Second acts: Seven tech titans today

Once upon a time, the name Tim Berners-Lee was on the lips of everybody in the tech world. Same goes for Philippe Kahn, Mitch Kapor, Steve Wozniak and several others who have since stepped away from the spotlight. What are these technology titans up to today? Read on to find out.

Marc Andreessen

While interning at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1992, Marc Andreessen became acquainted with Tim Berners-Lee’s standards for the World Wide Web. Inspired, he co-created Mosaic, the world’s first popular multiplatform Web browser, with Eric Bina.

Marc Andreessen After some legal wrangling with their alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Andreessen and Bina in 1994 changed the name of their new company from Mosaic Communications to Netscape Communications and the name of its Web browser from Mosaic to Netscape. (The company also negotiated a settlement with the University of Illinois.)

During this period of time, Andreessen’s star rose to epic heights, culminating in Netscape’s outrageously successful IPO in 1995 and the young dot-com millionaire’s appearance (seated on a throne) on the cover of Time.

Fast-forward 12 years. After Microsoft defeated Netscape in a series of vigorously contested browser wars (ironically, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was based upon the Mosaic source code), AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 and appointed Andreessen the company’s chief technology officer.

Andreessen quickly left AOL, however, to form Loudcloud, a Web hosting company. In 2002, the company changed its focus from services to technology and changed its name to Opsware, with Andreessen serving as chairman. The company was recently acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion.

Andreessen has also become actively involved in the Web 2.0 movement. The entrepreneur is an investor in social news aggregator Digg.com, and he recently founded Ning, an online company that lets anyone build their own social network. (According to Andreessen’s blog, Ning was responsible for 121,217 social networks at press time.)

Andreessen currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife Laura Arrillaga, who is chairwoman of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is famous for merging the notions of hypertext and the Internet, thereby inventing the World Wide Web, while working as an independent contractor for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Seeking to share information and updates among CERN researchers, he built the first Web browser, editor and server in 1990, and launched the first Web site and directory in 1991.

Tim Berners-Lee, photo by Uldis Bojarscc-by-sa-2.5 Since then, the father of the Web has been devoted to furthering the potential and reach of the Web. He is a fierce advocate of Net neutrality, the belief that all Web sites, networks, networking platforms and Net content are equal, and that Internet data packets should be passed between networks strictly on a first come, first served basis, with no preferential treatment for higher-fee networks. He makes frequent appearances in Washington to speak on Internet-related matters.

He also serves as director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization he co-founded in 1994 that is dedicated to, in the Web site’s words, leading “the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.” One of the key focuses of the organization is to help the Web spread to developing nations.

Berners-Lee, a native of England, currently lives near Cambridge, Mass. He is a member of the Royal Society of the Arts and has received numerous awards over the past decade, including the rank of Knight Commander of the British Empire and the Order of Merit. While Berners-Lee remains mum about his private life, you can find out more about his background and public life at his home page.

Dan Bricklin

Dan Bricklin is famous for conceptualizing and co-creating VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet application. Originally designed for the Apple II, VisiCalc was the killer app that opened up corporate America’s eyes to the relevance of the PC in a business environment. (Bricklin’s Web site includes a great recap of his colleagues’ reactions to the announcement of the IBM PC.)

According to legend, Bricklin’s inspiration was a Harvard Business School lecture in which a professor kept having to erase and change numbers and equations on the chalkboard. After enduring this tedium, Bricklin realized he could use a computer to quickly incorporate and crunch numbers and variables.

Dan Bricklin, photo by Betsy Devine, GNU FDL 1.2 and cc-by-sa-2.5 In 1979, Bricklin and his partner Bob Frankston founded Software Arts and released VisiCalc, which went on to sell an astonishing 700,000 copies over the course of six years during a time when very few personal computers were in homes and small offices in America.

Advised by a patent attorney that software programs like VisiCalc had little chance of receiving a patent, Software Arts didn’t patent the spreadsheet, opening the door for a host of imitators, including SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and eventually Microsoft Excel. Each program improved upon VisiCalc without having to pay royalties to its creators.

