As Tim Krauskopf steers his 33-ton rig and its load of frozen bagels down an Illinois highway, he is indistinguishable from other truckers hauling loads across the nation. But the 41-year-old in his blue jeans and baseball cap isn't your average trucker. He owns his own small trucking firm, for starters. He's also a millionaire several times over.

What really singles out the bespectacled man from suburban Chicago is what he did before he became a trucker: At the dawn of the Internet Age in the 1990s, he was one of the 20- and 30-something whiz kids who helped make the Internet what it is today.

His status as an Internet pioneer derived partly from Spyglass Inc., a company he co-founded in 1990. It developed a groundbreaking browser software called Mosaic that Microsoft soon leased and then spun into its Internet Explorer -- now the world's most widely used browser.