Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser

0:00:03 – It was this invitation to basically do anything.
0:00:05 It was this kind of great moment where you just kind of
0:00:07 felt like the future was like in front of you.
0:00:09 It’s very important to know that at this point
0:00:11 and all the way up until really 1994,
0:00:13 the overwhelming uniform universal expectation
0:00:15 was the internet would never be a business.
0:00:18 I at the time completely lacked the skill set
0:00:20 and the perspective to navigate, I would say,
0:00:23 interpersonal and in particular bureaucratic situations.
0:00:25 I had no clue how to do any of it.
0:00:26 So much of computer science at that point
0:00:28 was about optimizing scarce resources
0:00:30 because that was all you had at that time.
0:00:31 And they had spent decades figuring out how to do that
0:00:34 and we collectively decided to just break that rule.
0:00:38 – You’ve probably heard of the browser.
0:00:40 In fact, billions of people use browsers
0:00:42 as their gateway to the internet.
0:00:44 And you might even be using one right now
0:00:47 to access this very podcast recording.
0:00:50 Now in today’s episode from the Ben and Mark show,
0:00:52 Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz share the real story
0:00:54 behind the creation of Netscape,
0:00:56 a web browser co-created by Mark
0:00:58 that revolutionized the internet
0:01:01 and quite frankly, changed the world.
0:01:03 As Ben notes up top, until today,
0:01:05 this story has never been fully told
0:01:08 either in its entirety or accurately.
0:01:09 In this one-on-one conversation,
0:01:11 Mark and Ben discussed Mark’s early life
0:01:13 and how it shaped his journey into technology,
0:01:16 the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois
0:01:18 that led to the development of Mosaic,
0:01:20 a renegade browser that Mark developed as an undergrad,
0:01:23 which is widely referenced as the first widely used browser
0:01:26 and the fierce competition and legal battles
0:01:29 that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence.
0:01:31 Ben and Mark also reflect on the broader implications
0:01:34 of Netscape’s success, the importance of an open internet,
0:01:36 and the lessons that still resonate
0:01:40 in today’s tech landscape, especially with AI.
0:01:42 That and so much more.
0:01:43 I hope you enjoy.
0:01:49 – Who will decide the future of the internet?
0:01:52 Read Right On, a book by A6NZ General Partner
0:01:53 and author Chris Dixon,
0:01:55 takes on one of the most consequential questions
0:01:57 of our time, which is also the key
0:01:59 to unlocking more entrepreneurship,
0:02:02 more creativity, and more innovation.
0:02:06 From AI that compensates artists to social networks
0:02:08 that reward you for participating,
0:02:09 Read Right On shares a playbook
0:02:12 for building the next era of the internet.
0:02:14 Learn more at readrighton.com.
0:02:19 – Okay, you idiot, like this giant commercial opportunity
0:02:20 is staring you in the face.
0:02:22 You literally have like inbound sales leads,
0:02:23 like coming out of your ears,
0:02:25 like why don’t you go raise venture capital
0:02:26 and start a company?
0:02:28 And of course the answer was because I had no idea
0:02:29 that there was such a thing as venture capital.
0:02:31 – Yeah, venture capital.
0:02:34 – I literally, you know what a tractor was.
0:02:36 – Yes, exactly.
0:02:38 The content here is for informational purposes only,
0:02:41 should not be taken as legal, business, tax,
0:02:43 or investment advice, or be used to evaluate
0:02:45 any investment or security,
0:02:47 and is not directed at any investor
0:02:51 or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
0:02:53 Please note that A16Z and its affiliates
0:02:55 may maintain investments in the companies
0:02:56 discussed in this podcast.
0:02:59 For more details, including a link to our investments,
0:03:02 please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
0:03:04 – Welcome to the Mark Inventio.
0:03:06 Today is a super special episode
0:03:10 because we are going to talk about the origin
0:03:13 of the web browser and the invention of the web browser.
0:03:15 And we have one of the co-inventors
0:03:17 with us right here in Mark.
0:03:18 So it’s exciting.
0:03:21 It’s also exciting because this story’s never
0:03:25 really been told either in its entirety or accurately.
0:03:28 And so we’re gonna get a chance to do that.
0:03:30 For those of you who are so young
0:03:33 that you’re not quite sure what a web browser is anymore,
0:03:36 it is kind of how most people experience the internet.
0:03:38 So you might call it the internet.
0:03:39 It’s a thing, Chrome.
0:03:42 Let’s start at the very beginning
0:03:46 because one of the things that is kind of
0:03:49 one of the largest disinformation campaigns going
0:03:52 is this whole idea that people, entrepreneurs
0:03:55 and people who invent things are kind of born
0:03:57 with a silver spoon in their mouth.
