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RAMAT GAN, Israel — Kurt Akeley is not a household name like Bill Gates, but the company he helped co-found is a legend in Silicon Valley and in Hollywood. The company is Mountain View-based Silicon Graphics, a seriously heavy-duty designer and maker of super-computing systems. But it has applied the superbrains to such a trivial pursuit as making you scream when the dinosaurs rampage through Jurassic Park.

Silicon Graphics technology has changed the world. It has changed the world of movies, of science, education, military flight and combat simulation. It has changed the world in architecture and in product design — almost every new car in the world is designed on a Silicon Graphics workstation using software pioneered by Akeley and his teams.

They are a strange and fascinating breed, these frontiersmen of the digital high Sierras. They were in Ramat Gan in late January, their uniform blue denim shirts carving high-energy swathes through a phalanx of Israeli software engineers. Israel and Germany were chosen to host the second annual European Forum for software developers.

This is the cutting edge of computer science, and the intensive two-day forum included laboratory workshops with world experts. Akeley himself, now vice president in command of engineering for the modern dinosaur he created, flew in from California and opened the show to a thunderous rock beat and a swirling mass of gyrating silicon graphics on a huge screen.

"The spark is desire, the fuel, dedication, the aim, perfection" boomed an electronic voice. The business is deadly serious, it could have added. Akeley gave the keynote speech and though it sounds like English, these people do speak a language that needs to be learned. Three hundred programmers who also speak it sat enraptured.

Israel is cool in computer land, a tiny country with 3,000 new startup companies riding their boards ("platforms") on the digital waves crashing toward the future. That is what brings computer giants like Silicon Graphics here.

"Israel's development surprised me a few years ago," Akeley said over coffee. "Now I'm so aware of it, it's not a surprise any more. There clearly is a huge entrepreneurial interest in Israel — more than an interest, it's real action in Israel. Our competitors too have substantial design facilities here — it's a happening place."

Akeley seems typical of the new kings of the new industry. He is absurdly young and slim and carries vast intellectual power and vision with ease and humor. He is as excited about the movie- and game-makers' uses of Silicon Graphics technology as he is about the nuts and bolts of creating the complex engines.

Akeley was a research adviser at Stanford University before he co-founded Silicon Graphics in 1982. He has led the design teams for all the vast programs the company uses, including an industry standard for creating 3-D graphics known as OpenGL.

Unlike Bill Gates, he draws a line at discussing business ("I'm an engineer"), and was only reluctantly prodded into predicting the future. "Everyone else in the Valley is doing it," I told him. "Yeah, OK! I'll kick around at it."

In typical California fashion, Akeley favors "surf's-up" analogies. The key to the future lies in which waves of innovation the industries choose to ride. "Some waves, like interactive television, die not because they are not good ideas, but because their time may not have come," Akeley said.

As for his vision of the future, he said, "In other consumer technologies, the trend is away from the single device that washes your car, makes your breakfast and cleans your house, and more to specific devices that integrate easily into your life.

"Computing will move away from the idea that somewhere in the house is `the computer' and more towards the idea that you have a whole set of appliances and capabilities distributed throughout your life."