12 Tech Greats: Where Are They Now?
What happened to Rod Canion, Andy Grove, and their peers who shaped modern technology? Catch up on some original tech visionaries.
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Sadly, many of the early pioneers of the computer industry, from Admiral Grace Hopper to Digital Equipment Corp.'s Ken Olsen, are no longer with us. Even some second-generation pioneers, such as Apple's Steve Jobs and the reengineering guru Michael Hammer, have passed in the prime of life.
But what about the inventors and entrepreneurs who built on the work done by the first generation? They are the leaders who helped drive the PC industry, who packed computers into smartphones, and who innovated not just in how computers were built and operated, but also in how they changed the way modern business operates. Their technologies have changed our lives.
We plucked a handful of names from the technology history books to revisit. The faces that follow certainly don't comprise a definitive list of all-time great living tech leaders; that's a project for another day. Rather, these are examples drawn from a cast of thousands: engineers who created the next great thing, thinkers who sought a better way of utilizing IT, entrepreneurs who risked it all -- including their life savings and credit ratings -- to bring a startup to commercial success, and businesspeople who took charge of a tech company, driven by an inner confidence that better days were ahead.
In many cases, these second-generation tech pioneers have long outlived the companies for which they are known. And there's no shame in that; it's how technology progresses and business works. The technologies offered by those companies not only served a purpose back in the 1980s, 1990s, or later, but they also set a foundation for the capabilities that we enjoy today.
Take the example of the PC, which provided the arena where many of these folks operated. The traditional PC may be heading for the boneyard, but the concepts it introduced in terms of power and miniaturization -- an information device that's under the control of an average worker, and eventually, mobility -- are the bricks with which today's business is built.
You'll notice that this list is male-dominated. Frankly, so was the technology sector in the 1980s and 1990s. However, women are making great strides today as entrepreneurs in startups and through the corporate ranks to CEO of giant tech companies. This list will look very different 10 or 15 years from now.
Since this list is far from comprehensive, we'd love to know who we missed -- and what they are doing today. So share a comment or two and update us on a tech great you admire.
Under the leadership of McNealy and Bill Joy, Sun started out as one of several 1980s-era companies that delivered powerful networked workstations and servers to the engineering community. Eventually, Sun became a major player in the more general-purpose server business. It was a pioneer in the open systems world with Java, but critics said its allegiance to its own hardware kept it from being the software company that it could have become, particularly with its Solaris operating system.
With his toothy grin and his role as an industry thought leader, McNealy, now 59, was the face of the company, which saw success fade in the 2007-2008 timeframe. In 2010, Oracle purchased Sun for $7.4 billion.
Since leaving Sun, McNealy (@scottmcnealy) went on to found the Twitter products company Wayin and then Curriki, an organization that provides free educational resources to those in need around the world. He describes himself as a capitalist, but others have referred to him as a libertarian.
McNealy was known around Silicon Valley as an avid hockey player and golfer. In June, he served as a caddy in the US Open golf tournament for his son, Maverick, who just finished his freshman year at Stanford University.
Nicknamed "Woz," Wozniak was the other whiz kid working with Steve Jobs in the circa-1976 early days of Apple. Now 63, he is credited as the inventor of the Apple I, which may not have been the first personal computer, but it certainly helped create a new way of working with information.
His Apple II definitely had a market impact, particularly in the home market and in schools. Look around your IT group, and consider how many of your co-workers probably were introduced to technology through a single Apple II in the back of an elementary school classroom. Wozniak says on his homepage that he created a version of BASIC from scratch for the Apple I and II.
An engineer who left Hewlett-Packard to join Jobs in founding Apple, Wozniak in recent years has been sought after by the news media and Hollywood for comments on the late Jobs and on technology -- gadgets in particular.
Wozniak (@stevewoz) has been outspoken about human rights. After leaving Apple in 1987, he joined Mitch Kapor in launching the Electronic Freedom Foundation, and he has shown support for Edward Snowden and for Wikipedia.