0:03:59 And almost none of the successful entrepreneurs
0:04:02 we work with is that the case for.
0:04:04 They all come from, you know,
0:04:08 somewhere between like refugee and middle class backgrounds.
0:04:10 And you certainly were not born
0:04:11 with the silver spoon in your mouth.
0:04:14 So tell us a little bit about where you grew up.
0:04:15 You didn’t grow up in a big city.
0:04:17 You grew up in quite a small town.
0:04:18 What was that like?
0:04:21 And then what is it like growing up in?
0:04:23 How did you first encounter the internet?
0:04:25 – Yeah, so let me, if I could start our session today
0:04:28 with two disclaimers, which maybe relate to your question.
0:04:30 So disclaimer number one is we’re gonna be talking
0:04:31 about events that happened over 30 years ago.
0:04:33 – Little memory problems.
0:04:34 – Yeah, so, you know, I’m gonna tell the truth
0:04:36 as I remember it, I may get things wrong
0:04:37 or other people may have different recollections.
0:04:39 And so I have to disclaim that.
0:04:41 It’s ’cause I can’t swear to the factual accuracy
0:04:42 of stuff that was that long ago,
0:04:43 but I’ll tell the stories, I understand it.
0:04:45 And then I’d say the other story is
0:04:46 there are twists and turns along the way
0:04:48 where I would just characterize it as
0:04:50 at the time I was irritated at other people
0:04:51 for things that happened.
0:04:52 I think in the fullness of time,
0:04:54 what I realized is that I just at the time
0:04:56 completely lack the skillset and the perspective
0:04:58 to navigate, I would say interpersonal
0:05:00 and in particular bureaucratic situations.
0:05:02 I had no clue how to do any of it.
0:05:04 – Yeah, well, and so, I think when you get
0:05:07 into your background, people will kind of understand.
0:05:09 – I sometimes describe myself, I was feral
0:05:10 at this point in my life.
0:05:11 And so it’s always this thing,
0:05:13 if you could rerun prior events,
0:05:14 like with the skillset I have today,
0:05:16 I could have navigated it much better
0:05:17 and a bunch of things could have turned out different,
0:05:20 but I certainly did not have the skillset at the time.
0:05:22 So anyway, if it sounds like I’m criticizing other people,
0:05:23 it’s actually not what I intend.
0:05:26 It’s gonna be more ultimately criticizing myself
0:05:27 in the sense of whatever happened that I didn’t like
0:05:29 at the time, I think I was at least partly,
0:05:30 if not wholly responsible for.
0:05:31 – Yeah.
0:05:32 – ‘Cause I-
0:05:34 – You know, growing men can be like that
0:05:35 from time to time, you know?
0:05:38 – Yes, I would say I was raw aggression at that point
0:05:40 with very little, and yes, you’ve been, of course,
0:05:41 remembers this ’cause he met me shortly
0:05:42 after the events we were about to talk about.
0:05:45 So, first of all, the modern cliche is,
0:05:47 Elon Musk’s father had an emerald mind.
0:05:50 – Right, when he showed up in the U.S. with $2,000,
0:05:52 is the actual story, yeah.
0:05:53 – Yeah, exactly.
0:05:54 So there’s all these kind of fake histories
0:05:56 that are kind of retconned into people who grew up,
0:05:58 and in some cases, pretty tough backgrounds, yeah.
0:06:00 So I grew up in the American Midwest and rural Wisconsin,
0:06:03 and for people who haven’t spent time in Wisconsin,
0:06:04 there’s basically three Wisconsin’s.
0:06:05 They’re sort of the big city of Milwaukee,
0:06:07 which is like a, you know, kind of like a big,
0:06:09 almost like a Chicago kind of thing.
0:06:10 That’s its own world.
0:06:10 And then there’s Madison,
0:06:13 which is like a very kind of hippie college town
0:06:15 that was actually kind of a core of activity
0:06:17 in the ’60s, and then there’s the rest of Wisconsin,
0:06:20 which is completely disconnected from those two cities,
0:06:23 which has nothing to do and has no interface
0:06:24 into those two places at all,
0:06:26 and is sort of the rural Midwest,
0:06:28 which is basically a farming country.
0:06:28 And so–
0:06:30 – Probably one of the more grants, actually,
0:06:31 as I understand it.
0:06:32 – Yeah, I think that’s right.
0:06:34 If you get 10 minutes outside of either
0:06:35 Milwaukee or Madison,
0:06:38 you get into a real, real rural territory in a hurry, right?
0:06:40 And so, there were people in the farming world
0:06:41 in the Midwest, out through the 1970s,
0:06:43 that still didn’t have indoor plumbing.
0:06:44 I have memories of outhouses.
0:06:46 – Well, for a while, you didn’t have gas heat,
0:06:47 so you weren’t that far.
