Bangalore: The entire decade after 1989 has marked the shift in technology where people began to buy home computers and start logging on to the World Wide Web. It was the time when inventions like Windows 3.1 were released and a whole world of innovation was made possible by a handful of inspired minds.

These individuals (be the effect intentional or not) made computers in the ‘90s and Internet culture in general that much cooler, and thus became revered tech icons. But now with the tech world progressing quickly on the ideas that lent it a shoulder, one tends to wonder where these fine minds are, and what they're doing now.

Here are  five tech icons of the '90s, and their current occupations:

1. Person: Wes Cherry

    Innovation: Solitaire for Windows

Back in the ‘90s, when people were new to home computers and just started buying into them, the mouse was a new concept. To this end, Wes thought of writing Solitaire so people could familiarize themselves with the little tool through a little medium of fun.

He wrote it when he was interning at Microsoft in 1989, both because he wanted to get to know how to work with the Windows programming environment and because there were very few games available for Windows at the time. To his misfortune, however, he did not receive a penny in royalties despite the game being a part of the standard package of any Windows installation. But then what he did really rewarded him because later on, he got to write code for Microsoft Excel throughout the major portion of the ‘90s.

Wes and his family newly moved to Vashon Island, WA now and they are planting seven acres of apple trees as part of a new venture: Dragon’s Head Cider. Before you laugh at the irony here, know that he still writes programs for recreation, but then he mostly just works on offbeat projects such as the restoration of a six-wheeled Swedish fire truck. To this date, this gentleman could quite possibly be the one man in history whose time wasn’t completely wasted by Solitaire.