968) studied at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani. He immigrated to California in order to study electrical engineering at CalTech in 1988 and then at Stanford University in 1989. He never graduated and instead joined Apple. In july 1996 Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail, which liberated the Internet user from the slavery of the Internet Service Provider. Microsoft bought Hotmail in december 1997 (for about $400 million). He later founded the travel portal Arzoo and BlogEverywhere, In november 2007 he launched Live Documents, which allows users to create documents both offline and online. In january, 2008 Sabeer started SabSeBolo.com, a free web-based teleconferencing service. He envisioned the creation of an entire city in India, Nanocity, to replicate the model of Silicon Valley.

Jerry Yang

Jerry Yang (Taiwan, 1968) grew up in San Jose in a family of Chinese immigrants and studied electrical engineering at Stanford University until 1990, continuing to work there towards his graduation in electrical engineering. In 1994 he and David Filo created a catalog of websites, "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web", for use within Stanford University. They eventually set out to catalog the entire Web. In january 1995 they launched Yahoo! (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle!). Yahoo! went public in april 1996: in the first hour of trading its value reached $1 billion. Not bad for a company that so far had revenues of $1.4 million and had lost $643,000. In 1998 it was the second-most visited website on the Web after AOL. In january 1999 Yahoo purchased GeoCities for $3.57 billion. In 2004 Yahoo became a Chinese police informant when it notified the government of mainland China of Chinese pro-democracy advocates. In 2007 Yang donated $75 million to Stanford University to fund the Y2E2 building ("Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building"). Yang lost most of his power at Yahoo in 2009.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk (South Africa, 1971) grew up in South Africa but in 1989 immigrated to Canada, where he worked in a farm. In 1992 he moved to the USA and he studied physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1995 he enrolled at Stanford University but soon dropped out to start Zip2, a web-based service for news media. In 1999 he sold Zip2 for about $300M to Compaq that merged it with Alta Vista. In march 1999 Mush founded X.com in Palo Alto to offer online banking services including a way to email money. In 2000 X.com merged with Peter Thiel's Paypal bringing with him Sanjay Bhargava, Roelof Botha (who became the CFO), and Jeremy Stoppelman (vicepresident of engineering). See Peter Thiel for the rest of the story. In 2002 Musk founded Space Explorations Technology or SpaceX to develop space transportation. In 2004 he also invested in Tesla Motors (of which he became the CEO in 2008) and in 2006 he funded his cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive when they started the solar-energy start-up SolarCity.

Drew Endy

Drew Endy (Pennsylvania, 1970) studied civil engineering at Lehigh in Pennsylvania until 1994 and graduated in biochemical engineering from Dartmouth College in 1998. Then he worked in biotech labs at the University of Texas (january 1998) and in Berkeley with Sydney Brenner at the Molecular Sciences Institute (since october 1998). The rare engineer trained to be a biologist, in january 2002 Endy joined the MIT in Boston where he became a pioneer in synthetic biology. In september 2008 he moved to Stanford. At Stanford University he worked on creating a catalog of "biobricks" that synthetic biologists could use to create living organisms. His model clearly mirrored the way the personal-computer industry got started, with hobbyists ordering kits from catalogs advertised in magazines and then assembling the computer in their garage.

Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen (Iowa, 1971) grew up in Wisconsin and studied at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois. Andreessen and Eric Bina developed a graphical browser for the World-wide Web, Mosaic, in 1993. Originally developed for UNIX, it was soon ported to Windows, turning any personal computer into a client for the World-wide Web. Andreessen found a job in Silicon Valley at Enterprise Integration Technologies. There he met Silicon Graphics' founder Jim Clark who encouraged him to commercialize Mosaic. In april 1994 the duo opened Mosaic Communications Corporation, later renamed Netscape Communications, in Mountain View. In 1995 about 90% of World-wide Web users were browsing with Netscape's Navigator. Netscape went public in august 1995 even before earning money. By the end of its first trading day, the company was worth $2.7 billion and Clark had become overnight half a billionaire. Andreessen was just 24 years old. In 1999 America Online bought Netscape. Andreessen became a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He founded Loudcloud, later renamed Opsware and sold to EDS. In 2005 Gina Bianchini and Andreessen launched Ning, a meta social-networking software that allowed people to create and customize their own social networks. Ning raised about $120 million in funding in the first six years. In 2009 Andreessen and Ben Horowitz formed the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Larry Page

