People uncomfortable with the state of things often hope that history will prove them right. In this case, a history text has proclaimed that Mr. Gates is the epitome of 90s America. To consider the rarefied company he is in, consider: Booker Washington as the symbol of blacks during Reconstruction, Andrew Carnegie as the symbol of the industrial age, Bill Gates the symbol of the information age.
I am very uncomfortable with the thought. Society may reward its most productive and most creative individuals with wealth and/or power, but this does not imply that the most wealthy are the symbols of our age. I can think of several people, from the Bell Labs inventors of the transistor to the ARPAnet founders of the Internet who are more deserving of that honor.
Why? Because the most important aspect of the 90s is not the fact that Microsoft beat out Apple at the low end -- it is that innovation in electrical engineering and applications of semiconductor physics changed our world. Whatever else you may accuse Bill Gates of, you can not accuse him of being innovative. That credit belongs to visionaries not mass-marketers.
