You want to talk about change? Talk to Stepan Pachikov, who in the past 20 years started technology companies Evernote and Paragraph. He now owns homes in Silicon Valley and New York. He used to live in Moscow, where Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 tentatively unfurled glasnost. When Pachikov started a software company there a couple years later, it was still illegal to run a business.

"I didn't have any business life in 1987," Pachikov says. "I was listening to Voice of America and BBC through muffling stations—I am not sure I use the word properly. Who could imagine the largest Intel plant would be placed in China? Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore! Bulgaria is an EC country! Unbelievable!"

In 1987, IBM sold PS/2 computers ($1,350 without the optional hard drive that, today, could barely hold five MP3 songs) and Compaq sold a "portable" PC the size of an overnight suitcase.

The Internet was something used mainly by the kind of men who worked in labs and wore short-sleeve white dress shirts. Quantum Computer Services, founded in 1985, in 1987 changed its name to America Online, even though America was not even remotely online.

"At the time, I said a personal computer was an oxymoron, sort of like personal sex—you can do it but it's more fun if you're not on your own," says consultant and author Don Tapscott, who made his mark in the 1990s with Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology. "We got a lot of resistance to the idea that networked computers would change the world."

Speaking of technological transformation, in 1987 Microsoft bought a little company called Forethought for all of $14 million. Forethought had just developed a piece of software called PowerPoint. That's right—before 1987, there was no PowerPoint. Today, it seems as though the entire American economy would collapse without it.

Ben Cohen in 1987 was helping business partner Jerry Greenfield run a blossoming little Vermont outfit called Ben & Jerry's. The pair was depicted as idealistic hippies for capping executive pay, investing in the community and giving some of the company's profits to charity.

Conventional wisdom said business was supposed to be run like a war. Wess Roberts in 1987 published the hugely successful Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, about how to manage like the famous fifth century plunderer.

"The words 'socially responsible business' were not well known," Cohen says. "It's amazing to look back, and in only 20 years, the idea of business having a larger responsibility to society has become mainstream."

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