I wonder if in the world of today technology individual still have such an effect on the output. Chief Engineer Boeing vs. Airbus? Toyota vs. GM? Samsung vs. Sony?
Or it's only a legend, and the conditions in which you loc-designers operated were more important (economics, quality of the surrounding engineers...) La répartie est dans l'escalier. Elle revient de suite.
For example, the software for one complex, expensive computer system I'm familiar with was almost entirely written by one person. He disappeared for a few months and came back with the core code for the product. In another example, I know of a microwave component company with an entire product line that depends on the mathematical analysis performed by a single person.
A well-known example at Microsoft is Dave Cutler, who wrote much of the most essential code for Windows NT. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT There is some debate about this in the public sphere, but if you hunt down the VMS source code you will find his name on many of the modules--modules that were carried almost verbatim over to Microsoft...
