The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley - The Cardinal Inquirer

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Home<br>The Genius: Mike Burrows' self-effacing journey through Silicon Valley

Crystal Lu Jan 12 2007 Features<br>By Crystal Lu

The clock is just turning 12 at Google. On the verdant green lawn outside the company’s biggest cafeteria, early birds are already having their lunch at white tables and chairs. A pizza stand near the entrance to the cafeteria displays steamy pies just out of the oven. A few steps away is an Asian section serving stewed chicken thighs and chow-mein. There are also an Italian section, a Mexican section, an Indian section, a make-your-own-sandwich bar, a salad bar, a soda machine, a transparent-door refrigerator full of Odwalla juices and a counter for making coffee and tea. Everything is free. It’s part of the Google legend to break the there-is-no-free-lunch convention and offer all employees three complimentary meals a day. There are 10 cafeterias on the Google “campus”.

They don’t call it a campus for nothing. Most of the Googlers carrying their trays could easily pass for graduate students. Almost everyone is in jeans, except for a few men in baggy, knee-length shorts and a few women in denim skirts or casual-looking floral skirts.

One man stands apart. He’s wearing a pale blue button-down shirt and a black pair of slacks. He’s got a schoolboy hairstyle---slightly longer than a crew-cut---that makes his whitish blond hair appear more sun-bleached than aging gray. He’s clearly older than the others, but his smooth face and the curious, inquisitive look in his large blue eyes make him blend in with a youthful spirit.

Mike Burrows is 43 years old, and although he’s been in the United States for the past 18 years he still talks with the crisp accent of his native England. Mike explains he owns more than a dozen blue shirts and five pairs of identical trousers, all of them made out of washable, non-iron fabric. He dresses the same every day. “I strongly value function over form,” he says.

Mike is having a salad made of shredded carrots, bite-sized pineapple, and raisins. The “function” of the salad is to give him more nutrients and less fat than pizza or French fries would.

One of the highest-ranking computer scientists at Google, Mike works on Google’s distributed system, a non-centralized network consisting of numerous computers that can communicate with one another and that appear to users as parts of a single storehouse of shared hardware, software, and data. In the circle of high-tech experts, Mike has a special place for his role in inventing Alta Vista, the first multilingual search engine. According to The Google Story, a Google-authorized bestseller, Larry Page at the beginning stage of creating the Google search engine borrowed Alta Vista’s way of displaying links that could instantly take users to other websites.

Mike is not just another hip, smart young Googler. He’s one of the pioneers of the information age. His invention of Alta Vista helped open up an entire new route for the information highway that is still far from fully explored. His work history, intertwined with the development of the high-tech industry over the past two decades, is distinctly a tale of scientific genius.

The story of the Internet begins six years before Mike was born---with Sputnik.

When the Soviet Union launched the first artificial earth satellite in 1957, the United States responded by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Defense. To build a military research network that could survive a nuclear strike, ARPA contracted a technology-consulting firm, Bolt, Beranek, & Newman, to work on ARPANET, which linked computers at UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The system was completed in 1969. Three years later, Ray Tomlinson of BBN created the first e-mail program. In 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn first coined the term “Internet” in their paper on Transmission Control Protocol. Nine years after that, the Internet Activities Board was established. In 1990, a British scientist Tim Berners-Lee designed a virtual infrastructure called the World Wide Web to transmit hypertext documents internationally, and a program called a “browser” to view them. A global information space was forming. But the general...