0:06:49 – There’s also that, exactly.
0:06:51 So, yeah, see, if you wanna heat your house,
0:06:52 you cut down some wood.
0:06:55 And so, look, it’s up north and it’s very close to Canada,
0:06:57 so it’s extremely cold.
0:06:58 And so, it’s actually ’cause it’s this amazing thing
0:07:00 where it’s sort of frozen tundra for nine months,
0:07:01 and then three months of summer.
0:07:03 You know, but mostly farming, you know,
0:07:06 a lot of dairy farming, a lot of corn to feed the cows,
0:07:07 so corn and cows.
0:07:11 And then, I would say, light manufacturing, light tourism,
0:07:12 a lot of Illinois people vacation up there,
0:07:14 go hunting, fishing, or whatever.
0:07:16 So, a little bit of that, but mostly agricultural.
0:07:18 My town was sort of the sign of the outside of town
0:07:21 forever, population, 1300 and nine.
0:07:22 The sign never changed.
0:07:23 – (indistinct)
0:07:25 whether you had 1308 or 1310.
0:07:27 – Yeah, I don’t think it actually moved around that much.
0:07:29 So, it’s probably more or less accurate the whole time.
0:07:31 And then, of course, the running joke was that’s 1300 and nine,
0:07:32 including the cows.
0:07:34 So, yeah, so very small town environment,
0:07:36 kind of lower middle class context,
0:07:38 and public eight through 12 school.
0:07:40 My school was very small, 25 kids in a class.
0:07:42 So, I feel like, whatever, 300 kids in the whole school.
0:07:45 – So, a lot of people don’t have school choice today.
0:07:46 You didn’t have teacher choice either.
0:07:48 ‘Cause here’s, I guess, one teacher for every subject.
0:07:50 – No, no, exactly.
0:07:52 And then, look, this is the 70s and then the 80s.
0:07:54 And so, this not only predates the internet,
0:07:56 but this also predates cable TV.
0:07:57 We had no cable TV.
0:07:59 Long distance phone calls were still a dollar a minute.
0:08:01 We saw actually my neighborhood growing up, actually.
0:08:03 We had a party phone line for the entire neighborhood.
0:08:04 – That’s interesting.
0:08:05 – Which is actually quite an adventure.
0:08:07 And so, there’s a single phone number for the neighborhood.
0:08:08 And so, when your phone rings,
0:08:10 everybody in the neighborhood picks up the phone.
0:08:12 This is true, this is true.
0:08:14 And then, there’s an arbitration process,
0:08:17 a verbal arbitration process for who the call’s actually for.
0:08:19 And then, the expectation is that everybody else hangs up.
0:08:21 But, you know, they don’t have to.
0:08:23 – Well, they say there are no secrets in the small town.
0:08:24 – This is one of the reasons why.
0:08:26 So, yeah, so it’s sort of, I don’t know,
0:08:29 it’s halfway between the 1930s and the 1980s or something.
0:08:31 It just is one of those places where, you know,
0:08:33 a lot of the country was like that at that point,
0:08:34 which is it hadn’t fully adapted to,
0:08:36 certainly the things that we all now take for granted.
0:08:38 And then, you asked me how to discover the internet.
0:08:40 So, I had no idea the internet even existed
0:08:41 until I went to college.
0:08:42 So, the thing I knew that existed,
0:08:43 and this is where I kind of got lucky
0:08:46 in terms of when I grew up and when I came of age,
0:08:47 is I came of age sort of precisely at the moment
0:08:49 when the PC happened.
0:08:51 And so, I was aware of, you know,
0:08:53 there were all these just amazing stories.
0:08:55 This is when Steve Jobs was on the cover of Time Magazine,
0:08:56 and you know, so there was this moment
0:08:57 when the person on the computer
0:08:58 hit the popular consciousness.
0:09:00 It was sort of built in the late ’70s,
0:09:02 and then it sort of catalyzed hard in the early ’80s,
0:09:03 especially around ’82.
0:09:04 And then, you know, our school,
0:09:05 even though it was very small,
0:09:07 started to get a handful of early computers.
0:09:09 And then, there were a wave of consumer computers
0:09:12 at that time that were actually quite inexpensive.
0:09:13 And so, there were computers at that time
0:09:16 as cheap as $200 in currency at that point, which–
0:09:18 – And this is our floppy disk.
0:09:20 So, this is pre-hard drive or post-hard drive
0:09:22 when you got your first computer.
0:09:24 – Pre-floppy disk.
0:09:25 – And tape.
0:09:27 – Cassette tape, exactly, yes.
0:09:28 – It’s a slow loader, bro.
0:09:30 You can power it a load again.
0:09:31 I remember that era.