This year, the IEEE presented Wozniak with the Hoover Medal, in recognition of his professional accomplishments as an engineer as well as his personal endeavors. In 1985, he and Jobs were among the first recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, now known as the Grace Hopper Murray Award.
Wozniak published his autobiography, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007).
From 2002 to 2006, Wozniak ran Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), a startup that developed wireless GPS technology. In 2008, he joined the storage company Fusion-io as its chief scientist. That company was acquired by SanDisk in June.
Those in the world of entrepreneurs call it bootstrapping: You take your life savings, pour it into your startup venture, and pay the company's bills with whatever you earn. Venture capitalists didn't back Sandra Kurtzig's venture, ASK Computer Systems, in 1974 after she left her job selling time-sharing for General Electric.
Kurtzig, now 66, said that she left GE -- time-sharing was big business then -- to spend more time with her family. But she wanted to stay busy with a part-time venture, and that turned into ASK.
Kurtzig is credited with being the first woman to take a Silicon Valley company public. Eventually, she led ASK Group to become one of the world's largest software companies. The product that got the company off the ground was MANMAN, a manufacturing automation and inventory package that initially found a home on the popular Hewlett-Packard HP3000 series of minicomputers.
Kurtzig left day-to-day operations at ASK in the mid-1980s, keeping her chairman title, but later returned when the company ran into difficulties. She said that she brought back an entrepreneurial spirit, turned the focus more toward database management, and oversaw a move to new platforms. She retired in 1993, and ASK was eventually purchased by Computer Associates.
Over the years, Kurtzig has been a frequent speaker at software industry events, and she has served as a guest expert on television news programs. Her autobiography is titled CEO: Building a $400 Million Company from the Ground Up (Harvard Business Review Press, 1994).
Kurtzig (@SandyKurtzig) got back into the startup game in 2010, when she founded the cloud ERP company Kenandy, named after her sons. Just more than a year ago, Kurtzig, who dipped into her life savings when VCs didn't fund ASK, closed a $33 million Series B funding for Kenandy. InformationWeek welcomed Kurtzig as a speaker at the InformationWeek Conference in April 2014.
Kurtzig's bio page on Kenandy's website reads, "Now, as Chairman and CEO of Kenandy, she is helping to create and drive the new industry paradigm of enterprise management on the cloud, supporting a growing, global community of companies that design, manufacture and distribute products."
She's back in the same business, but in a very different environment.
Having been acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002, Compaq sits virtually in the land of forgotten toys, given how fast the technology sector has moved in 12 years.
Once a giant in the PC industry, Compaq today is relegated to a line of HP home computers. But in 1982, Compaq burst into the computer picture. Weighing in at 28 pounds, its clunky Compaq Portable was guaranteed to strengthen, if not lengthen, your arm on a business trip. It featured a single 5.25-inch floppy disk that was used alternately to load applications and copy data after first loading the operating system.
The operating system was the key. Compaq's computer was promoted as the first PC to be fully compatible with the IBM PC. Dozens of other manufacturers followed in its path, and IBM PC became not just an IBM brand but a generic name.
Rod Canion, now 69, was a manager with Texas Instruments when he and co-workers Jim Harris and Bill Murto set out to try something new. Reports were that each invested $1,000 to form Compaq, though VC Ben Rosen was brought in an equity investment.
The Portable was followed by a full range of Compaq products, from notebooks to enterprise servers. During the 1990s, Compaq was a leader in PC market share in multiple market segments. However, as the market dynamics changed -- particularly with the growth of Dell and its famed high-efficiency production system -- Compaq's dominance diminished.
It acquired the minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corp. -- itself a high flyer just a decade earlier -- in 1998 but then was acquired by HP in 2002. Canion led Compaq as CEO during the early glory years of the 1980s, helping the firm to the $1 billion mark faster than any prior company. However, he was removed as CEO in 1991.