Larry Page (Michigan, 1973), the son of computer science professors, studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan before enrolling to study computer science at Stanford University (he never graduated). In march 1995 he met Sergey Brin. In august 1996 a prototype of their search engine was running on a Linux server inside the Stanford network. In 1998 Page and Brin launched their search engine, Google. Google ranked webpages according to how "popular" they were on the Web (i.e. how many webpages linked to them). Google went against the trend of providing ever more sophisticated graphical user interfaces: the Google user interface was just text (and very little text). In 1999 Google had eight employees. Their first "angel" investor (before the company even existed) was Andy Bechtolsheim of SUN. Then (in june 1999) they obtained $25 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner-Perkins. In 2000 Yahoo dumped Inktomi and adopted Google's search engine. In june 2000 Google had achieved the feat of indexing one billion pages. In january 2001 Google hired Wayne Rosing, a Silicon Valley veteran who had overseen the Lisa at Apple and Java at SUN. In february Google completed its first acquisition (an archive of the old Usenet, dating back to 1995) to create an extra application (Google Groups). Venture capitalists John Doerr of Kleiner-Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital became more involved in steering the business of the company, which eventually led to hiring another Silicon Valley veteran, Eric Schmidt (Zilog, Xerox PARC, SUN), as chairman. In 2003 Google had 10,000 servers working nonstop to index the Web (14 times more servers than employees). In 2002 Google acquired Blogger and in 2004 they acquired Keyhole, the source for their application Google Earth. More than a search engine, Google was expanding in all directions, becoming a global knowledge provider. In early 2004 Google handled about 85% of all search requests on the Web. Google's IPO in august 2004 turned Google's founders into billionaires. In 2004 an ever more ambitious Google launched a project to digitize all the books ever printed. In 2004 Google hired German-born natural-language expert Franz-Josef Och, whose machine-translation system at the University of Southern California had been selected by DARPA; and in 2005 Google introduced its own automatic-translation system to translate webpages written in foreign languages. In october 2004 Google acquired Danish-born Australian-based Berkeley alumnus Lars Rasmussen's company Where2 and its mapping software; and in 2005 Google introduced Google Maps. In october 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. By 2006 Google had indexed more than eight billion pages, coming from the 100 million websites registered on the Web. In 2007 Google started distributing for free Android, a Linux-based open-source operating system for mobile phones that had originally been developed by a Palo Alto stealth start-up named Android and founded by Andy Rubin and others. In february 2007 Google targeted Microsoft's core business when it disclosed a humbler version of cloud computing, Google Docs. In 2007 Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, the New York-based company that dominated "display advertising". Google's strategy became even more aggressive in 2010 when it launched into an acquisition spree. Notably, it purchased BumpTop, the three-dimensional GUI developed since 2006 by University of Toronto's student Anand Agarawala, and Plink, a visual search engine developed by two Oxford University's students, Mark Cummins and James Philbin. In 2007 Google's founders established Google.org, the non-profit arm of Google, to fund greentech start-ups. In 2008 they invested in eSolar, a Pasadena-based manufacturer of solar thermal plants, and in AltaRock Energy, a Sausalito-based firm tapping geothermal energy.

Gina Bianchini

Gina Bianchini (California, 1972) grew up in Cupertino (the rare native of Silicon Valley), studied business at Stanford University until 2000, and worked for CKS Group and Goldman Sachs. In 2005 Bianchini and Netscape's founder Marc Andreessen launched Ning, a meta social-networking software: it allowed people to create and customize their own social networks. Ning raised about $120 million in funding in the first six years. In 2010 she quit Ning and joined the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm, founded by Marc Andreessen himself.

