It’s a fundamental aspect of human nature, I believe, for each generation to criticize the generation that preceded it, often using them as a convenient scapegoat for all that’s wrong in the world. The current large target is my own generation, the Baby Boomers. I recently overheard a group of young people—mid-20s—complaining at length about their belief that the Boomers constitute a waste of flesh who never contributed much to society. Respectfully, I beg to differ; this is my response, along with a plea to ALL generations to think twice about how they characterize those who came before.

Millennials, sometimes called Gen-Y, and the Plurals, commonly referred to as Gen-Z, often blame Baby Boomers for the state of the world: the growing wealth imbalance, the violence and unpredictability of climate change, the multifaceted aftermath of COVID because of its impact on the supply chain, and the world’s growing political and cultural divisions—in essence, the world sucks and Boomers are to blame. They often proclaim Boomers to be a generation that contributed little of value to the world. This, of course, is a long-standing social convention: blame the old people, because they know not how dumb, useless and ineffective they are.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of admiration out there for the current Millennial über meisters of Silicon Valley—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Brian Chesky (AirBnB), Alexandr Wang (Scale AI), and Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox). They deserve admiration for their accomplishments, but they didn’t create Silicon Valley—not by a long shot. The two generations that came before them did that.

But let’s consider the boring, stumbling, mistake-prone Boomers. You know them; they include such incompetent, non-contributing members of society as Bill Gates, the Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, Peggy Whitson, who recently retired as Chief Astronaut at NASA, Larry Ellison, who founded Oracle, Oprah Winfrey, creator of a breathtakingly influential media empire, Marc Benioff, founder of SalesForce, Reid Hoffmann, co-creator of LinkedIn, and Radia Perlman, the creator of the Spanning Tree Protocol, the rule set that the 25 billion computers on the Internet, give or take a few hundred million, use to talk to each another. And I won’t even bother to mention Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. 

What a bunch of losers.

But there may be a reason for the dismissal of an entire generation’s contributions to the world that goes beyond the tradition of putting elders on a literal or figurative ice floe and shoving them off to sea. I find it interesting that the newest arrivals on the generational scene judge the value of a generation’s contributions based on the application that that generation created. All hail Facebook, X, Instagram, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB, Google, Tencent, AliBaba, TikTok, GitHub, and Instacart, the so-called platform companies. Those applications are the “public face” of massive and incomprehensibly complex technological underpinnings, yet rarely does anyone make time today for a scintilla of thought about what makes all of those coveted applications—ALL of them—work. In fact, none of them—NONE of them—would exist without two things: the myriad computers (including mobile devices) on which they execute, and the global network that gives them life and makes it possible for them to even exist.

The tail wags the dog here: without the network, these applications could not function. Want some proof? The only time the vast majority of people on the planet are even aware of the network’s existence is when it breaks, which is seldom. But when it does? When ice or wind bring down aerial transmission cables, when a car takes out a phone pole, when fire destroys critical infrastructure and people can’t mine their precious likes on Facebook, when there’s a long weekend and everybody is home downloading or gaming or watching and the network slows to a glacial crawl, technological Armageddon arrives. Heart palpitations, panting, sweating, and audible keening begin, as people punch futilely at the buttons on their devices. But consider this: the global telephone network has a guaranteed uptime of 99.999 percent. In the industry, that’s called five-nines of reliability. And what does that mean in English? It means that on average, the phone network—today, the Internet—is unavailable to any given user for eight-and-a-half minutes a year. In a standard year, there are 525,600 minutes. For about nine of those every year, the network hiccups. Take a moment to think about that. 

When we think back on famous scientists and innovators, who comes to mind? Well, people like Alexander Graham Bell, of course, who invented the telephone, but who also invented the world’s first wireless telephone, called the photophone—and yes, it worked; or Thomas Edison, who became famous for the invention of the lightbulb, but actually invented many other things, and who was awarded 2,332 patents and founded 14 companies, including General Electric; the Wright Brothers, who flew successfully at Kitty Hawk; Watson and Crick, who discovered the DNA double helix and created a path to modern genetics and treatments for genetic disease; Bardeen, Bartain and Shockley, unknown names to most people, but names attached to the three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories who invented the transistor; Philo T. Farnsworth, the creator of television; and Marie Curie, who did pioneering research on radioactivity. These are all famous names from the late 1800s all the way through the 1960s. But then, there’s a great twenty-year leap to the 1980s, the time when Generation X came into its own. Movies were made about this generation, some of the best ever: Ferris Buehler’s Day Off. The Breakfast Club. Home Alone. Sixteen Candles. St. Elmo’s Fire. Clerks. The Lost Boys. Karate Kid. Gen-X was a widely criticized generation, an ignored, under-appreciated, self-reliant, go-it-alone generation of entrepreneurs that includes Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Sergey Brin of Google, Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard, Travis Kalanick, of Uber, and dare I say it, Elon Musk. All major contributors to the world’s technology pantheon, some as inventors, some as innovators. The power of the Internet to allow data aggregation and sharing made it possible for platform companies like Uber, eBay, Facebook and Google to exist. Those weren’t inventions, they were innovations (and to be sure, exceptional innovations!), built on top of pre-existing technologies.

