2. Person: Jack Eastman and Patrick Beard

    Innovation: After Dark Screensaver

Two things that really plagued computers back in the day were power surges and screen-burning, not viruses and identity-theft. A decent-enough power strip was sufficient to solve the former, but the second was peculiarly enough, solved by flying toasters!

In 1989, Berkeley Systems (who, back then, only wrote Mac software for the vision impaired) released the After Dark Screensaver. It later on became a default Mac feature and then got ported to Windows, immediately gaining popularity.

You Don’t Know Jack, a very popular trivia game series, was another innovation they brought forward. It really caught Sierra On-line’s eye and they bought it for a little short of $14 million.

Shortly thereafter, Eastman co-founded CloudSource and is the present co-founder of Eightfold Way Consultants. Patrick is now a senior engineer at Apple.