July 2008 Issue
[Excerpt]
Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.
by Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb July 2008
This year marks the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary moment. In 1958 the United States government set up a special unit, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (arpa), to help jump-start new efforts in science and technology. This was the agency that would nurture the Internet.
Internet Pioneers
Get more stories straight from the mouths of those who lived them in our special collection of oral histories. Plus: See our slide show of Internet pioneers. Photograph by Christian Witkin.
This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mosaic, the first widely used browser, which brought the Internet into the hands of ordinary people.
Millions of words—multiplied and sent forth by the technology itself—have been written on the world-changing significance of the Internet, for good or ill, and the point hardly needs belaboring. Surprisingly, few books have been written that cover the full history of the Internet, from progenitors such as Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider up through the entrepreneurial age of our own times. Not many people recall that the first impetus for what became the technology of the Internet had its origins in Cold War theorizing about nuclear warfare.
To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it.
Chapters:
I: The Conception
II: The Creation
III: The Web
IV: The Browser Wars
V: Going Public
VI: Boom and Bust
VII: Modern Times
VIII: The Last Word
Internet Pioneers
IV: The Browser Wars
By 1995 the Netscape Navigator browser dominated the market. On December 7, 1995, Microsoft C.E.O. Bill Gates gave a speech to his employees outlining Microsoft’s aggressive new approach to the Internet. He named Netscape as a target and rallied a team of top-notch programmers to build Internet Explorer. The event is known in the industry as Pearl Harbor Day.
Lou Montulli: From a scientific point of view none of us really respected Microsoft. There was definitely a sense of: They’ve put out of business three or four major companies, and they did it simply by copying what they did and outpricing or outmaneuvering them in the market. This is a general feeling of computer scientists everywhere, that Microsoft doesn’t tend to innovate as much and really just enters the market late, takes it over, and then stays at the top.
Thomas Reardon was 21 years old when Bill Gates offered him a senior position at Microsoft, in 1991. Reardon became a program manager for Internet Explorer.
Thomas Reardon: I was the first at Microsoft to know about Netscape. I remember calling down there and saying, Hey, I’m with Microsoft, and I’m looking around at all these people who started Web browsers because I think we’re going to do one inside of Windows and we want to know if we might look at your technology as a source for this, do a license deal, or we buy your technology. And they told me basically to go fuck off.
In June 1995, Microsoft dispatched representatives, including Reardon, to Netscape’s corporate offices in Silicon Valley to discuss browser technology.
Thomas Reardon: I know it sounds like I was big bad Microsoft. You have to remember I was 24 years old here, so I wasn’t exactly a captain of industry. The big meeting that people have talked about that was really at the heart of the government’s anti-trust trial is a meeting we had in June. We tried to have a relationship with Netscape.
Gary Reback, with the firm Carr & Ferrell, in Palo Alto, was Netscape’s lawyer and would be instrumental in persuading the Justice Department to prosecute Microsoft.
Gary Reback: A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us. But if you want to do something smaller, that just hooks in with our stuff, we’ll give you the non-Microsoft part of the market to work with. And we’ll sort of draw a line, and you’ll have part of the market and we’ll have part of the market.
How the Web Was Won
Thomas Reardon: The government’s argument that we went down there Mafia-style, telling Netscape that they have to do a deal with us or they were going to find a dead-horse head in their bed in the morning—it was kind of absurd. It turns out Marc was sitting in the meeting, taking notes on his laptop. They had contacted this famous anti-trust lawyer, Gary Reback. They had been working with him. They kept asking us these really loaded and weird questions. We thought we were down there for a business meeting, technology meeting, engineering meeting. And then they ended up taking all the minutes of that meeting, you know, and sending it out to this anti-trust attorney, who then turned it over to the D.O.J. that night. It was just a bunch of bullshit.
Hadi Partovi was the group program manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. He later co-founded Tellme Networks and is president of iLike. Jim Barksdale was Netscape’s president.
Hadi Partovi: Both Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale were trash-talking basically. I mean, there was a competition between the companies, but it got to the point where they felt they were far enough ahead that they might as well trash-talk to build up the perception that these guys are going to win. On the one hand, you know, they were the David and we were the Goliath. On the other hand, Internet Explorer only had 5 percent market share in the Web-browser world, and nobody had even heard of it when we started out. And it definitely got people’s competitive juices up. Marc Andreessen had said something along the lines of “Windows will be reduced down to being a poorly debugged bag of device drivers.” And what that means is basically the relative value of Windows will be pretty much meaningless.
Thomas Reardon: Andreessen said that Windows was just a piece of shit. Well, that became a call to arms for us. We had this famous meeting called the Pearl Harbor Day meeting that year. Bill was going from talking about the Internet to: O.K., now we need a battle plan. The Internet Explorer team went from 5 people to 300.
Hadi Partovi: I personally printed out the strongest quotes from the Netscape people, with their faces, so if you walked down the hallway of the Internet Explorer team, you’d see the faces of one of these Netscape executives and what they said.
