Digital Revolution: Online Special

From Steve Wozniak in 1987 to John Chambers in 2001, the Commonwealth Club of California has played host to virtually all the leaders of the tech revolution that has indelibly marked the past decades.

The story really unfolds in two stages: firstly, those who made computing accessible to the home through their remarkable software and hardware innovations, including Apple, Microsoft, Intel and Dell.

And secondly, those that have ridden the networking revolution enabling the rapid spread of the internet's pervasive power through society and the economy: the founder of the web, Tim Berners-Lee; the companies behind networking, Cisco systems and Sun Microsystems; the e-commerce bellwether, Amazon.com; and those who have made the net more accessible to the everday user, such as AOL, Yahoo! and Google.

Each of these extraordinarily successful companies, and especially their CEO's, have faced as much criticism as praise over the years, for alleged practices ranging from monopolistic abuse to disreputable working practices.

The remarkable wealth and power accrued by these men draws envy, awe, fascination or disgust from the observer, but rarely do the tech leaders address the broader public on such subjects.

The Commonwealth Club has given the podium, over the years, to nearly all the leaders of the tech revolution, allowing them the chance to portray their companies and their vision as they see it.

And perhaps surprisingly, these tech leaders have often spoken about much more than Silicon Valley, from Marc Andreeson on the digital divide to Larry Ellison on why PC's should be more like pencils, fully cognizant of the potentially dramatic advances their companies could facilitate throughout the world. Often, their predictions and analysis have become outdated faster than a microchip, and that in itself reveals forks in the road and chances not yet taken in the digital age.

For good or bad, the story of the digital revolution was, and still is, largely determined by these people: for all the democratic power of the internet, a fair portion of the public reading this will be using a Dell machine, accessing the internet on AOL, on a Windows machine powered by an Intel chip, running on a Cisco network. And few of these users will not use Yahoo!, Google, or Amazon.com on the World Wide Web.

For those of us who are curious as to why we're mostly using a Dell computer and not an IBM, with an Intel chip instead of an AMD, and are more often searching on Google instead of Infoseek, the men that made these companies have much to tell us about their own success, and their contributions to the digital world we live in today.