born 1944, Plainview, Tex., U.S.
U.S. businessman.
He dropped out of high school to join the navy. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah and taught at UC–Santa Cruz (1974–78) and Stanford (1979–82). He founded Silicon Graphics in 1981 and served as its chairman 1982–94, building it into a billion-dollar company that produced workstations for graphics-intensive applications. In 1994 he cofounded Netscape Communications, whose graphical interface Web browser revolutionized the Internet by making it easy to access Internet documents.