Even the much-talked-about creations of Elon Musk aren’t inventions. Let’s look at StarLink, the SpaceX constellation of orbiting communication satellites. A satellite comprises radio technology to make it work; solar cells to power it; semiconductors to give it a functional brain; and lasers to allow each satellite to communicate with others. All of those technologies—ALL of them—were invented at Bell Labs in or around the 1940s. In fact, the first communications satellite, Telstar, was created at Bell Labs and launched into orbit in 1962—more than 60 years ago—to broadcast television signals. 

That 20-year leap between the 60s and the 80s conveniently ignores an entire generation and its contributions to the world—not just techno-geeks, but content and entertainment and media people who redefined our perception of the world. This was the time of the Baby Boomers, and while you may see us—yes, I am one—as an annoying group of people that you wish would just go away, you might want to take a moment to recognize the many ways my generation created the lifestyle enjoyed by Millennials and Gen-Z—and took steps to ensure that it would endure.

The thing about Boomer researchers, scientists, and innovators was that with very few exceptions, they were happy to work quietly behind the scenes. They didn’t do great big things exclusively for money or power; they did them because they were the right things to do, because they wanted to leave the world a better place for those who came later. And they did, in more ways than you can possibly imagine.

Let’s start with the inventions and innovations that made possible, among other things, the devices on which you watch, listen or read, and the content they deliver. I know I’ve already mentioned some of these people, but they deserve a few more words. 

Let’s start with the Steves—and no, I don’t mean me. I’m talking about Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs who did quite a few things before inventing the iconic Macintosh. Both were born in the 1950s and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and met while they were summer interns at Hewlett-Packard. In 1977, seven years before the Mac, they introduced the world to the Apple II personal computer, which included color graphics, a sound card, expansion slots, and features that made it the first machine that came close to the capabilities of modern PCs. Later, they introduced what many called the “WIMP Interface,” for windows, icons, mice, and pointy fingers, the hallmarks of what later became the Mac operating system—and ultimately, Windows 95 and the generations of that OS that followed. Incidentally, the incredibly stable, highly dependable Macintosh operating system is based on UNIX, an operating system first designed and developed at—you guessed it—Bell Laboratories.

Next we have Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born in London in 1955. He grew up around computers, because his parents were mathematicians who worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer in the world to be sold commercially. He became a software consultant for the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, which became famous for being the home of the Very Large Hadron Collider, which was recently used by astrophysicists to discover the Higgs Boson.

While at CERN in the 1980s, Berners-Lee took on the challenge of organizing and linking all the sources of information that CERN scientists relied on—text, images, sound, and video—so that they would be easily accessible via the newfangled network that had just emerged called the Internet. In the process he came up with the concept for what became the World Wide Web, which he laid out in a terrific research paper in 1989. Along the way he developed a software language to create web pages, called HTML, along with the first web browser, which he made available to everyone, free of charge, in 1991.

Most people think of the Internet and the World Wide Web as the same thing—but they aren’t. The Internet is the underlying transport infrastructure; the Web is an application that rides on top of that infrastructure, or better said, a set of applications, that make it useful to the entire world. 

Next, let me introduce you to Ray Kurzweil, who decided he would be an inventor before he started elementary school. By the time he turned 15, he had built and programmed his own computer to compose music. After graduating from MIT with degrees in computer science and literature, he created a system that enabled computers to read text characters, regardless of the font.

Kurzweil invented many things, but he is perhaps best known for coining the concept of the Singularity, the moment when digital computers and the human brain merge and communicate directly with each other. It’s a fascinating idea. A good business PC easily operates at four billion cycles per second. The human brain, on the other hand, operates at about ten cycles per second. But: a digital PC has limited memory, whereas the human brain’s memory is essentially unlimited. So what happens if we combine the blindingly fast clock speed of a PC with the unlimited memory of the human brain? The Singularity. Cue the Twilight Zone music.

Now let me introduce you to Ajay Bhatt. Born in India, he received an undergrad degree in electrical engineering before emigrating to the U.S., where he earned a master’s degree in the same field, working on technology to power the Space Shuttle. After joining Intel in 1990, he had an epiphany while working on his PC one evening. What if, he wondered, if it was possible for peripheral devices to connect to a computer as easily as plugging an electrical cord into a wall socket? Not all that hard, he decided, and he and his colleagues invented the Universal Serial Bus, which we all know as USB.

