How the Internet Happened

作者: Brian McCullough 笔记数: 83

Intro

This quote is probably apocryphal, but it does capture the early thinking when computers first began to serve man. They were to be rare, expensive oracles; and like the oracles of ancient times, they would be useful only in rare, exceptional cases.

Computers were expensive in the beginning. They were complicated and difficult and they were as big as a room (that is not hyperbolic phrasing; generally considered the first modern computer, the ENIAC occupied about 1,800 square feet and weighed almost 50 tons). The received wisdom of their rarefied utility affected their design; computers were not conceived to be user-friendly because it was never assumed a nonexpert user would interact with one.

Invented by Xerox, popularized by Apple Computers and the Macintosh, and then mainstreamed by Microsoft and its Windows operating system, the GUI was the evolutionary leap that would eventually make computers friendly to the average user.

Funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Internet’s first four connections, or “nodes,” were all at academic research centers: the University of California, Los Angeles; the Stanford Research Institute; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah.

1. The Big Bang — The Mosaic Web Browser and Netscape

THE MODERN WEB ERA began in Champaign, Illinois. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is world-famous as a leading research institution in the field of computing. The ORDVAC and ILLIAC, two of the earliest computers in the world, were built there in 1951; the university was granted Unix license number one by Bell Laboratories in 1975; and in 1985, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) was established there. In the famous science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the homicidal HAL 9000 computer states that he “became operational” in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1992, partially as a nod to the university’s prominence in the field.

The professors who ran the research programs that were the NCSA’s bread and butter assigned the projects, and the pool of “kids” in the basement coded away to the profs’ specifications.

But he was no prodigy. Built large, at six feet two, with a loud, excitable personality, he was not exactly a wallflower, and it set him apart.

At the University of Kansas, several students created the text-based Lynx browser. Pei-Yuan Wei developed the ViolaWWW browser while pursuing a degree at UC Berkeley.

In a little over a month of nearly round-the-clock coding, they had their browser ready. It was called X Mosaic.

No less a web authority than Tim Berners-Lee forwarded and endorsed Andreessen’s announcement.

Clark believed he had built SGI into a technology powerhouse that rivaled the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. And yet, he had nowhere near the wealth of Bill Gates or Larry Ellison to show for it.

After all, if interactive TV was the next big thing, then you could do worse than have the founder of Silicon Graphics helping you build the set-top boxes.

He [Clark] has this Jedi Mind Trick speech where he brings us all upstairs and we all come down saying, ‘Yes, we’re going to make a company! It will be great!’

All hands were tasked with speedily producing what the team of young coders had dubbed “Mozilla,” suggesting that the new browser was a monster set to devour their previous brainchild, Mosaic.

He described working for as many as thirty-nine straight hours, catching catnaps under the desk in his cubicle, missing meetings because of fatigue, hoping to catch his “second or third or eighteenth wind.”

“Most Intriguing People,” alongside a young golfer named Tiger Woods.

A good example of this was the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology, which Netscape would pioneer. This is the encrypting technology that makes secure interactions on the web possible.

The product would be free. Well, in a winking, knowing sort of way. Upon release, the web browser would be available for anyone to download so-called beta versions (“beta” means an early version of the software; a work in progress). However, if you wanted to own the standard version of the software—the final one, with all the features…

“It’s basically the Microsoft lesson, right?” Andreessen asked. “If you get ubiquity, you have a lot of options, a lot of ways to benefit from that. You can get paid by the product that you are ubiquitous on, but you can also get paid on products that benefit as a result.”

As this was going on, on October 12, 1994, the marathon sessions of hard work in Mountain View paid off. A beta version of the new web browser, version 0.9 of a program eventually called Netscape Navigator, was made available on the web for anyone to download at midnight.

Indeed, no sooner was Navigator 1.0 out the door than the team started work on version 2.0.

A few weeks after the IPO, Andreessen was quoted in InfoWorld magazine saying that Netscape would turn Windows into “a mundane collection of not entirely debugged device drivers.”

2. Bill Gates “Gets” the Internet — Microsoft and Internet Explorer

Netscape rebuffed Microsoft’s overtures completely, and somewhat rudely. Netscape did not have any intention of doing business with Microsoft.