0:09:32 – Yeah, so, for people who don’t remember,
0:09:33 but before floppy disks,
0:09:35 you would literally hook up a cassette tape player.
0:09:37 And the thing with a cassette tape player
0:09:39 is it didn’t have any kind of seek capability, right?
0:09:41 And so, the way that you loaded the program was,
0:09:42 you had to fast-forward by hand
0:09:44 at the right point in the tape, right?
0:09:45 And then, you were always at risk.
0:09:46 You were gonna write to the tape.
0:09:48 You wrote a program, you wanted to write it out of the tape.
0:09:49 You just ran the risk.
0:09:52 You were gonna overwrite something in the past.
0:09:53 And then, there was this really fundamental trade-off.
0:09:54 If you didn’t have a lot of money,
0:09:55 it’s this very fundamental trade-off,
0:09:57 which is you could buy a short cassette tape
0:10:00 that was high quality or a small amount of stuff,
0:10:01 or you could buy, same price,
0:10:03 you could buy a cassette tape that was much longer
0:10:06 and could record a lot more, but at much lower quality.
0:10:08 And that mattered because the lower quality tapes frequently,
0:10:10 you would not be able to read back what you had written.
0:10:12 And so, there was a real quality-quantity trade-off.
0:10:15 – Yeah, this is a gambling exercise.
0:10:16 – Exactly.
0:10:17 And then, so we didn’t have the internet,
0:10:18 but we had no exposure to the internet.
0:10:20 We’ll talk about the internet prehistory in a little bit,
0:10:21 but we didn’t have that.
0:10:23 What was happening at that time was what were called BBSs,
0:10:26 which was acronym for Bullition Board Systems.
0:10:27 And the thing about these is,
0:10:30 BBSs were kind of pre-social networks in a way,
0:10:31 and pre-internet.
0:10:33 And so, the way this would work is the host of the BBS
0:10:36 would literally set up a set of modems
0:10:38 in their house or apartment,
0:10:39 often like eight or 12 or 20 or something,
0:10:43 to take incoming calls from people with remote computers.
0:10:45 And then, in theory, you could dial into BBSs,
0:10:46 and you just literally used a modem
0:10:49 and you dialed into the phone number for the BBS.
0:10:50 And then, if you got to the BBS, it was really cool
0:10:53 because you had access to early versions of email
0:10:55 and social networking and user profiles
0:10:58 and Bullition Boards and classified ads
0:11:00 and downloading games and playing games and so forth.
0:11:02 And so, it’s kind of pre-internet, pre-AOL,
0:11:03 kind of versions of these things.
0:11:05 The problem that I had was, again,
0:11:07 rural Wisconsin, longest as phone calls are a dollar a minute.
0:11:09 There are no BBSs in my town.
0:11:10 And so, I read about BBSs.
0:11:11 I actually don’t, to this day,
0:11:13 I think I never actually used one
0:11:14 ’cause I couldn’t afford it.
0:11:16 And by the way, also, this is also pre-day broadband.
0:11:18 And so, when I first started on this stuff,
0:11:20 this was actually pre-modem, as we understand it today.
0:11:22 So, the form of the modem at the time
0:11:24 was what’s called an acoustic coupler.
0:11:26 And so, you take your old-fashioned telephone handset
0:11:28 and you literally put it in these two…
0:11:31 – Yeah, no, I remember those, yeah, right.
0:11:32 – In the two rubber cups.
0:11:34 And then, it’s literally using your handheld phone
0:11:36 as the receive transmit for the audio signals.
0:11:39 And so, the acoustic coupler modems were 300 bod,
0:11:41 300 bits per second.
0:11:45 – Yes, and very noisy, 300 bod, yeah.
0:11:46 – Yeah, very noisy, exactly.
0:11:47 So, yeah, very slow.
0:11:49 So, you could kind of get a glimpse.
0:11:51 I would say the romance of the personal computer
0:11:53 at that point was very clear.
0:11:54 And that’s what really got me was,
0:11:56 and basically, the way that you’d bought a computer,
0:11:57 you plugged it into your TV set in those days.
0:11:59 And what happened was, you literally,
0:12:01 you got injected into the basic programming language
0:12:02 interpreter, and what that showed up as
0:12:04 is that literally, the screen would say ready,
0:12:06 and then there was a cursor.
0:12:07 And for kind of kids of my age,
0:12:10 it was this invitation to basically do anything, right?
0:12:11 And so, it was this kind of great moment
0:12:13 where you just kind of felt like
0:12:14 the future was like in front of you.
0:12:15 And then, there were all these,
0:12:16 this became a pop kind of culture thing.
0:12:18 And so, there were all these books and magazines
0:12:19 that you could buy or subscribe to that,
0:12:21 you literally subscribed, you know,
0:12:22 hobbyist magazine for what kind of computer you had.
