Working without a 'Net: When the Superhighway Was a Cowpath

Working without a 'Net: WHEN THE SUPERHIGHWAY WAS A COWPATH

COMPUTERS TOUCH SO MUCH IN OUR LIVES that it's easy to forget they haven't been around long. Of course, the 1940s probably sound as though they happened a long time ago — ancient history even — to many of the people you'll read about in this book. Most weren't even born. (Hey, I wasn't even born!)

But Internet Marketing? That's a different story. Internet Marketing is several generations younger. Even I remember the days before the World Wide Web brought up Google. You know, we might have seen banner ads and pay-per-click a few centuries ago if Benjamin Franklin and Charles Babbage had ever crossed paths, but Ben died the year before Chuck was born. Neither of them lived to see a vacuum tube, let alone a PC, but they both played a role in the history of Internet Marketing. I'll spare you the technical talk. All you need to know is that Franklin revolutionized (no pun intended) advertising, and Babbage conceived of the first "analytical machine" — that is, the first computer. (Too bad he was so busy perfecting the plans that he never got around to building it. I know people with online businesses like that.)

Dreamers and Geeks

In the introduction to this book, I said that most of the pioneers of Internet Marketing could hardly be considered computer geniuses. That's true. But many of the people who paved the way for Internet Marketing were certifiably brilliant in the field — genuine geeks. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that until mathematicians had computers, the word geek was used only for those weird carnival dudes who did things like bite the heads off live chickens.)

Don't worry — I have no intention of droning on about punch cards and programming here; tracing the connections that make things happen can be fascinating, but I don't really want this book to weigh more than my laptop, so I'll keep to just a few of the most relevant contributors. I could ignore them all, but I promised a history book, so I have to mention something from the old days. Besides, my editor thinks that adding the occasional endnote makes the book look more official — and they're also useful for giving credit where credit it due. And as you'll read later on, that's a key tenet of successful Internet Marketing.

Here's one of those geniuses: Vannevar Bush (no relation to the political family). When things get really dull at your next party, maybe you can liven things up by mentioning that he was the first to predict something that was, for all intents and purposes, hypertext — without which there would be no Internet Marketing as we know it today. He grumbles about how difficult it is to retrieve and make use of all the information piling up (if he felt overloaded then, imagine what he'd think if he were alive today) given the primitive resources of his day (filing cabinets, oh my! or card catalogs at the library, good heavens!!):

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path. The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. ... Trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade ... yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

— Vannevar Bush, 1945

Enough about him. Fast forward two decades after ENIAC — the first large scale, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed — to the 1960s, and you come to Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider. "Lick," as he preferred to be called, was another visionary. Like many of the people you'll read about later in this book, his contribution came not through dumb luck but through the ability to draw on seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge and experience to synthesize a cogent thought. That is, nothing he did or learned was wasted. As an undergraduate, he studied math, physics and psychology, a seemingly peculiar mix but one that served him (and us, as it turns out) quite well. It played into his incredibly radical belief that engineers ought to know a little something about humans. (He actually introduced a course — Psychology for Engineers.)

Lick was heavily involved in the SAGE project (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), a computer-operated air defense system. Machines collected data, and humans decided what to do with it. WWII had inspired military researchers to delve into ergonomics, and an Army lieutenant named Alphonse Chapanis revealed the startling notion that pilots would have fewer crashes if their instrument panels were actually designed logically rather than randomly. At the time, they were all a confusing jumble of dials and buttons.

In 1960, perhaps inspired by these decades-old concepts, Lick wrote a now- famous paper called "Man-Computer Symbiosis." In it he proposed yet another radical idea: people should be able to interact with computers.

Until then, the buzz was all about artificial intelligence — feeding information into a computer and letting it crunch away and spit out answers, translations, and other data. Lick had this crazy idea that people ought to be able to sit down with a computer terminal (and at this point, that's all they were — dumb keyboards that connected to the real brains, the mainframe computer) and do things like send and retrieve information and then manipulate it. He would have loved the idea of a "personal computer."