Much of the related hype Netscape received came with those pointed barbs that seemed to be aimed squarely at Microsoft. All those headlines suggesting Marc Andreessen as the next Bill Gates? That couldn’t help but turn Gates’s head.

Andreessen had seen: the browser could be a software platform capable of supplanting traditional operating systems like Windows. If, in the future, people could live their lives and do their work entirely online, then what would be the need for a desktop OS?

They would follow the traditional Microsoft game plan: the first version would be a copycat product that didn’t have to be great; it just had to be good enough. Subsequent versions would be better.

On its release in August 1995, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be free. Not kinda-sorta free, wink-wink free, like Navigator was.

3. America, Online — AOL and the Early Online Services

The quid pro quo was implicit, if not explicit.

Even the humble .gif graphics file format, still popular on the web today, was developed in-house at CompuServe.

“You were a twenty-two-year-old blonde with a pinup’s body or a fifty-five-year-old divorced guy with a beer belly.”

“We didn’t trust Microsoft’s motives, because we knew they could emerge as a major competitor,” Case later said. “At one point in the meeting, [Russell] Siegelman [a Microsoft executive who eventually ran MSN] proposed a 50-50 joint venture, but from our point of view, it was ‘OK, we’ll help you build it, teach you all about it, then just when it gets interesting, you’ll shoot us.’” As another AOL executive put it, AOL was offered an unappealing choice: become “a footnote on Bill Gates’ resume,” or stand and fight and maybe become “the king of the online industry.”

5. Hello, World — The Early Search Engines and Yahoo

A convention among software developers at the time was to name projects “Yet Another Something Something.” For example, YAML was Yet Another Markup Language. So, Yang and Filo settled on the name Yahoo!, which they claimed stood for Yet Another Hierarchical, Officious Oracle. The exclamation point was irreverent and fun.

When Netscape launched its beta browser late in 1994, it decided to make Yahoo the default link when a user clicked the DIRECTORY button on the top menu of the browser. No one could have anticipated it beforehand, but having a button in Navigator’s menu bar was almost as valuable as having an icon on the Windows desktop.

The first-mover advantage meant that Yahoo had a big head start in the land grab for market and mind share among early web devotees. This was a lead that was Yahoo’s to lose.

6. Get Big Fast — Amazon.com and the Birth of Ecommerce

Pioneers of new technologies are rarely the ones who survive long enough to dominate their categories; often it is the copycat or follow-on names that are still with us to this day: Google, not AltaVista, in search; Facebook, not Friendster, in social networks.

7. Trusting Strangers — eBay, Community Sites and Portals

A lot of this comes from geography and timing. Silicon Valley came into being in the 1960s and 1970s. Cold War–era defense- and space-research spending seeded the technology industry in the Valley, while the nearby counterculture havens of Berkeley and San Francisco infused flower-power thinking among the denizens. So, Silicon Valley has always been equal parts egghead libertarianism and acid-tinged hippie romanticism.

Why eBay? Well, after cashing out from the eShop sale, he had done some web consulting and freelance work and decided to do so under the rubric Echo Bay Technology Group, a name he simply liked. However, the domain EchoBay.com was taken, so he registered what he considered to be the closest approximation: eBay.com.

eBay would also piggyback on many of the hottest fads in collectibles, of which there were quite a few in the late 1990s. Furbies. Tickle Me Elmos. Tamagotchi. But the greatest of these was the Beanie Baby craze of roughly 1996 to 1999, exactly mirroring the rise of eBay.

8. Blowing Bubbles — The Dot-com Era

It was all that much more impactful because it happened to the baby boomers, the megageneration. Between 1946 and 1964, 76 million Americans were born, and by the 1990s, this cohort was entering its forties, the time that most people begin saving for retirement. If the baby boomers were now interested in investing, that meant America was now interested in investing. The sheer weight of their numbers, backed by the accumulated wealth from their prime earning years, meant that there was suddenly a mountain of money looking for a place to go.

Turning a $2,000 investment into $77,000 is phenomenal on any time scale, but to do so in less than thirty months is unheard of.

It was “an authentic cultural phenomenon,” as Fast Company magazine described it, “broadcast to nursing homes, yuppie gyms, dorm rooms, hotel lobbies, pilot ready rooms, and restaurants” so that Americans could get a quick update on their favorite stock or the hot new IPO that was hitting the market.

