TED at 25
A brief history of
the conference
that’s changed the
face of invention.
BY
Nicole Dyer
IMAGINE YOU’RE A T A DINNER PARTY.
To the left of you is Walt Mossberg,

to the right is Ozzy Osbourne. Sitting directly across the table is Frank Gehry. Wait, who’s that guy next to Frank? Is that the legendary primatologist Frans de Waal? Yes, that’s Frans. Don’t look now but there’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin; the Google duo is talking to Al Gore. And next to Al is someone named Oliver Stone.

Face after face, it’s the same. Everyone is elite, everyone is brilliant,
and after eavesdropping on their conversations for ten minutes, you re-
alize that everyone is irrepressibly interesting. Feeling overwhelmed?

This is the essence of TED, the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, an annual gathering of well-heeled overachievers, from artists to business magnates, who convene to talk about the things they’re most passionate about and to share “ideas worth spreading,” as the conference tagline promises. This typically entails heady subjects like string theory, open-source architecture, and ways to save

19 84
19 94
TED’s first year; attendees
are treated to one of the
first demonstrations of
the Macintosh computer

The dot-com bubble balloons; entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, a TED regular, founds Amazon.com

1998

Microsoft CEO Nathan
Myhrvold discourses on
“Why Dinosaurs Fuck”

1984: Richard Saul
Wurman stages the
first TED conference
in Monterey, California.
The guest list includes
such luminaries as
computer scientist
Nicholas Negroponte,
founder of MIT’s
Media Lab, and Herbie
Hancock. Sony executive
Michael Schulhof talks
about the future
of media and tosses
hard shiny discs
called “CDs” into the
audience. “No one had
a machine to play them
on,” Wurman recalls.
The gathering was also
treated to one of the
first demonstrations of
the Macintosh computer.

1990: After a six-year hiatus due to budget constraints, Wurman debuts the second TED, again in Monterey, where it would remain until 2008. Frank Gehry, Laurie Anderson, and John Sculley, the former Pepsi executive who invented the Pepsi Challenge, are among the attendees.

1994: Penn & Teller, Thomas Dolby, Dean Ornish

1995: Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, gives his last speech at TED. He passes away in June. “Ricky is a mutant,” he tells the audience. “You’re all mutants and that’s why everyone here understands what’s going on.”

1992: Guest list notables: Michael Crichton, Bill Gates, Stephen Jay Gould, and Quincy Jones

Mid-1990s: The dot-com bubble balloons; venture-capital cash and lucrative stock options flow like cheap champagne. Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, a regular TED fixture, founds Amazon.com in 1994.

1995: Journalist Louis Rossetto and publishing partner Jane Metcalfe receive seed money to launch their European publication,

The Electric Word, in the U.S. under the new name of

Wired.

1998: British journalist Chris Anderson attends TED for the first time. “I thought I had come home,” he says. “I didn’t want it ever to end.” His favorite speaker: Microsoft CEO and paleontology buff Nathan Myhrvold, who gives a colorful and unexpected talk entitled “Why Dinosaurs Fuck.”

1998: Aimee Mullins, a Paralympics competitor, shows TEDsters the meaning of human resilience when she puts on her race-ready artificial legs. “That was a classic TED moment,” says Anderson. “It wasn’t so much about technology or design as it was about humanity.”

1999: Li Lu takes the TED stage 10 years after he helped organize the student protests in Tiananmen Square. “There wasn’t a sound in the room,” recalls Wurman. “He told his whole story. It took people’s breath away. I broke my rule and let him speak for 40 minutes.”

1999: Anderson launches Business 2.0; he credits the title to a conversation he had with Jeff Bezos in a bathroom during a TED conference.

MATHIEU THOUVENIN (JEFF BEZOS)

1980

1990