Ten years is a long time in technology. Enough for five or six cycles of Moore's Law, which means the tech at the end works 64 times better — or costs a sixty-fourth as much. But Moore's Law does not apply to people, and most of us ended up doing much the same thing in 2009 as we did in 1999.
That's not true of some, of course. The rapid pace of change of technology, and the extreme reactions of the market to the potentials and pitfalls of world-changing inventions, has taken some talented people and changed their lives dramatically.
We look at 12 people whose decades changed radically — for better or for worse — by their involvement in tech, and the ways their lives have changed our own.
Steve Case
Then Founder and CEO of AOL
Now Founder and CEO of Revolution LLC
Probably the event that most clearly marked the height of the dot-com madness was the merger between traditional media company Time Warner and the then-new media darling AOL, announced in January 2000. It landed AOL's already famous chief executive, Steve Case, on the cover of Time magazine with Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin.
The merged company took AOL's New York Stock Exchange symbol, and awarded its shareholders 55 percent of the new company. Shortly afterwards, AOL's subscriber base began to shrink, and it has never recovered.
In 2005, Case, who resigned from the Time Warner board of directors that same year, wrote in The Washington Post that he thought it would be best to undo the merger, which is now Time Warner's plan. Case has gone on to head Revolution, an investment firm . Revolution's stated goal is to shift power to consumers, much like Case's goals with AOL.
It is easy to forget it now, but AOL was the first online service to use graphical interfaces and focus on ease of use for consumers. The 'walled garden' approach lost out to the open standards of the internet, but AOL was an important stage in opening up the online world to the mass market.
Shawn Fanning
Then Founding the original Napster
Now Turning 30 and starring in Volkswagen commercialsImage credit: CBSnews.com
Napster, which launched early in 1999, kicked off two things: first, the career of Shawn Fanning (pictured left, credit: CBSNews.com), then a 19-year-old computer programmer working for his uncle during Christmas break from Northeastern University; second, the file-sharing wars.
Napster, which operated a central server that maintained an index of the MP3s available on everyone's computers, created a wildly new and effective distribution system that was extremely efficient and massively uncontrollable.
Sued almost as soon as it launched, Napster was shut down within two years. But its legacy lives on in the form of increasingly decentralised and harder-to-control peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies — first Gnutella, then eDonkey and latterly BitTorrent. It can also be blamed for the drive, 10 years on, for hugely intrusive and powerful laws to monitor and regulate internet access.
Fanning continued to be ahead of the curve. In 2003, he and other Napster veterans set up Snocap, intended as a way for rights holders to register their content. Snocap was designed to offer the technology to digital content providers as a way of enabling legal file-sharing services.
In 2008, Snocap was acquired by social media company Imeem, which still uses the technology. By then, Fanning was gone. In 2006, he developed Rupture, a social-networking tool he described to the Los Angeles Times as "Twitter for gamers". Rupture has since been acquired by Electronic Arts for $15m (£9m). In 2008, Fanning appeared in commercials for Volkswagen, directed by Roman Coppola. All this, and Fanning doesn't even turn 30 until next year.
Kim Polese
Then Founder and CEO of Java-based start-up Marimba
Now CEO of open-source company SpikeSource
Running a slightly mysterious start-up in 1999's hottest technology area, Java, Kim Polese's picture was everywhere. Smart, energetic, young — she turned 40 in 2001 — and attractive, she was the poster child for not only new technology, but also a new generation of technologically-savvy women.
In 1997, Time magazine listed her as one of the 25 most-influential Americans. A seven-year veteran of Sun, where she was the original Java product manager, she co-founded the Java-based company Marimba in 1996, taking it public in 1999 and eventually selling it to BMC Software for $239m in 2004.
In her time at Sun, Polese was the guiding force behind marketing Java and, as Tim Berners-Lee had done with the web, she made a key decision: to make Java royalty-free so it would see widespread adoption. This track record makes Polese's present job entirely logical: SpikeSource provides a platform for testing, packaging, distributing and maintaining software of all kinds.
Polese also serves on many boards and councils, including the Global Security Institute, the Long Now Foundation and the University of California President's Board on Science and Innovation.
Talkback
Back in 1985 Commodore wanted to setup an online community for their users to interact. They found a small company, and gave them the task of doing this.
Jim Kimsey who was responsible for obtaining the capitol investments, Marc Seriff who developed the Q-Link code based on the original PlayNet software, and Steve Case, the marketing expert. On November 1st, 1985, Q-Link was born. (Steve later was promoted to executive vice president)
It later became AOL. It was a bulletin board, and it had a graphical interface for the various sections, and you could email other members. I joined in December, 1985, using a 300 baud modem.