9. Irrational Exuberance — The Dot-com Bubble

Fly-by-night bonanza.

At the end of 1999, in its final issue of the twentieth century, Time seemed to make the supremacy of the dot-coms official when it named Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as its Person of the Year. At age thirty-five, he was the fourth-youngest person to receive this accolade, after Charles Lindbergh, Queen Elizabeth II and Martin Luther King Jr. James Kelly, Time’s deputy managing editor, wrote that Bezos had been selected because “he has helped guarantee that the world of buying and selling will never be the same.”

Bezos responded: “Anything, with a capital A.”

In February 2000, Wall Street was shocked when Amazon announced it had sold a $672 million convertible bond offering. Why did Amazon need so much cash, unless it feared it was running out?

10. POP! — Netscape vs. Microsoft, AOL + Time Warner and the Nuclear Winter

It sure as heck seemed to Netscape like Microsoft was leveraging its operating system monopoly to kill the market for web browsers.

The ensuing Microsoft trial was like a bonfire-of-the-vanities-style sideshow playing out in the background during the headier months of the dot-com bubble.

Critics saw this as little more than a slap on the wrist.

But the fact that Netscape ended up swallowed by AOL, the “training wheels for the Internet,” seemed especially ignominious. “I mean, OK … Microsoft? A worthy opponent!” says original Netscape engineer Aleks Totic. “Did they fight fair? No, they did not. But … it’s understandable. Now, being in a market where Netscape got sold to AOL? That was just depressing.”

Especially given the way it all turned out, many have painted the AOL/Time Warner merger as a smash-and-grab job: savvy Internet punks swooping in and taking advantage of clueless old-media types.

By 1999, when Internet stocks were worth more than gold, and when new phenomena like Napster were driving home the lesson that web technologies could be existentially threatening to old media companies and their distribution models…

The merger seemed like a home run to her and nearly everyone else.

It was the weak constitution of all those “iffy” dot-coms that had hit the market toward the tail end of 1999 that tipped the scales.

That $1,000 put into Amazon’s IPO, which had climbed in value to more than $61,000 at the bubble’s height, was worth about $3,400 at the end of September 2001, when Amazon was trading under $6.

Cuban had already cashed out early by selling his company, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo. But he didn’t trust the insane valuation of the Yahoo stock he had been paid in, so he set up a hedge against his Yahoo holdings, called an “options collar.” When Yahoo’s stock subsequently collapsed, his entire fortune was protected. “He probably extracted more from the initial Internet bubble than anyone else,” the hedge fund manager and author James Altucher said of Cuban.

Compare Cuban’s story to that of Toby Lenk, founder of eToys, who saw his paper fortune of $600 million wither away because he refused to bail out on his company’s stock. Is there any great nobility in Lenk’s determination to go down with his ship versus Cuban’s astute decision to get out when the getting was good? Probably not. Or consider Paternot and Krizelman, who in May of 1999, when TheGlobe stock was still at $20 a share, sold 80,000 shares and 120,000 shares for roughly a combined $4 million (original investor Michael Egan sold TheGlobe shares worth more than $50 million). Paternot, Krizelman and Egan did nothing ethically or legally wrong.

AOL dial-up subscriber numbers, which peaked at 26.7 million in 2002, dwindled away, as Americans shifted over to broadband connections with DSL companies or to cable ISPs like Time Warner Cable’s own Road Runner Internet service.

11. I’m Feeling Lucky — Google, Napster and the Rebirth

Page wrote in his proposal, “this technology will give Excite a substantial advantage and will propel it to a market leadership position.” All he asked for in exchange was a seemingly reasonable $1.6 million in cash and Excite stock—a nice little payday—and then he and Brin would return to finishing their doctorate work. Excite countered with $750,000, which Page and Brin rejected.

The incumbent search players’ failure to scoop up the PageRank technology has become infamous in business lore as one of the great missed opportunities of all time.

Bell claims that there was no way he could justify upsetting his existing talent, especially when some of them were founders of the company. “Ultimately I couldn’t stomach the cultural risk that Larry insisted on,” Bell says.