Lick became program manager of IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office), a newly created offshoot of the Department of Defense's Advanced Projects Research Agency (then called ARPA, renamed DARPA, then re-renamed ARPA and now called DARPA. Gotta love the military ...). At IPTO, Lick's role involved choosing to fund those projects that showed promise, and he chose well. Of key importance to us is that he believed in Douglas Englebart's Knowledge Augmentation Laboratory. From this lab came the "mouse," the idea of "cut and paste," and the ability for people to actually interact with what they saw on the computer screen. (The brain was still a mainframe, though).

In 1962, Lick wrote a memo. His ideas there earned him the moniker "Father of the Internet." Building on his idea that humans should be able to interact with machines easily and logically, he described his vision — a "galactic network" with computers all around the world connected to each other and being used for things like commerce, communication and financial transactions, all operated through a graphical user interface point-and-click operation. In other words, the Internet.

ARPAnet

Lick didn't stay long at IPTO but went back to his research, and eventually returned to M.I.T. where he directed Project MAC (which stands for Multiple Access Computer ... or Machine-Aided Cognition ... or Man And Computer — no one is quite sure). Project MAC developed the first operating system to use a hierarchical file system (think: folders) called Multics; engineers involved in that project went on to create UNIX. When he left IPTO, Lick made sure that his successor shared his vision and ARPA did develop the first "galactic network": ARPAnet.

ARPAnet started out as just three terminals at ARPA, each connected by telephone line to a different mainframe: the Q-32 at Systems Development Corporation (SDC) in Santa Monica, CA; a computer at UC Berkeley ("Project Genie," another of Lick's creations, a smaller Project MAC); and the Multics/TX-2 in the M.I.T. lab. The terminals sat in the office of Bob Taylor, the director of IPTO (and later a founder of Xerox PARC and Digital Equipment Corporation). The terminals could talk to computers in other states, but they couldn't talk to each other, and Taylor — who had to walk from one terminal to another and log in there to contact the different mainframes — thought things would be a whole lot simpler if the terminals were connected to each other, too. When they were, that was the birth of ARPAnet — the Internet in its infancy. It was 1966.

By 1972, ARPAnet could send email. Woo-hoo!

Net Wars

The Department of Defense owned ARPAnet. Recognizing its potential, the Department of Energy created its own communication networks, MFENet and HEPNet, for its researchers. Other networks soon cropped up: USENET (Unix-based), BITNET (academic use), SPAN (NASA only), CSNET (academic and industrial use only), DECNet (corporate: Digital Equipment Corp.), XNS (corporate: Xerox), and SNA (corporate: IBM).

Naturally, none of these networks could communicate with the others. They didn't speak the same computer language.

It wasn't until the National Science Foundation and a British network (JANET) announced that they intended to link together academic communities regardless of discipline. That move began to make the networks compatible, and the TCP/IP protocol became the standard. That network became the NSF Backbone known as NSFNET. That was 1986. One by one the independent networks adopted the TCP/IP protocol and connected to NSFNET. Commercial traffic was prohibited.

The commercial sector didn't care that it couldn't use NSFNET; it developed its own networks — among them UUNET, PSI, and ANS CO+RE. By 1988, these commercial networks had finally been allowed to connect to the NSFNET, the backbone of education and research users. In theory, any industrious user could have begun doing Internet Marketing then and there.

Of course, it would be text only.

There were bulletin boards, newsgroups, and email. There was even Internet Relay Chat (a primitive version of today's chat). But there was no graphical user interface, no hypertext and no pictures. There was no World Wide Web.

From Net to Web

The Internet is not the Web. The Internet is what we call the gazillion publicly accessible computer networks connected together and capable of transferring packets of data from place to place electronically. It's boxes and wires.

According to the man who invented it, Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web is "the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." In 1980, Berners-Lee worked as a contractor at the Organisation Européenne Pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research, which, oddly enough is abbreviated as CERN), the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Berners-Lee developed ENQUIRE, a system that used hypertext (which was developed in rudimentary form in 1965) to let various researchers communicate and share data.

By 1989, CERN had become the largest Internet node in Europe, which gave Berners-Lee an idea: why not join hypertext and the Internet to make it easier to find data? (Ever wonder where "http" comes from? Hypertext Transfer Protocol.) As he put it, "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." (Sure. Like Karl Benz just had to take the wheel idea and connect it to gasoline and — ta-da! — the automobile.) He's quick to point out that Robert Cailliau helped him with the development.

