I would imagine Doom and PageRank was the right person finding the right problem to work on at the right time in the right domain.
If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.
A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.
I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.
If Page, Carmack and Zuckerberg were all trying to do something in nuclear physics I think they would have been where young people are today with computing.
A past problem with the low hanging fruit picked and continued progress having undesirable higher order effects.
I am sure their are just as brilliant young people today. If I had to bet, I would bet the reason we don't feel this is because they are in a domain that is not purely computer science related and a really good chance what they are doing is not in English but Mandarin.