Jim Clark: Microsoft was making it very clear that they were going to kill us. We were trying to negotiate deals where Compaq and Gateway and all these P.C. manufacturers would bundle our Web browser. And Microsoft threatened them. Microsoft threatened them that if they did they would revoke their license to Windows. So, needless to say, everyone backed off.
Jim Clark
Thomas Reardon: We had an intensely competitive battle. We were releasing browsers every six months. The amount of software that got written in relation to the Web in that period of time was just insane.
For two and a half years Internet Explorer ate away at Netscape’s lead. The Browser Wars reached a pivotal moment when Microsoft offered Internet Explorer as a free feature in Windows.
In 2000, U.S. District Court judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft had illegally held a monopoly on Windows and used it as a platform to crush competitors such as Netscape. He ordered that Microsoft be broken into two companies. In 2001 a federal appeals court upheld his ruling, but reversed the order to split up the company. Later that year Microsoft reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which permitted the bundling of Internet Explorer into Windows on the condition that users could choose other browsers as well.
VI: Boom and Bust
The dot-com boom of the 1990s was epitomized by the initial public offering of Netscape Communications, in August 1995; on the opening day of trading, Netscape’s stock price almost doubled in value. Before long, Silicon Valley was the scene of the most frenzied investing in modern times. Some companies, such as Amazon.com and eBay, had realistic business models; many other start-ups did not. Record losses soon followed. Between March 10, 2000, and October 10, 2002, the nasdaq Composite Index, which lists most technology and Internet companies, lost 78 percent of its value.
Hadi Partovi: There were so many start-ups where they’d have a fund-raising party. The company basically would have a business plan and a PowerPoint, no technology. They’d raise $10 million and then there’d be like $250,000 or $500,000 blown away just on the party.
Jeff Bezos: Many of those companies didn’t spend the money in a thrifty way. They would raise $25 million with a single phone call and then spend half of it on Super Bowl ads.
Hadi Partovi: Most investors didn’t understand the Internet. They just knew that these things that have “dot-com” next to them were worth a lot and were going to be really big someday, and they missed the last one. I remember DrKoop.com. And I remember they were losing money, I think $10 million a month or some crazy amount, and they still had an I.P.O. of almost a billion dollars, something really ridiculous.
Rich Karlgaard’s Upside magazine was the first to cover the Silicon Valley start-up scene.
Rich Karlgaard: The hottest job title during the frothy days was—you’d see 25-year-olds who had the title of “vice president, business development.” It was like sales without the quota. I remember asking one of these V.P., biz-dev guys how his company was doing, and he says, “Oh, it’s great, we’re into our third round of financing.” And I said, Well, how about the revenue side? Are you profitable? He says, “We’re a pre-revenue company.”
Vinod Khosla: You know, the dot-com crash was mostly a crash about stock-market perceptions, not about actual growth. If you look at data traffic on the Internet between 2000 and 2001, 2002, 2003—all the way to 2008, there hasn’t been a down year. People think of the dot-com crash, but it wasn’t a crash in the usage of the Internet.
Gary Reback: Silicon Valley had been through boom times for sure, but nothing like that Internet boom. Companies were going public—you couldn’t get a corporate lawyer in Silicon Valley. Big law firms were bringing in lawyers from Cleveland, literally. You couldn’t get an underwriter.
The Valley was in such a boom that it was crushing our infrastructure. You couldn’t go out for lunch, because there’d be no parking spaces. The streets would be clogged to get there. You couldn’t get a reservation. People stopped scheduling meetings during the day because it was like Los Angeles. It was a system out of control.
Pets.com, which sold pet supplies and accessories, is now mainly remembered for its 1999–2000 national sock-puppet advertising campaign. The company shut its doors in late 2000. Julie Wainwright was the C.E.O.
Julie Wainwright: When we went public we raised just under $80 million. We always had a plan for profitability and the company was exceeding its goals. In the first full year of operation we were going to hit about $50 to $55 million in revenue. But it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to close the gap, so I shut it down in November 2000 and actually returned money to shareholders. I didn’t run into bankruptcy.
People think we spent tons of money in advertising. And we didn’t, because I only ran ads in key markets. But people fell in love with the sock puppet. It captured people’s imaginations. When you start thinking about what Pets.com did in that short time period—we actually exceeded PetSmart and Petco and became the No. 1 brand online.
Jeff Bezos: I think the only thing I ended up with out of that investment is a sock puppet. An expensive sock puppet.
Rich Karlgaard: And after it all, there was a bumper sticker you’d see in Palo Alto: “Dear God, one more bubble before I die.”
With more and more businesses coming online, the Internet underwent an enormous build-out of its underlying infrastructure. Companies such as Global Crossing and Qwest Communications laid down thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables to accommodate the high-bandwidth services that define today’s Web.
Although the United States has never experienced a full-scale attack on communications such as the one anticipated by Paul Baran, the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, had the effect of putting a portion of the Internet under stress. The network adapted easily. Craig Partridge is a chief scientist at BBN Technologies (formerly Bolt, Beranek & Newman).
How the Web Was Won
Complete Article Text
Comments