Often, says Tim Anderson, thinking back to the mid-1970s and his time as a student at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, you'd walk into the terminal room and there he'd be: Professor J.C.R. Licklider, typing code with his own 10 fingers.

This took some getting used to. Lick, as everyone called him, wasn't a hacker, but an absent-minded-professor-type in his 60s. "He'd sit there with a bottle of Coke and a vending machine brownie as if that were a perfectly satisfactory lunch," recalls Anderson, who is now the chief technology officer at an Internet startup known as Offroad Capital. "He had these funny colored glasses with yellow lenses; he had some theory that they helped him see better."