And then we have one of my favorites, Bob Metcalfe. Another MIT grad with degrees in 

engineering and management as well as a PhD from Harvard,  he joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, better known as Xerox PARC, a well-respected facility that has been compared to the east coast’s Bell Labs. While he was there, Metcalfe and his colleagues developed a technique for cheaply and easily connecting computers so that they can share files at high speed. The technology that resulted is called Ethernet, the basis for nearly every connectivity solution in use today in modern computer networks, including WiFi. He went on to found 3Com Corporation, but for me, he will always be most famous for what has come to be known as Metcalfe’s Law: that the value of a mesh network, meaning a network in which every computer connects to every other computer in the network, increases as a function of the square of the number of devices that are attached. Want that in plain English? When a new computer loaded with data connects to a mesh network, the combined value of all that data and its shared access doesn’t increase in a linear way; it increases exponentially. Don’t believe it? Look at every one of the so-called platform companies that we discussed earlier: Apple’s App or music store, Uber, Amazon, every single social media company, and for that matter, the telephone network and the World Wide Web itself.

Dr. Robert Jarvik was a prodigy who invented a surgical stapler and other medical devices while he was still a teenager. But then he got serious. While he was an undergraduate student at the University of Utah in 1964, his father needed to have heart surgery. That ordeal influenced Jarvik to turn his curiosity, inventiveness and problem-solving skills—along with his medical degree— toward finding a method to keep patients with failing hearts alive until they could receive a transplant. While he wasn’t the first to develop an artificial heart, Jarvik’s 1982 creation, the Jarvik 7, was the first such device that could be implanted inside a person’s body. Today, Jarvik continues to work on a device that can serve as a permanent replacement organ.

Here’s another one, and this one fascinates me. Sookie Bang was born and raised in South Korea. She graduated from Seoul National University in 1974 and earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of California at Davis in 1981. As a professor and researcher at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, her specialty is bioremediation—for example, using bacteria as an ingredient in a sealant to fix cracks caused by weathering and by freezing water that seeps into the concrete outer surfaces of buildings. Bang and her colleagues figured out how to speed up a naturally occurring process in which bacteria extract nitrogen from urea, which produces carbon dioxide and ammonia as byproducts. The CO₂ and ammonia then react with water and calcium to form calcium carbonate, the chemical compound that we know as limestone. The patch created by the bacterial process seals the crack from the inside out and integrates with the porous concrete, repairing the crack. In essence, the concrete becomes self-healing.

Another Boomer name you need to know is Dean Kamen, who was born in Long Island, N.Y., in 1951. You may not know who he is, but I guarantee you know at least one of his inventions.

In the early 2000s, Kamen attracted media attention because investors were knocking each other over to be the first to fund “Project Ginger.” The project was highly secretive, but when the veil was finally lifted, the world was stunned when they were introduced to the Segway Transporter. The device incorporates sophisticated electronics and a gyroscope that allow it to self-balance, and moves, stops and turns based on subtle changes in the driver’s posture. Today, the Segway’s progeny include the ubiquitous “hover boards” that every kid seems to have. But Kamen’s invention also led to the development of an extraordinary device that has changed the lives of thousands of people: a remarkable wheelchair that, thanks to its gyros, can convert from a standard four-wheel chair to a two-wheel chair, in the process lifting the occupant up to eye level with an adult. It can even climb stairs. 

 But Kamen was an inventor long before he created the Segway. While he was still a college student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1972, he invented a wearable device called the ambulatory infusion pump. It changed the lives of diabetics, freeing them from having to worry about injecting themselves with insulin. The pump did it for them.

But he didn’t stop there. After creating the ambulatory infusion pump, Kamen went after a solution for patients with severe kidney disease who had to travel to dialysis centers for the treatments they needed to survive. He invented a portable machine that allowed patients to give themselves dialysis treatments at home, while sleeping. In 1993, it was named Medical Product of the Year.

The list goes on: flexible foot prostheses, artificial skin grafts, innovative battery designs, and plenty of others, all created by experienced, gifted innovators and inventors—and dare I say it, with a small bit of pride, Baby Boomers.

The truth is, every generation yields its own crop of gifted people who make important  contributions to science, engineering, the arts, medicine, and society at-large. But without the contributions of those who came before, nothing we enjoy today would exist. The Boomers stood on the shoulders of giants from the Greatest and Silent Generations, just as Gen-X, the Millennials and Gen-Z stand on Boomer shoulders, and just as the next generations to arrive will stand on theirs. It’s easy to criticize those who came before, but it’s also not much of a stretch to recognize that the current generations of any era wouldn’t be where they are or have what they have without them. So instead of looking for the failures of prior generations, maybe we all need to take a moment to recognize their successes—and how those successes benefit us. Of course, if you still want to blame the Boomers for the Internet, mobile telephony, and the commercial success of the global semiconductor industry that makes literally EVERYTHING work, I guess I’m good with that.