0:12:24 And it would literally have printouts
0:12:26 in the magazine of programs that you could actually sit
0:12:27 and type into your computer,
0:12:29 type into the basic prompt and make work.
0:12:31 And so, there was this incredible sense of adventure
0:12:33 for what you could do on a computer.
0:12:35 And then, there was this additional thing out there,
0:12:36 which was, wow, if you could afford it,
0:12:38 you could be on BBSs and you could talk to other people.
0:12:39 And so, they kind of had that network thing
0:12:40 from the beginning.
0:12:42 It’s just the economics at the time was not feasible
0:12:44 to have it be a mass marketing thing.
0:12:46 – Yeah, yeah, interesting, interesting.
0:12:50 Okay, so then, you get the University of Illinois.
0:12:52 And why did you go there?
0:12:56 Why not Madison or MIT or what have you?
0:12:58 – Financially, the state schools were the options.
0:12:59 And then, Illinois turns out to,
0:13:01 then and now is a great engineering school.
0:13:03 And so, Madison’s very good,
0:13:04 but Champaign-Hurban was one of the top
0:13:05 engineering schools in the country.
0:13:07 And so, it was just, it was a nice coincidence
0:13:09 that that was kind of close enough and inexpensive enough.
0:13:11 – And also having to have national computing,
0:13:13 super computing.
0:13:15 – Yeah, so this is where I got really lucky.
0:13:17 So, I dropped into Illinois as a new student,
0:13:19 started out in double E and then decided
0:13:21 I did not care at all about electrical engineering
0:13:22 and switched into computer science,
0:13:23 which was a much better fit.
0:13:25 But, you know, I showed up as a CS student.
0:13:27 And basically, this was my big stroke of luck was,
0:13:31 this was Illinois, University of Illinois in 1989.
0:13:34 So, this was four years into two federal programs
0:13:36 that basically created the precondition
0:13:37 for everything that followed with the internet.
0:13:39 And the two programs were something,
0:13:41 I think it was called the National Supercomputing Act,
0:13:44 and it was basically this effort to basically fund,
0:13:46 it was funded for what were called
0:13:48 National Supercomputing Centers at four universities,
0:13:50 one of which was Illinois.
0:13:51 And so, the campus as the federal government
0:13:52 just dropped in a ton of money
0:13:54 to basically buy state-of-the-art computers,
0:13:56 including at the time, really big computers
0:13:58 like these big Cray and thinking machines computers
0:14:01 that cost like $25 million at the time
0:14:02 and filled up entire rooms.
0:14:04 The supercomputers in those days were so big
0:14:06 that in some cases you’d actually build a building for them
0:14:08 and you’d build the building,
0:14:09 but you wouldn’t close the roof
0:14:11 and you would lower the computer by a crane
0:14:13 down through the roof into the center of the building
0:14:14 and then you would just use the roof.
0:14:16 And so, the big iron.
0:14:19 Exactly, some very esoteric, expensive, powerful systems.
0:14:20 So, we had those.
0:14:23 And then the other federal program was a program
0:14:25 to build what was called the NSF net.
0:14:27 The NSF there being short for National Science Foundation,
0:14:29 which is the government agency that all the money came through.
0:14:32 And the NSF net basically was the first internet backbone
0:14:33 as we understand it today.
0:14:34 And those programs were joined
0:14:36 because the original purpose of the NSF net
0:14:38 was to connect together these supercomputing centers
0:14:41 and then to allow researchers, scientists
0:14:43 in many other colleges, universities across the country
0:14:45 to be able to remotely access
0:14:47 these large centralized supercomputers.
0:14:49 I want to take a moment here to kind of pay credit to Al Gore
0:14:52 on this who famously gets just like endless shit
0:14:54 for people kind of saying that he said
0:14:54 that he invented the internet.
0:14:56 And so, just to defend Al’s honor for a moment.
0:14:58 A, he never actually said he invented the internet.
0:15:00 What he said is he took the lead in the Senate
0:15:01 in creating the internet.
0:15:03 And what he meant by that was not that he sat down
0:15:04 and wrote the code for it.
0:15:06 What he meant was he was one of the real leaders,
0:15:07 one of the main forces in the Senate
0:15:09 to actually fund these two programs.
0:15:10 And these two programs led directly to the internet
0:15:11 as we know it today.
0:15:13 And so, he and his colleagues at that time
0:15:15 really stepped up at a pivotal moment.
0:15:16 And I think that’s actually very relevant
0:15:18 to kind of what’s happening today with AI.
0:15:19 Like, I think that’s actually the same thing
0:15:21 that needs to happen with AI today.
