Lorinda Cherry earned a Masters degree in 1969, so guessing she was born around 1948, meaning she'd be about 74 now. Steve Wozniak is 71, Stroustrup is 71, Larry Wall is 67, Bill Gates is 66, van Rossum is 66.

Torvalds at 52 is the most clearly "next generation" of those people.

Can't help but think that those people mostly redid what their parent's generation invented, but in a more practical/commercial way, which is an achievement in itself, but of a completely different kind.

9front guys with plan9's legacy being modernized. Gemini. NNCP as a disaster-resistant network. Solar powered minicomputers and devices.

The future won't be like the 20th century one. It will be less power hungry.

Most giants I've met never make a name for themselves and prefer it that way.

> Elon ... have taken all the talent that would have gone to bell labs and used it to generate ad revenue

This is pretty unfair to Elon. He took all that talent and started putting things into space. And building the next generation of cars. He seems to be doing amazing work.

Bezos and Zuckerberg, sure. Musk is in a different league, possibly an entirely different game.

Your first point seems to be conflating workplaces and individual talents in order to make a snarky point about tech CEOs. I mean, I get it, but the "giants" that sergiotapia was referring to clearly aren't the people who ran Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, SRI and BBN. (Also, to be persnickety, Tesla and SpaceX don't make any of their revenue from advertising sales, and while Amazon does have a growing advertising services business, it's still a pretty small sliver of their overall revenue stream.)

Your second point seems more reasonable, although I think klyrs makes a cogent point: the "giants passing away" now are primarily the ones who made their names in the pre-internet age. The next generation after them are the folks who were making their names circa 1980–2000, and we can hazard some plausible guesses. It may be too early to say yet who the anointed giants of 2000–2020 will be.

I can’t edit my post, but I think there are good points here.

The “ad revenue” comment was snarky and for Elon and Bezos may not be fair because they have had some major impacts to quality of life - Elon with electric vehicles and Bezos with availability of goods, AWS, etc. They both have given really smart people some really interesting problems to work, and we may recognize that in stories as they come out in 30-40 years.

Thinking a bit more about it, I think it takes a company today to make an impact given the complexity of technology. Things like dc and bc have been coded and discovered, and now we’re building advanced products to do advanced things.

Underlying my original comment is my concern for the allocation of brain power in technology today. I don’t know what the right ratio is, but I do feel like we’ve got too many people going toward taking users’ attention and discretionary income rather than working more valuable (on a societal level) problems.

> our “giants” will be Zuckerberg, Elon, and Bezos. They have taken all the talent that would have gone to bell labs and used it to generate ad revenue.

If we compare these to people who contributed to basic science and technology, I think we must draw a line between industry giants and enterprise giants.

Morgan, Ford, Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, were enterprise giants.

Tesla, Holonyak, Salk, were industry giants.