Since leaving Compaq, Canion served as CEO of the network-attached storage company Tricord Systems and founded the infrastructure company Insource Technology Group. He serves as a board member for a number of corporations and nonprofits, including the Houston Technology Center and its educational research arm, Questia Media.
When you sit down with the bean counters to hash out your 2015 budget this fall and the spreadsheets start flying around the table, thank -- or blame -- Dan Bricklin.
Before Excel was the standard for spreadsheets, there was Lotus 1-2-3 -- and before Lotus, there was VisiCalc, which took accountants' ledger sheets and made them digital. Bricklin and Bob Frankston founded Software Arts in 1979. A bit of trivia: Bricklin's original working name for VisiCalc was "Calcu-ledger."
"The idea for the electronic spreadsheet came to me while I was a student at the Harvard Business School, working on my MBA degree, in the spring of 1978. Sitting in Aldrich Hall, room 108, I would daydream: Imagine if my calculator had a ball in its back, like a mouse... (I had seen a mouse previously, I think in a demonstration at a conference by Doug Engelbart, and maybe the Alto). And... imagine if I had a heads-up display, like in a fighter plane, where I could see the virtual image hanging in the air in front of me. I could just move my mouse/keyboard calculator around on the table, punch in a few numbers, circle them to get a sum, do some calculations, and answer 10% will be fine! (10% was always the answer in those days when we couldn't do very complicated calculations...)," Bricklin recalls on his web page.
VisiCalc made its mark running on the Apple II. However, Lotus offered 1-2-3 on the IBM PC platform and picked up the market share that came with it. Bricklin and Frankston hadn't patented VisiCalc, for a variety of reasons. In the end, 1-2-3 took off, at least until Excel -- as part of Microsoft Office -- grew even bigger. VisiCalc, the pioneer, was left in the dust.
Bricklin, now 62, now serves as president of Software Garden, a developer of phone apps and web software. He also is chief technology officer of Alpha Software Corp., which offers the Alpha Anywhere application development platform. In addition, Bricklin (@DanB) is very active as an adviser/mentor in the software development and startup community, particularly in the Boston area. He's a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and has supported the One Laptop per Child program.
Donna Dubinsky was co-founder of two "past-tense" companies -- Palm and Handspring -- in the 1990s. Both firms made PalmOS-based personal digital assistants (PDAs), which played a relatively short but critical role in helping technology get where it is today. The successor product lines of both companies live on today under different corporate labels.
During the years when cellphones were still establishing themselves -- "Bag Phones" were still quite popular circa 1994 -- the PDA showed how a pocket-sized device could do an incredible number of tasks that had previously required a full-blown computer or stacks of paper. Contacts, calendar, note taking, and eventually email all fit into a handheld device.
If that sounds like a smartphone, sans the phone and browser, you're right. PDAs -- and you can still find some surviving ones for cheap on the web -- served as a proof of concept, showing that users wanted all that information in their pocket. Bring that capability to a cellphone, add music, a camera, and a web browser, and you get today's smartphones.
Dubinsky, now 59, started her career with Apple. She moved into Apple's Claris software group and then on to Palm, where she and Jeff Hawkins led the company. She and Hawkins then founded Handspring.
Today, Dubinsky and Hawkins are at the machine intelligence company Numenta, where Dubinsky is CEO. Numenta, which works on applications that help companies act on machine-generated data, notes: "Its biologically inspired machine learning technology is based on a theory of the neocortex first described in co-founder Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. This technology is ideal for large-scale analysis of continuously streaming datasets and excels at modeling and predicting patterns in data. Its first commercial product, called Grok, offers a breakthrough solution for anomaly detection for IT Analytics."
Dubinsky (@ddubinsky), a graduate of Yale University, earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School. She also serves on the board of the Peninsula Open Space Trust, the Computer History Museum, and Yale.
