I'm Swedish. We have quite a few of these guys. For every "public" one of these, there are many that are absolute monster programmers that don't market themselves at all. I've worked with a few.
I'm just gonna throw in this link because I think it's great:
Among other crazy stories, Daniel is featured there. My favourite story is that the TLD .se was was ran by a guy in in his living room for years until The Swedish Internet foundation took it over.
There's also Kazaa and the guys behind The Pirate Bay. Real OG hackers from that era.
W.r.t. to your question I think it's relevant to say that "most things invented then" were "simple" ideas but hard to implement due to the tooling in that time and lack of programmers. But if you were good, you could go at it alone or with a small team. I think that it's a little bit inverted now: finding good, novel ideas in the space that can be done by one person or a small team is hard, but building and shipping it, if you do, is probably a lot easier due to OSS.
I'm just gonna throw in this link because I think it's great:
https://internetmuseum.se/english/
Among other crazy stories, Daniel is featured there. My favourite story is that the TLD .se was was ran by a guy in in his living room for years until The Swedish Internet foundation took it over.
There's also Kazaa and the guys behind The Pirate Bay. Real OG hackers from that era.
W.r.t. to your question I think it's relevant to say that "most things invented then" were "simple" ideas but hard to implement due to the tooling in that time and lack of programmers. But if you were good, you could go at it alone or with a small team. I think that it's a little bit inverted now: finding good, novel ideas in the space that can be done by one person or a small team is hard, but building and shipping it, if you do, is probably a lot easier due to OSS.
Oh and naturally the all-Swedish version is better at https://internetmuseum.se/