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The Shire
    Sergey and Larry are the hobbits of the Shire of the Internet. Although they were born a generation after Steve Wozniak, Apple Computer’s cofounder and the original technology hobbit, they were more like him than like Steve Jobs or most of the Bubble generation of Internet entrepreneurs.
    Internet technologists are comfortably rooted in their personal shire of science and technology and academe, leagues away from the turmoil of the modern business world. Many of them have day jobs. They’re prone to being easy-going pranksters with a fondness for a good online party with others like them. In 2001, when the first Lord of the Rings movie was released, Larry and Sergey rented out an entire theater and took the Google staff to see it.
    They grew up in an environment that encouraged open programming, and they shared their creations freely in the academic tradition. What college student doesn’t appreciate free beer, music, games, programs, and information to get them through the next exam? The Internet provides everything but the beer.
    Larry not only used Legos to build a computer printer in grade school, he repeated the stunt when he built Google’s first computer server at Stanford. However, he did not actually use Legos at Stanford, but rather knockoffs of larger blocks called Duplos. “They’re imitation Duplos, because they were cheaper than the real thing,” Sergey once explained. “This turned out to be a big mistake, because the tolerances [the deviations in the way the parts fit together] on the imitation Duplos are much worse than the tolerances on real Duplos, and as a result our system would crash from time to time, because these things would fall apart and the whole disc array would go down and you couldn’t do any searches.” 5 (The device is now on display in the Gates engineering building at Stanford.)
    Even today, Sergey and Larry—especially Larry—are still shy when outside the circle of other technologists. In person, they don’t generate that air of superiority so common in Silicon Valley CEOs. They even seem deferential. Still, having succeeded so effectively in school and as entrepreneurs, they developed the luxury of rarely dealing with outsiders, a trait that many people see as arrogant and dismissive—which it often is.
    When Larry and Sergey met at Stanford and started working together, they found they shared not only a profound love of computers, but also a strong left-wing bias and a devil-may-care attitude. They distrusted business moguls.
    This is true also of the rest of the technology elite who helped build the Internet. The original designers of the Internet never intended it to reach out and touch anyone beyond the domain of the universities and government labs for which it was created. These groups used the Internet to share their research, ideas, and software programs—all for free. Most of them are advocates of the Open Source movement, which believes technology standards should be built not on patented, corporate-owned software, but on generally agreed-upon technology available to anyone. They contributed technology to the Internet’s growth as well. In the 1980s, the Internet started quietly growing in capability right alongside the much noisier personal computer industry.
    But a funny thing happened on the way to the 1990s. Since anyone sufficiently technical could tap into the Internet with their own computer, it was soon co-opted by groups of invaders its builders never envisioned. The true Internet pioneers were hackers, online game players, software pirates, and independent programmers who wanted to share their creations with the world. The Open Source advocates soon came to power.
    But Larry and Sergey have now ventured beyond the truly dedicated Open Source movement by creating a corporate giant. And for that, most of the