In the 1920s and 1930s the movie industry crawled out of the primordial stew of Southern California, hatched by a few extravagant nomads exploring the edge of innovation.

Or perhaps it was just genius lunacy.

One toted a note pad and pencil scratching out cartoons. Another dreamed of ways of putting vaudeville on film.

The names meant nothing then. Disney. Warner. Scores more. Entrepreneurs armed with only imagination.

Do you remember where the Dow Jones Industrial Average was then? Few do. It wasn't important, didn't drive the dreams of film-makers who valued the creative process, the push of progress, the call of innovation.

The Dow's ebb and flow weren't the reason for the film industry growing.

There were naysayers all along the way.

Disney almost gave up on its Mouse early on, based on advice from Walt's brother Roy who remarked that people didn't want mice anymore.

Warner thought talking movies were something the public wouldn't want. And of course now Mickey is a symbol for a multi-billion empire and Warner talks quite a lot in movie, music, TV and radio.

It happened without the Dow, NASDAQ or S&P. It wasn't charted against the GDP or number of new home starts. Disney and Warner carried on without any input from the Federal Reserve.

Through wars, famine, depressions, booms and busts. Even a few births, marriages and deaths also.

LPs, 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs and MP3s haven't changed a C note or a G chord.

Disney and Warner went from a couple guys in a backlot in Hollywood to conglomerates through a period of tremendous technological change: radio, TV, VCR, cable, satellite, Internet.

Went through bread lines, soup kitchens, returning W.W.II veterans, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War. Peace. Love. Hippies.

Watergate. Clinton-Lewinsky.

The Dow marched up and down but didn't drive the train. Companies that persevere, adapt, absorb new technologies, learn from mistakes, get ahead.

In 50 years nobody will likely remember where NASDAQ was. They will remember the origins of a networked world and for better or worse, its impact on their lives.

Now more than ever innovation that leverages an understanding of where we are in the technological cycle is needed.

Amid a dot-com collapse, telecom turbulence, CNBC-inspired attention-deficit investing we are doing the equivalent of scratching our note pads with mouse figures, winding film on home-made reels on the edge of the digital frontier.

We are as far from what a networked world will be as Walt Disney was from Space Mountain.

It has nothing to do with NASDAQ. It has nothing to do with the Dow.

Imagine that.