0:15:23 Well, it’s kind of the opposite of what’s happening
0:15:26 with AI in universities today,
0:15:29 which is they’re not only underfunded to do AI,
0:15:32 but there’s a push among the big tech companies
0:15:36 to enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI
0:15:38 and universities by eliminating open source.
0:15:42 So, full credit to Al Gore for doing the right thing.
0:15:44 ‘Cause it’s clear that that wasn’t obvious.
0:15:45 Yeah, that’s right.
0:15:47 We’ve been spending a lot of time in Washington lately.
0:15:48 And I’ve actually been telling the story
0:15:49 to a lot of current senators
0:15:52 and encouraging them to basically do the same thing.
0:15:52 Yeah.
0:15:54 Democrats love it ’cause it rehabilitates Al Gore.
0:15:56 The Republicans, I gotta get them through the Gore part,
0:15:57 but–
0:15:58 Everything partisan in 2020.
0:16:00 But they also seem to think it’s a good idea.
0:16:01 So, I hope that will happen.
0:16:04 So, basically my great luck was I showed up at Illinois in ’89
0:16:06 and basically four years into these federal programs.
0:16:09 And so, I showed up basically just got blasted
0:16:10 into the future in one step.
0:16:11 ‘Cause when I showed up there,
0:16:13 there was, University of Illinois was actually wired.
0:16:16 It was one of the hub nodes of the internet backbone.
0:16:18 And the campus was getting wired for broadband.
0:16:20 And there were computers and computer labs
0:16:21 with state of the art equipment
0:16:23 all the way up to these giant Craig supercomputers
0:16:26 that the computer science department had access to.
0:16:26 It was just there.
0:16:28 It was like being beamed into the future.
0:16:31 Now, the twist on that is the assumption in those days
0:16:34 was you would use this stuff while you’re in school.
0:16:36 And so, they had started to give out email addresses
0:16:38 to undergrads and things like that.
0:16:40 But the assumption was that you would use these systems
0:16:41 while you were in school.
0:16:43 And then if you stayed and became a faculty member
0:16:45 or something, you would use these systems
0:16:45 for your research.
0:16:47 But if you graduated and just went out
0:16:48 and went into the real world,
0:16:49 you would leave it all behind.
0:16:50 – Right, there’s access to the internet, right?
0:16:52 There’s not access to the internet chains, right?
0:16:57 Maybe you could kind of describe what the internet was
0:16:59 at that point.
0:17:00 ‘Cause when we say internet,
0:17:01 people imagine a lot of things,
0:17:03 but that’s not what it was then
0:17:06 in terms of a user experience.
0:17:07 – Yeah, that’s right.
0:17:07 And so a couple of things.
0:17:09 So one is it’s very important to know
0:17:11 that at this point and all the way up until really 1994,
0:17:14 the overwhelming uniform universal expectation
0:17:16 was the internet would never be a business.
0:17:17 There would never be a business.
0:17:18 There would never be an industry.
0:17:20 There was never going to be money to be made.
0:17:21 There was never going to be a commerce.
0:17:22 There was never going to be streaming video.
0:17:25 There was never going to be stores, any of the stuff.
0:17:27 By the way, even the idea of having like newspapers online
0:17:28 was considered bizarre.
0:17:29 It wasn’t even going to be that.
0:17:31 It was supposed to be like scientific research papers
0:17:33 and experimental data and things like that.
0:17:34 And so it was very much not viewed
0:17:35 as like a commercial opportunity.
0:17:37 It was viewed very much not that way.
0:17:38 And basically, I think, correct me if I’m wrong,
0:17:40 it had been up until like ’94.
0:17:42 I think zero of the big tech companies of that era
0:17:43 took it seriously.
0:17:44 – Yeah, zero.
0:17:46 And in fact, well, in fact, the opposite,
0:17:49 they were building kind of parallel systems to the internet,
0:17:52 often referred to as the information superhighway.
0:17:55 Bill Gates was a huge kind of champion
0:17:57 of the information superhighway
0:17:59 and specifically not the internet.
0:18:02 So yeah, and he was kind of the biggest figure
0:18:04 and for sure in software
0:18:06 and probably in the industry at the time.
0:18:07 – Yes, so the big computer companies
0:18:08 wanted to build proprietary networks
0:18:09 and they were doing that.
0:18:11 And by the way, AOL was up and running by ’94.
0:18:13 AOL kind of got going around ’89,
0:18:14 kind of the same time I showed up at Illinois,
0:18:16 but it really kind of hit critical mass.
0:18:19 AOL basically was a consumer-scaled version
0:18:20 of the BBS idea that we described.
0:18:23 And then in ’93, it famously interconnected itself
0:18:24 with the internet.
0:18:26 And so all of a sudden, all the AOL subscribers
0:18:26 became internet users.
