It was a TED conference tradition that the audience knew well. On stage was their host, conference founder Richard Saul Wurman, in yet another outrageous getup—perhaps an iridescent purple scarf cascading over a fuzzy orange sweater. And he always kicked off the annual confab with the following bellow:

“Welcome to the dinner party I've always wanted to have, but couldn't!”

A chorus of TEDsters, as conference devotees called themselves, would chant with him.

And what a party it was.

Wurman invited only people he found interesting—people like Bill Gates, Yo Yo Ma, Jonas Salk, Timothy Leary, Rev. Billy Graham, and Quincy Jones.

But between speeches by Nobel Prize winners and C.E.O.'s, he also booked magicians and jugglers. Once, for the heck of it—and also because it was so beautiful—he had the glass artist Dale Chihuly  set up his colorful sculptures all over the conference hall. Another time, he featured a lecture on cockroaches.

“Running TED and being a magazine editor are very similar,” Wurman says. "You get to indulge your interests and find out about things you don't know about."

Now 72, Wurman sold TED and hasn't run it for more than five years. The author of more than 80 books, including guides and atlases, he now heads up a venture called 19.20.21 to collect and organize information on major cities of the world.

But his legacy at TED endures.

An architect by training, Wurman founded the Technology, Entertainment, and Design Conference in 1984—long before ideas about convergence entered popular parlance. He wanted to bring together professionals from those fields, he says, just because they fascinated him.

“Richard is one of the more unique people in the world,” says Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway personal transporter and a longtime conference enthusiast. "You sit down and have a conversation with him, whether it's about classical music or quantum mechanics or protenomics or astrophysics—he's passionately interested and has enormous insights. TED is sort of a manifestation of his broad-based interests and passions.”

As host, Wurman always sat on stage. When something moved him deeply, he has been known to erupt in tears, or let loose occasional profanity. Once, during an animal act, the audience gasped as Wurman—oblivious to the perils—rose to his feet and kissed a large black bear.

Though now under different ownership and management, TED continues to attract luminaries in technology, business, arts and sciences. The conference seems less whimsical and more “grown up” now, with a greater emphasis on social responsibility, longtime TEDsters say.

But it still adheres to rules that Wurman laid down all those years ago, rules that make TED unique in the conference world:

Wurman never introduced speakers because he felt it wasted time—that’s what printed programs are for.

He loathed long speeches because they might bore. So he mandated that every talk or performance at TED be short. To this day, TED speeches last no longer than 20 minutes.

Wurman also prohibited breakout sessions to maintain audience unity, and barred panel discussions. Panel speakers, not having sole responsibility to sustain audience attention, can get lazy preparing for their talk and end up saying not much of anything of substance. So virtually every TED speaker still goes at it alone.

And, in Wurman's world, there are absolutely no lecterns.
Standing behind one, he says, “allows you to read your speech. It also protects your groin. If your groin wasn't protected, you'd be more vulnerable”—and able connect with the audience on a deeper, more emotional level.

“I developed a conference I would like to go to,” he says.

See Portfolio.com's full coverage of the 2008 TED Conference