C. Gordon Bell

Senior Researcher, Microsoft Bay Area Research Center

Most Important Technology of the Last 40 Years:

The integrated circuit and the Web—it's a tossup.

Most Important Technology for the Coming Decade:

Wireless.

Technology That has Evolved in a Surprising Way:

The longevity of Moore's Law.

"The actual statement of Moore's Law was important—saying we're going to have that massive doubling—because otherwise the development could have been helter-skelter. Instead it's become a way of behaving and investing and developing, and it continues to set targets of behavior. It is the overriding technological force, bar none.

"My current project is called MyLifeBits, a system that is your surrogate personal memory and archive, so you can go back in time, and it'll all just be there. This is something that everybody already is building, if they don't throw things on their computer away. With MyLifeBits, I could say, 'O.K., if you want an archive of me, here's a terabyte, and that's me. It's my brain and everything that went into it.' We're creating a wonderful Alexandrian library."