You might have heard of Jaron Lanier for several different reasons. First, if he didn't coin the term "virtual reality," he certainly made it popular back in the 1980s. You might also know him as a thought leader and author on technology and society. Or you might also know him as a composer of classical-style music.
He founded VPL Research, which he positioned as the first company to sell virtual reality products. He also developed some of the first multi-person virtual worlds using head-mounted displays and avatars. VPL also did pioneering work in VR apps for surgical simulation and virtual sets for television production.
Lanier has led four startups that eventually became parts of Oracle, Adobe, Google, and Pfizer. For four years, he was chief scientist at Advanced Network and Services, working on Internet2 and the National Tele-immersion Initiative. More recently, he has been working with Microsoft as an interdisciplinary scientist at Microsoft Research.
Today, Lanier (@RealJaronLanier) is a popular speaker and author, sharing his thoughts -- including what he calls a "humanistic approach to technology" -- on subjects such as the role of technology in our world. He is author of Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2013), in which he takes on the Internet giants. This month, he discussed Facebook's emotions experiment in a blog for the New York Times.
His 2014 public appearances range from performing arts events to conferences on neurosurgery and digital cities. If you don't encounter Jaron Lanier's work as a writer or musician, you might find that he is behind the scenes on your gaming experience, medical care, or vehicle design.
At first glance, you might conclude that Paul Allen hit the tech world jackpot. As a young man, he became a billionaire (along with Bill Gates) seemingly overnight. Having established his fortune -- Forbes ranks him as the 59th richest man in the world, worth $16.2 billion -- he has spent the 31 years since he left Microsoft as an investor, philanthropist, jetsetter, amateur musician, and sports team owner.
In February, Allen (@PaulGAllen) was again in the world spotlight, hoisting the Super Bowl trophy after his Seattle Seahawks stomped the Denver Broncos.
Allen, now 61, has also faced plenty of challenges. He has fought two bouts with cancer, the first one playing a role in his decision to leave Microsoft in 1983.
Where is Paul Allen today? Pretty much everywhere.
His investments include the space venture Stratolaunch, the venture capital firm Vulcan Capital -- which recently invested in the online voting company Scytl and the auto buying company TrueCar.com -- and Vulcan Technologies, a think tank that has spawned several startups.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation works with Vulcan in supporting the arts and social initiatives in the Pacific Northwest and nongovernment organizations around the world, such as Elephants Without Borders. He also plays guitar in a band, and his production company, Vulcan Productions, has released about a dozen movies.
In addition to being the primary owner of the NFL champion Seahawks, Allen owns the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association.
When Allen left Microsoft, he spread his wealth where it was needed, donating $1.5 billion for medical research. He also made some smart investments: Forbes noted that Allen paid $194 million for the Seahawks in 1997 and an additional $130 million for a new stadium. The franchise is now worth at least $1 billion.
Like those who invented revolutionary concepts before him -- folks like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell -- the man credited with inventing the Web is still working with his masterpiece 25 years later.
Berners-Lee was working at CERN in Switzerland when he sought a way to address the problem of lost information at the accelerator facility. In his original paper in 1989, he wrote, "This proposal concerns the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."
A year later, he developed his first Web client and server and further specified Web elements such as URLs, HTTP, and HTML. By the mid-1990s, people like Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark were building on Berners-Lee's work, bringing out the Mosaic browser, and the Web was off to the races. By the end of the decade, the precipitous Web boom was ready for a bust, which in fact happened not long after that.
But the Web never really stopped growing, and Berners-Lee has stayed in the middle of it all, as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton and with the W3C and World Wide Web Foundation. The W3C develops interoperability standards for the Web, while the intent of World Wide Web Foundation is, in Berners-Lee's words, "to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity." In the latter position, Berners-Lee is an advocate for open government data.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004. Last year he, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin, and Andreesen were awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."
He might not get credit for it, but John Warnock helped to introduce the quiet office environment.