0:18:27 And so there was that,
0:18:29 but that didn’t even happen until ’93.
0:18:30 There was certainly no vision for that,
0:18:32 I think in the late ’80s
0:18:33 and there were no consumer ISPs
0:18:36 and then there were no normal businesses online.
0:18:38 And in fact, the internet up until 1993,
0:18:40 what was the NSF net, which then turned into the internet,
0:18:42 the operator under something that the federal government
0:18:44 dictated called the acceptable use policy,
0:18:48 the AUP and because the NSF net was federally funded,
0:18:51 commercial activity on the internet was actually banned.
0:18:52 ‘Cause it was viewed as a certain inappropriate use
0:18:54 of federal research dollars.
0:18:55 And so it actually would not have been legal
0:18:56 to engage in commercial activity.
0:18:58 And so there basically was none.
0:19:00 And then yeah, and then the big phone companies
0:19:01 and the big media companies at that time
0:19:04 didn’t even want to build like BBSs or anything,
0:19:05 internet-related.
0:19:06 What they wanted to do was basically,
0:19:08 what we now know as streaming,
0:19:09 they wanted to do what they called
0:19:10 at the time, interactive television.
0:19:12 And the big killer app for internet television
0:19:13 was called video on demand.
0:19:16 And so sort of the revolutionary idea at that time
0:19:18 that instead of watching whatever was on a TV channel
0:19:19 at that moment, you could watch whatever you want
0:19:22 by clicking a button and then maybe you could order a pizza.
0:19:25 – Interestingly, there is a small minor bandwidth problem
0:19:27 with that idea, if I recall it correctly.
0:19:28 – Yeah, it was actually an idea
0:19:29 that was ahead of its time, right?
0:19:31 Streaming video didn’t really work
0:19:32 in the way that we understand it today
0:19:34 until probably 15 years later, right?
0:19:36 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.
0:19:38 I mean, well really when Netflix made the cutover
0:19:43 from CDs to streaming, which was the late 2000s, right?
0:19:45 – Yeah, I remember meeting with Reed Hastings in,
0:19:47 I think 2004 and Netflix was up and running
0:19:50 and it was very successful doing DVD rental by mail
0:19:51 and Reed’s a technical genius
0:19:52 in addition to being a business genius.
0:19:55 And he said, “I’m thinking about doing streaming.”
0:19:57 And my first reaction was that’s crazy, it’ll never work
0:19:59 because even in 2004, like most people on the internet,
0:20:01 they didn’t have broadband connections fast enough
0:20:03 to do like TV quality.
0:20:04 So the video at that point
0:20:07 was actually these little postage stamp size videos.
0:20:08 And I was like, oh, I don’t understand
0:20:09 who’s gonna wanna sit there
0:20:10 and watch a little postage stamp size thing.
0:20:12 And Reed had correctly extrapolated
0:20:14 that the broadband wave in the 2000s
0:20:15 was gonna result in streaming working.
0:20:18 But just give you a sense of the delay there, right?
0:20:20 So even a decade later, even a decade after the founding
0:20:21 of Netscape, development of Mosaic,
0:20:23 and founding of Netscape in a decade later,
0:20:25 it was still considered weird and bizarre
0:20:26 to turn to stream videos.
0:20:27 Yeah, so the media companies in the early 90s
0:20:29 were not being run by technologists.
0:20:31 And so they had a hard time, I think mapping.
0:20:33 There was a famous interactive television
0:20:36 information super highway trial in the early 90s
0:20:38 around this time, which was to do this video on demand.
0:20:40 So to do this thing where you’d have a remote
0:20:41 and you could press a button and watch
0:20:42 whatever movie you wanted.
0:20:43 And I remember it was a trial.
0:20:44 They were trying to figure out if there would be
0:20:45 consumer demand for this.
0:20:47 And so one of these companies,
0:20:49 they wired a neighborhood to do the streaming of a video,
0:20:52 but it wasn’t digital switched, it was analog switched.
0:20:54 And so they had a dedicated long,
0:20:57 basically analog line wired to each house.
0:20:59 And then in the back office, they had a bank of ECRs,
0:21:02 video tape players, and they had a videotape player
0:21:03 for each house.
0:21:05 And then they had a wall of video cassettes
0:21:06 with all the movies that were optioned.
0:21:08 And then they had a guy on roller skates.
0:21:11 – Yeah, roller skates to get to them quickly.
0:21:12 – To get there quick enough.
0:21:14 Cause the user expectation was you click the button,
0:21:16 you watch the movie.
0:21:18 And so the guy on roller skates had to like shoot over
0:21:20 to the wall of video tapes, pull down the right tape
0:21:22 and then shoot down the hall to the right VCR
0:21:24 and get the tape and the VCR and press play
0:21:26 before the couch potato was like giving up
0:21:28 cause the stream business started.
