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Sergey Brin and Larry Page came onto the stage to thé: kind of roarsand excitement that teenagers narmally reserlTE' ft)r rock stars. Dressed casually. th ey sat down. pleased at their h ernes' welcome.
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"Do you guys know the story of Google?" Page asked. "Do you wanl me to tell it?" "Yes!" the crowd shouted. Brin and Page were the duo that had created the most powerful and accessible information tool oftheir time.

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"Google was started when Sergey and l were'PhD students in computer science at Stanford University," Page began. "We didn't know exactly what we wanted ta do. l got this crazy idea that l was going to download the entire Web onto my computer. l told my advisoT that it would take a 15 week. After about a year or so, l had sorne portion of it." The students laughed. "Optimism is important," he went on. "You have to be a liule silly about .l'our goals. You should try to do things that most people would not." ln the rich history of American invention, there had never been a meteoric rise comparable to Brin and Page's. It had taken Thomas Edison a quarter century ta invent the light bulb; Alexander Graham Bell had spent many years developing the telephone; Henry Ford created the modern assembly line after decades ofwork; and Thomas Watson .Jr. labored long and hard before IBM rolled out the modern computer. But Brin and Page, in just five years, had turned a graduate school research project into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. "So l started downloading the Web, and Sergey started helping me because he was interested in making sense of the information," Page went on. "That was about eight years ago. We started working really, reaUy hard on it. We worked through holidays, and worked many, many hours a day. We started a company in Silicon Valley. And the company grew and grew and grew. That," he concluded, His 'The Google Story.'" Those two crazy kids have changed the