In 1985, Bricklin left Software Arts to found Software Garden, a small company in Newton, Mass., with a focus on developing software tools such as the ListGarden RSS Feed Generator Program. The company also provides software consulting services to small businesses and corporations.

In 1990, Bricklin co-founded Slate Corp., which was dedicated to developing software for pen computers, and in 1995 he founded Trellix Corp., a provider of Web publishing technologies and services. Slate failed, but Trellix was bought by Interland Inc., where Bricklin served as chief technology officer before returning to Software Garden in 2004.

Earlier this year, Bricklin and Software Garden released wikiCalc, a free collaborative Web-based spreadsheet app. Bricklin still lives in the Greater Boston area.

Philippe Kahn

From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, Philippe Kahn was a mainstay on the pages of business tech magazines. At the time, the company Kahn founded, Borland Software, successfully kept pace with Microsoft, Lotus and other software service companies through the release of powerful applications such as Turbo Pascal and SideKick.

Kahn was lauded as one of the smartest visionaries in software technology and was frequently quoted in news and analysis stories. In the early ’90s, Kahn theorized a formula that he, in typically grand fashion, named Philippe’s Law. This theorem, which still holds up today, according to developers we polled, stated that the productivity of a software developer in a team of n size is diminished as the size of the team grows, and by dividing n by the cube root of n, you can determine the loss of productivity.

Philippe Kahn Kahn was also notorious (or misunderstood, depending on whom you ask) for having an outsized ego. As an example, a 1997 article in The New York Times recounts a moment toward the end of his tenure at Borland when he spent about $5,000 of the company’s money distributing as holiday gifts copies of jazz albums on which he played flute.

After a board dispute, Kahn stepped down from his role as Borland president, CEO and chairman of the board in 1996. Since then, Kahn has been widely recognized for inventing the first camera phone in 1997. (Listen to his January 2007 interview with NPR for his thoughts on the impact of camera phones upon greater society.)

Kahn also co-founded Starfish Software, a developer of device synchronization technologies, in 1994, and picture-messaging company LightSurf Technologies in 1997. His current company is Fullpower Technologies, which he co-founded in 2004. The company’s inference engine is the core technology behind an operating environment for the sensors found in pacemakers, insulin pumps, camera phones and other consumer electronic devices.

In his personal life, Philippe Kahn is a classically trained musician (he plays the flute semiprofessionally). He is also a devotee of sport sailing and has won numerous races, including the Transpacific Yacht Race, which runs from Los Angeles to Hawaii.

Kahn lives in northern California with his wife Sonia Lee (co-founder of Starfish, LightSurf and Fullpower), with whom he is raising four children. The two are heavily involved in humanitarian efforts and are active participants in the Lee-Kahn Foundation, which is dedicated to increasing public access to health care, education and the arts.

Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor is most famous for founding Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 alongside partner Jonathan Sachs. Through much of the 1980s, the company’s Lotus 1-2-3 business software was ubiquitous in corporate America, thanks to a useful combination of spreadsheets, graphics presentations and database tools.

For a few years, Lotus was one of the largest software companies in the world, making $53 million dollars in its first year, $156 million in its second year, and $258 million in its third. This placed the company on equal footing with Microsoft and Apple, during which time Kapor was a titan of the industry.

Citing his loathing of being in power along with his desire to be more hands-on, Kapor stepped down in 1986 and accepted a teaching position at MIT’s Center for Cognitive Science. In 1990, he and Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow created the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending citizens’ civil liberties in the digital arena.

Mitch Kapor In 2001, Kapor founded the Open Source Applications Foundation, which has developed the Chandler Project, a cross-platform open-source personal information manager that supports Outlook-like functions such as calendars and e-mail.

These days, Kapor lives in San Francisco with his wife and serves on the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to maintaining low barriers of entry to the Internet. He is also on the board of Linden Lab, maker of the popular virtual environment Second Life. Kapor’s Mitchell Kapor Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to environmental, educational and civic equity, with an emphasis on low-income communities of color.