Officially, he co-founded Adobe with Chuck Geschke in 1982. Warnock had developed some ideas for new printer software while working at the graphics company Evans & Sutherland. He and Geschke refined those concepts as the Interpress printer protocol at Xerox PARC. When Xerox chose not to pursue their idea further, the pair founded Adobe and built the PostScript language, which in 1985 formed the basis for Apple's first desktop publishing system. The combination of PostScript and laser printers simply changed the way we print.
Prior to PostScript and lasers, serial and parallel printers clattered away in the office, with typewriter-style keys banging out one character at a time or pin-style dot matrix output shaping each line of characters dot by dot. With the arrival of laser printers, the loudest noise came from paper shuffling through the feeder.
As it grew, Adobe took on new output and design tasks, leading to today's PDF format, Illustrator, Flash, and Photoshop. Adobe has since expanded its product suite through both internal development and acquisition.
Warnock, now 73, retired as Adobe CEO in 2000 but continues to serve as chairman. He has also served on the boards of a variety of technology and publishing companies, including Salon Media Group, and is a trustee of the Sundance Institute. He and his wife have endowed chairs in areas such as computer science, the arts, mathematics, and medical research at the University of Utah and Stanford University.
Philippe Kahn rose to industry fame in the 1980s as CEO of Borland, which offered a range of development tools for an exploding PC industry with thousands of applications that could do everything a business or household could imagine. With no venture backing, he took the company from startup to $500 million in revenue.
But Kahn also gets credit for inventing a device that has revolutionized the way we interact with family, friends, and the world around us: the camera phone. He even demonstrated it while his wife was in labor with their daughter in 1997. Kahn had been working on what he calls an "instant visual communicator," connecting his digital camera with his cellphone and a laptop running software he had developed. When his daughter was born, he sent out baby pics to friends and family.
After leaving Borland in 1994 -- during a decade that wasn't kind to packaged software providers -- Kahn launched Starfish Software, which developed software for synching wireless devices, and LightSurf Technologies, which commercialized mobile phone photography software.
More recently, he has been engaged in two diverse businesses. He is the team leader for Pegasus Racing, which designs catamaran style sailboats; and he is CEO of Fullpower Technologies, which develops wearable computer technology under the MotionX brand for applications such as sleep tracking, fitness, and navigation.
Describing himself on LinkedIn as an "inventor, technologist, visionary, sailor, mountaineer, and jazz musician," Kahn studied at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and at Sofia-Antipolis, receiving a master's degree in mathematics. He also earned a master's degree in classical flute from the Zurich Music Conservatory.
And, yes, he posted baby pics with his bio.
Philippe Kahn rose to industry fame in the 1980s as CEO of Borland, which offered a range of development tools for an exploding PC industry with thousands of applications that could do everything a business or household could imagine. With no venture backing, he took the company from startup to $500 million in revenue.
But Kahn also gets credit for inventing a device that has revolutionized the way we interact with family, friends, and the world around us: the camera phone. He even demonstrated it while his wife was in labor with their daughter in 1997. Kahn had been working on what he calls an "instant visual communicator," connecting his digital camera with his cellphone and a laptop running software he had developed. When his daughter was born, he sent out baby pics to friends and family.
After leaving Borland in 1994 -- during a decade that wasn't kind to packaged software providers -- Kahn launched Starfish Software, which developed software for synching wireless devices, and LightSurf Technologies, which commercialized mobile phone photography software.
More recently, he has been engaged in two diverse businesses. He is the team leader for Pegasus Racing, which designs catamaran style sailboats; and he is CEO of Fullpower Technologies, which develops wearable computer technology under the MotionX brand for applications such as sleep tracking, fitness, and navigation.
Describing himself on LinkedIn as an "inventor, technologist, visionary, sailor, mountaineer, and jazz musician," Kahn studied at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and at Sofia-Antipolis, receiving a master's degree in mathematics. He also earned a master's degree in classical flute from the Zurich Music Conservatory.
And, yes, he posted baby pics with his bio.
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