Through nothing but word of mouth, the service grew increasingly popular, serving more than 10,000 queries a day by late 1998.

Page and Brin would raise an additional $1 million when David Cheriton kicked in some money, as well as a few others, including former Netscape executive Ram Shriram and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.

Instead of splurging $800,000 on setups from IBM or Oracle, they spent a mere $250,000 to cobble together a rack of eighty-eight computers to meet their number-crunching needs.

But not everyone—even the smartest of the smart—could make the cut at Google.

Most music was easily compressed and a listener was none the wiser.

It turned out that the key to mastering the nuances of human singing was an obscure a cappella recording of a minor hit from the 1980s, Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.”

The Napster phenomenon was covered in the press as some sort of grass-roots movement that bubbled up out of nowhere, largely because that was the image Napster, the company, later fed to the press.

And instead of taking more than a decade and billions of dollars to do so, Napster had attracted that many users on the backs of half a dozen barely postpubescent hackers and about $400,000 worth of hardware.

But if Napster was a supernova, it was also the star-crossed startup of the Internet Era.

Napster played up the publicity for all it was worth. It cast itself simultaneously as (1) the little guy getting beat up on by greedy corporations, (2) the cutting-edge technology company that the dinosaurs of old media were threatened by and (3) the champion of everyday users who just wanted to consume their music the way they wanted.

Napster was the first signal that the web had changed consumer behavior in a fundamental way. Today, we live in a world where consumers not only expect, but demand, infinite selection and instant gratification.

12. Rip. Mix. Burn. — The iPod, iTunes and Netflix

The “i” in iMac was meant to suggest an innovative, but also individualized, device—a return to the “personal” in personal computing. But the “i” was also meant to suggest “Internet.”

The general public has intuited that the Internet and digital technology enable a world of unlimited selection and instant gratification.

13. A Thousand Flowers, Blooming — PayPal, AdWords, Google’s IPO and Blogs

Elon Musk, of course, went on to found Tesla. Peter Thiel became the first major investor in Facebook. Early PayPal employee Jeremy Stoppelman founded Yelp. Max Levchin founded Slide. And PayPal alumni had a hand in founding, funding or contributing to the development of so many subsequent companies (LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Palantir, and Square, just to name a few) that folks in technology often refer to a “PayPal Mafia” that runs Silicon Valley today.

It became a classic win-win-win: Google started making more money per search than Overture did, advertisers felt like they were paying less per click while reaching more potential customers, and users felt like they were getting supplemental search results, in the form of ads that were often quite useful.

14. Web 2.0 — Wikipedia, YouTube and the Wisdom of Crowds

But that was the issue: how was YouTube anything but Napster 2.0, with all the inevitable liability headaches that would imply?

Napster had attempted to make the argument that it enjoyed legal immunity under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a neutral platform. Service providers and platforms were protected as “safe harbors” under the law, provided they quickly and efficiently remove copyrighted material when notified.

Going scorched earth against Napster had not saved the music industry.

Little did Murdoch know that, even as he said those words, the battle for social networking was already over, and Myspace would join SixDegrees and Friendster as an also-ran in the history books.

15. The Social Network — Facebook

It didn’t help that the News Feed near-fiasco came on the heels of a less publicized but no less demoralizing failure from earlier in the summer.

Given the stumbles of the past few months, nearly everyone was now in favor of a sale—especially the VC investors, but plenty of rank-and-file Facebook employees as well.

17. One More Thing — The iPhone

The problem of the phone accidentally turning on in a user’s pocket was solved when a UI designer noticed the sliding lock and unlock mechanism on airplane bathroom doors. Thus, “slide to unlock” was born.

At the last minute, the engineers identified a “golden path,” a specific set of demo actions that Jobs could perform in a specific order that afforded them the best chance of the phone making it through the presentation without a glitch. For example, Jobs could send an email and then surf the web, but if he reversed the order, the phone tended to crash. The engineers also masked the WiFi that Jobs would be using onstage so that audience members couldn’t jump on the same network and possibly clog it up. AT&T brought in a portable cell tower to make sure Jobs would have a strong signal when he made his own first demo phone call. But, just to be on the safe side, the engineers hard-coded all the demo units to display five bars of cell strength, whether that happened to be true or not.

Outro

There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association.

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

… Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them.