The Last Component

To be honest, there was some Internet Marketing happening before this latest piece was in place, and I'll touch on this later in the book. But the really cool stuff came after the development of Internet browsers.

Browsers are software that let you interact with text and images on the screen using a user-friendly, point-and-click system based on HTML and hyperlinks (that's hypertext) from one page to another; a hyperlink could take you to the next page in a logical book-style sequence or to a page on another website on another server in another country to a sentence about a topic only peripherally related to the original. There were browsers of sorts before this, but here I'm talking about the ones that took the Internet from the realm of the technophile to people who still viewed computers as fancy calculators and typewriters. I'm talking about the browsers with pictures.

Wait! Why don't I let one of the Internet gurus take up the story for a minute? For the next page or two you'll be reading the words of Ken McCarthy talking about Marc Andreessen. Ken told me a few things I don't think you'll find in print anywhere else. I'm going to wait until a little bit later to give Ken a proper introduction.

Ken McCarthy on Marc Andreesen

THE BIRTH OF THE BROWSER

In 1993, Marc was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, studying at the National Science Foundation's National Center for Supercomputing Applications, in Champagne-Urbana. He was there for computing stuff. He was kind of a geeky guy and hadn't really found his way yet; he spent a lot of time playing basketball. He had a job in the physics lab — a work-study job that paid something like $6.85 an hour — helping out, emptying wastepaper baskets. I don't know exactly what. There he saw the Web, which was, of course, originally built for physicists by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva. Those were the original users of the Web; about fifty high-particle physicists. Marc saw that and said, "Wow, this is really cool. Why don't they put a point-and-click graphical interface on it?"

He and his friend Eric Bina got together and did just that. It's a very funny story. It worked just like the Mark Twain story where Tom Sawyer gets his friends to paint the white fence for him: Marc recruited all his hotshot programmer friends to help develop different versions of the browser — a UNIX version and so on. Then they put the browser they created, Mosaic, up where people could download it — and started giving it away. I believe it only took them a year from the start to having a million users. ...

People just don't appreciate and understand that Marc just put the thing up and gave it away. And once you downloaded it, he personally provided a huge amount of customer service. That's how I met him. I wrote him an email with a question, and he answered it. He did that for probably thousands of people in those early years. He ramped the whole thing up from zero to a million users. And then he graduated from college and got a job.

It wasn't much of a job — he was a junior engineer at a nonprofit in Silicon Valley that was working to improve computer networking throughout the Valley. That was his job. Nothing grand, nothing high profile. No one rolled out the red carpet for him. Most people just didn't really appreciate the significance of what he had done.

Then came one of those wonderful moments in time, one of those magic things that might just as easily not have happened — just as we could very easily not be having this conversation if certain things didn't happen. What happened was that Jim Clark, co-founder of Silicon Graphics, had just been sort of bounced out of his own company. He was looking for something new to do when Marc arrived. Clark was asking around, looking for a new venture, and some people — the technical people, not the business guys, but the smart technical people — said, "You really should talk to Marc Andreessen."

Well, he did, and the first thing Marc said to Jim was, "I'll do anything you want, but I don't want to do another version of Mosaic. I'll do anything, but that."

Part of the reason he said that — and this is another important part of the story — is that, well, they had created this marvel, these kids. I can't tell you how much I admire them. But as soon as it got popular, the college stepped in and said, "Hey, you did this on our time. It belongs to us." They actually took Marc Andreessen and all those guys off the Mosaic project — basically booted them out.

So as you imagine, when Marc arrived in Silicon Valley, he was quite discouraged. He created this thing, this force of nature, and it had been taken away from him. It's no surprise he didn't want to touch it again.

I like to tell this story because a lot of people when they are just getting started in business think everything just goes on a nice smooth path. They think if you hit a rock or something, it means there is something wrong with your venture or your idea or your life. Having your amazing project taken away from you — that's a pretty big rock. The fact is we wouldn't have the World Wide Web as we know it if Marc Andreessen hadn't been incredibly flexible and persistent and diligent in not only creating the idea, but also shepherding it through every step of the way. Obviously Clark convinced him to change his mind and in 1994 they founded Mosaic, which they renamed Netscape to avoid trademark problems. Jim Barksdale joined as CEO, and they became a real company.