Anne Wojcicki

Anne Wojcicki (California, 1973) grew up in Palo Alto, where her father was the head of Stanford University's Department of Physics, and studied biology at Yale University until 1996. Google was started in the garage of her sister's home. Anne Wojcicki eventually married one of the two founders, Sergey Brin. In april 2006 she and Linda Avey founded in Mountain View the biotech company 23andme. Its services analyzed parts of the human genome to derive useful medical information, and its kits were priced under $500 by 2010. The company obtained $23 million in funding from Genentech, Google and New Enterprise Associates. In 2009 Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin donated $500,000 to the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, chaired by Wojcicki's mother.

Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin (Russia, 1973), the son of mathematicians, grew up in the USA after his Jewish parents immigrated from Russia. He studied mathematics at the University of Maryland, and in 1993 went to study computer science at Stanford University (he never graduated). See Larry Page for the rest of the story.

Max Levchin

Max Levchin (Ukraine, 1975), a Ukrainian Jew, grew up in the Soviet Union but immigrated to Chicago in 1991. He studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1997, where he had become a specialist in cryptography. He had already founded start-ups when he moved to the Bay Area and in 1998 he founded Fieldlink/ Confinity, bringing with him a group of University of Illinois alumni, including Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Peter Thiel then invested in Confinity and see his bio for the rest of the story. In 2004 Levchin founded Slide.

Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey (Missouri, 1976) dropped out of New York University to move to the Bay Area. In 2006 Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams of Blogger fame (acquired by Google) created the social-networking service Twitter, where people could post short live updates of what was going on in their life. It soon became popular for current events the way CNN had become popular during the first Gulf War. In december 2008 Dorsey founded Square, a service to accept credit-card payments on iPhone and Android devices.

Chad Hurley

Chad Hurley (Pennsylvania, 1976) studied fine art at Indiana University of Pennsylvania until 1999. He dropped out of college to join Paypal in 1999 as the art designer. In 2005 Hurley and Steve Chen founded YouTube. See Steve Chen for the rest of the story.

Christopher Voigt

Christopher Voigt (????, 1976?) studied chemical engineering at the University of Michigan until 1998 and graduated in biochemistry and molecular biophysics from CalTech in 2002. After a year at U.C. Berkeley he moved to U.C. San Francisco where in 2003 he founded a lab to program cells like robots to perform complex tasks.

Steve Chen

Steve Chen (Taiwan, 1978) grew up in Illinois where his Taiwanese parents relocated during his childhood. He dropped out of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to join PayPal as a software engineer. In november 2005, funded by Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital (another PayPal alumnus), Chen and another PayPal employee, art designer Chad Hurley (with German-born Stanford student Jawed Karim working part-time), launched YouTube, whose concept sounded innocent enough: just a way for ordinary people with an ordinary digital videocamera to upload their videos to the Web. They set up offices in San Mateo. By july 2006 more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and more than 100 million videos were viewed by users worldwide every day. In october Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Jawed Karim

Jawed Karim (Germany, 1979), grew up in Germany, the son of a Bangladeshi immigrant and a biochemist, and relocated to Minnesota with his parents in 1992. He studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but dropped out to join PayPal in 2000. He quit PayPal to return to school but in 2005 he helped Chad Hurley and Steve Chen start YouTube. See Steve Chen for the rest of the story. In 2009 Jawed, now a graduate student at Stanford, launched the venture-capital firm Youniversity Ventures to help students start companies.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg (New York, 1984) grew up in a town near New York. While studying at Harvard University in february 2004 Zuckerberg launched the social-networking service Facebook. It soon spread from college to college. Weeks later Zuckerberg and friends relocated to Silicon Valley and obtained funding from Peter Thiel of PayPal. In 2005 Facebook raised $12.7 million from Accel Partners, and in 2006 it raised an additional $27.5 million from Greylock Partners and others. Zuckerberg was 22. A study predicted that Facebook would reach 48 million users by 2010. In april 2007 it had 20 million registered users. It had signed up 100 million users by august 2008, on its way to becoming the second website by traffic after Google. It began the year 2009 with 150 million users and was growing by about one million users a day. In 2010 it was approaching half a billion registered users. Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaires in the world. In 2010 he was estimated to be worth $4 billion.