Word: silicon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It's time to ring in the century of biotechnology. Just as the discovery of the electron in 1897 was a seminal event for the 20th century, the seeds for the 21st century were spawned in 1953, when James Watson blurted out to Francis Crick how four nucleic acids could pair to form the self-copying code of a DNA molecule. Now we're just a few years away from one of the most important breakthroughs of all time...
...Walkman, the Mac, MTV and Nintendo helped too, but the cyberpunk novels--most notably Gibson's cyberspace epic Neuromancer--were clearly a formative influence on today's Gen X Silicon Valley sensibility. Sterling himself edited the seminal 1986 anthology Mirrorshades; his prologue became the de facto cyberpunk manifesto and remains, he ruefully admits, his most widely known work to date...
...damn rich. "I can't spend all my money," he sighs. "The best things in life just aren't that expensive." At 41, the founder of the Internet search-service Infoseek is worth more than $137 million. But while many of the other fresh-faced moguls in Silicon Valley have plowed their outrageous fortunes into still more outrageous indulgences, Kirsch decided in 1992 to do something subversive: he created his own charitable fund...
Giving away a lot of money isn't that easy. "Every one of us is going to give the money away at some point," says Bill Davidow, a venerable Silicon Valley philanthropist and multimillionaire, "but some of us just haven't chosen to part with it yet." Some charitable foundations and organizations, he says, haven't learned ways to make folks feel good about giving away their money: "My wife and I, for example, contribute to a wonderful organization that has one of the most disorganized development groups I have ever seen...
Alas, not everyone has ambitions so grandiose. In Silicon Valley, 25% of the area's wealthiest people give away less than $2,000 a year. And the spike in giving among the most affluent Americans is at least a little deceiving. The 8% of after-tax income that the superrich give away is still puny compared with their total wealth...