C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.

My father worked for Bell Labs. Hence, I knew very much about the place. I knew it because also he was involved with telephony.

We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

There are a lot of ways to make people not like you, but one of the most powerful - if least fair - is to be really, really successful. Nobody resents the guy who just lost his job. But the guy whose Internet start-up made him a billionaire at 25? That's a whole different kettle of envy.

Nothing's faster than the Internet.

In my first company, Seer Technologies, where I was chief technology officer, we shied away from the media. We watched every word and were guarded in front of journalists.