The July issue of Vanity Fair is fantastic. Tons of good stuff in there: from a great story on Angelina Jolie to the now famous Clinton article. But what I found most interesting was a piece called "How the Web Was Won, An Oral History of the Internet." It's around 20 pages long and features commentary from all the heavy hitters--from Andreessen to Abrams to Cerf.
Over the course of a plane ride and three different sit downs, I got through it. And then after finishing I thought it might be beneficial, and kinda fun, to provide a Cliffs Notes version of the key milestones, commentary and quotes that I found particularly interesting or insightful.
Here it goes...
- Packet Switching is one of the first internet building blocks--The Rand Corporation conceived them around 1960.
- The culture for working with a scientist during the early development days according to Leonard Kleinrock (professor of computer science at UCLA in the 60s): "Find a good Scientist. Fund him. Leave him alone. Don't tell him how to do something... Tell him what you're interested in." (Pretty good advice.)
- Because they owned communication during the 60s and 70s, "AT&T fought packet switching tooth and nail" and missed out on early networking experiences.
- The mass production of packet switches was awarded to Bolt, Beranek & Newman over Raytheon via Government bid. BBN was chosen because of their "structure" and "people." (Agencies, take note.)
- The first packet switches were connected to the first host at UCLA in 1969. (What a year: Man on the Moon, Woodstock and the first real step in internet development.)
- Vint Cerf designs TCP and IP protocols, providing the basic linking structure of the web. He grabbed the @ sign off the keyboard to separate recipient names because that symbol wasn't taken yet.
- 1970s, computers were huge and occupied entire rooms... There were usually one or two per city. But then Apple launched a personal computer in 1977 and IBM followed in 1981. Small is good.
- 1985, Steve Case joins Control Video which later becomes America Online. They were creating IM and Chat Rooms around 1985.
- 1989, Modems were placed into PCs by IBM. Nice.
- Late 80's, email was used by some academics and the military. Who knew?
- 1988, John Poindexter was indicted for his role in Iran-contra and emails were entered into evidence. Lawyers said, "what's this email thing?"
- 1991, Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee introduced the concept of a "world wide web." (Yes, they named it---and they chose that name because it said exactly what it was.)
- 1993, first browser was invented: Mosiac by Marc Andreessen at the Univ. of Illinois. Go Illini. This allowed the access of multiple web services from a single program. Later it becomes Netscape.
- Al Gore, doesn't invent the internet, but rather funds the four national supercomputing centers that R&D it.
- 1995, Microsoft and Netscape fight for a while over browser control. (Internet Explorer/Microsoft had 5% share, Netscape pretty much had the rest.)
Consumer web brands begin...
- Pierre Omidyar (eBay founder who wrote the auction web code over a 3 day weekend): "I think what eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger."
- Craig Newmark (Craigslist founder): "I really did grow up a nerd.... This is not an exaggeration. And I felt left out all the time. Nowadays, I remember that feeling, and I want everyone to be included..."
- 1998, Matt Drudge broke the Monica/Clinton thing on the Drudge Report after Newsweek declined to publish the story.
- Internet companies went crazy. A 25 year old VP/Business Development dot com exec was quoted as saying, "We're a pre-revenue company." Classic.
- From March 10, 2000 and October 10, 2002, the NASDAQ Composite Index lost 78% of its value.
- After the drop, a Palo Alto bumper sticker read: "Dear God, one more bubble before I die."
But we rose again as a group, not as selfish individual companies and investors.
- Google grows huge. Larry Page (Founder): "You can capture the collective intelligence of all the people who are writing and use that to help the people who are searching... It's a sort of group intelligence."
- Wikipedia emerges. Jimmy Wales (Founder), abbreviated: "How do you innovate a social community? A website where every action is policed doesn't work, but complete anarchy doesn't work either. It's actually the same problem we face off-line. It's the problem of living together."
I think that's a brilliant way to look at the web these days... and I'm going to end there.
The article is great, has wonderful photos and discusses much more than above--from YouTube to Amazon to all the social networking sites and more. I suggest making the time to crack it open...
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