Bob Garrity, retired broadband guru

Call Bob Garrity a visionary if you like. Back when cable companies were still going on about interactive TV, Garrity knew broadband would be the catchword of the future — the underlying concept dominating the rhetoric of high-tech companies for years to come. He installed the first cable modem west of the Mississippi in his Bay Area home. And he was the architect of the world's largest consumer broadband network.

But Garrity doesn't surround himself with the whiz-bang, high-tech bric-a-brac you'd associate with an Internet visionary. There's no T-1 line coming into his home, and he doesn't effuse platitudes about the wonders of bandwidth. Don't get him wrong — he's known all along that broadband would change the world. He just doesn't consider it a new gospel.

“There hasn't been any killer application out there that's changed the way people view their lives,” Garrity said. “For me, broadband is more about convenience. It's a more enjoyable way to access information.”

Garrity worked at Viacom in 1994 when 28 kb/s modems were the way to access the Internet, and cable was for… well, cable programming. One day, a few folks from Intel dropped by with a clunky, malformed contraption they called a cable modem. Deciding to give it whirl, Viacom authorized Garrity to install the West Coast's first cable modem in his home. The first connection was nothing special. No waves of content and video assaulted his senses. But it allowed him to surf at lightning speeds the admittedly more simplistic HTML sites of the mid-'90s, making an immediate impression.

“Within a week I was telling all of the senior management at Viacom that cable modems would be the next big thing,” Garrity said. “I was sure I was going to form my own business installing cable modems.”

He didn't have to. In 1995, he got into the business of installing a nationwide broadband network. He joined the then-fledgling @Home Corp. (long before the “Excite” prefix was added) and proceeded to design the architecture for the world's largest consumer broadband network. By the time of @Home's demise late last year, the company served up high-speed connections to almost 4 million homes in North America.

Now retired, Garrity has time for the convenience his work has created. He has a cable modem, of course. He manages his investments, surfs wine and winery sites, and runs discussions on meditation and spiritual healing techniques. Not exactly high-tech stuff here, but come on — the guy's retired. Cut him some slack.—Kevin Fitchard