In 2006, Kapor launched a new Internet start-up named Foxmarks Inc. The company’s Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer allows users to automatically sync bookmarks between two or more systems running Mozilla Firefox. The company’s next act is ambitious: Foxmarks is hoping to utilize its members’ bookmarks to provide highly intelligent contextual next-generation Internet search.

Peter Norton

Looking back at the ’80s and ’90s, it’s hard to believe that there was a long stretch of time when third-party software utility companies made a financial killing by reselling add-on applications to enhance, maintain or fix Windows and DOS.

Peter Norton’s software shop, named Peter Norton Computing, was one of the most prominent and successful during this heyday. In the early 1980s, Norton released Norton Utilities, a suite of tools that allowed users to recover deleted data from disks, amongst other useful functions. This software tool suite was the foundation of an empire.

The Peter Norton Programmer’s Guide to the IBM PC In short succession, the company released a number of applications for programmers and end users, including Norton Commander, Norton Editor and Norton guides. Norton’s book, The Peter Norton Programmer’s Guide to the IBM PC, was considered a bible for many programmers; he went on to pen dozens of computing books over the years. Peter Norton products had the distinction of featuring a photograph of Mr. Norton, arms crossed, on the cover.

In 1990, Norton sold his company to another software utility company, Symantec, which continued to release products under the Norton brand name: Norton AntiVirus, Norton Internet Security, Norton SystemWorks (which includes the Norton Utilities tools) and more.

A former Buddhist monk, Norton moved on to the nonprofit sector with a focus on the arts. Shortly after selling to Symantec, he established the Peter Norton Family Foundation, which provides financial support to modern arts organizations. He is currently president of the foundation and participates on the boards of numerous colleges, museums and art institutes.

Norton, who lives in Washington state, is frequently recognized for owning one of the largest collections of modern art in the world. His pieces are on display and loan in museums across the globe.

Steve Wozniak

One of the most popular icons of the early days of personal computing, Steve Wozniak (affectionately known as “The Woz”) is famous for developing the Apple I and Apple II systems and for co-founding Apple Computer Inc. with Steve Jobs in 1976.

Shunning the fame that his more flamboyant partner seemed to court, Wozniak focused on hardware and software development for Apple. After being involved in a 1981 plane crash that caused him some memory loss, Wozniak left Apple temporarily and returned to the University of California, Berkeley, to complete his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

Steve Wozniak, photo by Alan Luckow He returned to Apple in 1983 and retired from full-time work there a few years later. Nevertheless, he is still considered an Apple employee and receives a small paycheck.

Woz went on to start CL 9, a universal remote control company, in 1985, and co-found the GPS company Wheels of Zeus (known as wOz) in 2001. He also spent time teaching fifth-graders in Los Gatos, Calif., and continues to donate computing equipment and technical support to the district.

These days, Wozniak serves as the chief technology officer and chief visionary officer at Jazz Technologies (formerly named Acquicor). It’s the parent company of Jazz Semiconductor, a Newport Beach, Calif., foundry that, according to the Jazz Web site, is targeted at applications including wireless, optical, networking, power management, storage, aerospace/defense and other high-performance uses.

In his personal life, Wozniak lives in Silicon Valley, where he is a member of the Silicon Valley Aftershocks Segway Polo team. He is also touring in support of his just-released autobiography, iWoz. According to recent Hollywood scuttlebutt, he is currently dating comedienne Kathy Griffin.

Wozniak has always been a fan of robotics. In a recent interview with IDG Now, he discusses, among other things, why a single robot will never be able to make a cup of coffee and how he is currently focusing on making his home entirely energy-efficient.

For more info on The Woz, see his Web site.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included the misleading statement that Philippe Kahn “spent a great deal of [Borland]’s money distributing copies of jazz albums on which he played saxophone.” In fact, he spent his own money producing the albums, and Borland spent about $5,000 distributing them. Also, he played flute, not saxophone, on the albums.

George Jones is the senior vice president/creative director of IDG Entertainment.