0:21:29 – Oh my God.
0:21:31 – And so yeah, that idea was a bit early.
0:21:33 But on the University of Illinois campus,
0:21:35 like broadband existed, like I said, email existed.
0:21:37 You asked how do people use the internet in those days?
0:21:39 So sort of pre-web, it was mostly,
0:21:41 well, there was the leading apps at that point.
0:21:43 There was an app called Telnet that you would use
0:21:45 to basically log into another computer on the network.
0:21:46 And that was actually very important
0:21:49 cause that’s how the scientists would use the super computers.
0:21:51 And actually the group I was in at Illinois
0:21:53 actually built one of the main Telnet apps.
0:21:54 There was an app called FTP
0:21:55 that was a file downloading app.
0:21:57 And so you could upload and download files.
0:21:59 There was early email.
0:21:59 So that worked.
0:22:01 There was early what were called news groups,
0:22:03 which is like basically forums,
0:22:04 kind of early social networking.
0:22:06 But I think at the time those were probably the four
0:22:08 main things that people did.
0:22:10 – And it was all scientists
0:22:14 and computer science majors on the internet, if I recall.
0:22:16 I mean, there was really nobody else.
0:22:18 – Yeah, so this is at the time 89.
0:22:20 I’m gonna guess there were somewhere between 500,000
0:22:21 to a million people total online.
0:22:23 And yeah, it was basically the,
0:22:25 it was basically the faculty, staff and students
0:22:27 at these four supercomputing centers.
0:22:28 It was the remote users.
0:22:30 And then it was like the defense contractors
0:22:31 got wired up early.
0:22:33 And then there were branches of the government
0:22:34 that got wired up early.
0:22:36 And then there was like the national labs.
0:22:38 And there were, and then a handful of hobbyists
0:22:40 would figure out a way to get online.
0:22:43 And so yeah, so basically it was,
0:22:45 first of all, it was like 100% people in the West,
0:22:47 overwhelmingly the US and Europe.
0:22:49 It was very heavily obviously English dominated
0:22:50 from the very beginning.
0:22:53 It was extremely technical scientific oriented.
0:22:57 Almost everybody on it had a scientific or technical degree.
0:22:59 It was also very, as a consequence of all that,
0:23:01 the, it was this incredible, brilliant,
0:23:03 this is like a million of the smartest people on the planet.
0:23:05 So the caliber of the people
0:23:07 and the quality of the discussions was like sky high.
0:23:09 – Oh yeah, I remember being,
0:23:13 the old news groups were unbelievable.
0:23:18 I remember like, if there was like a bug in a compiler,
0:23:20 like you could find out about it
0:23:22 and you know, there would be workarounds
0:23:25 and like the level of expertise on those things
0:23:26 was absolutely astounding.
0:23:28 – And look, many of the smartest people
0:23:29 in the scientific and technical world at that point
0:23:31 were in there and they would talk to you
0:23:32 if you had something interesting to say.
0:23:33 And so if you posted on a news group,
0:23:35 they would respond.
0:23:37 And so it was like this distributed community
0:23:38 of like, you know,
0:23:39 the smartest scientific technical minds in the planet.
0:23:40 It was really special.
0:23:43 And then also because there was no money,
0:23:44 you know, there was, there were no ads,
0:23:46 you know, there were, there were no scams.
0:23:46 There was no fraud.
0:23:48 There was no spam, you know, they’re like,
0:23:50 I remember there was actually a scandal
0:23:52 that there was a guy who figured out
0:23:53 that this was like a ripe for, you know,
0:23:54 basically scam, you know, kind of thing.
0:23:56 And he started, did the first spam emails
0:23:57 and news group messages.
0:23:59 And it was like a big scandal at the time
0:24:01 that somebody would actually do that.
0:24:03 Cause like a guy just literally started to do that, right?
0:24:05 And, but you know, it had run for years
0:24:07 without anybody even trying that.
0:24:08 Yeah, that’s what a community.
0:24:10 That’s a true meaning of community, right?
0:24:14 Like you have all people of the same culture in one place.
0:24:17 That scale, that’s amazing.
0:24:18 Yeah. So people who were on that at the time
0:24:20 kind of always look back at that and they miss it
0:24:23 because that has never been reconstituted.
0:24:24 You know, like a lot, a lot of the,
0:24:25 a lot of those people in their equivalents today
0:24:27 are like on X or they’re on the other social platforms,
0:24:28 but they’re, you know,
0:24:29 they’re a minority population
0:24:32 in a much larger, you know, context everywhere now.
0:24:34 Whereas at the time they were the entire population.
0:24:36 Yeah. So that, that, that was a super magical thing.
0:24:37 But, but yeah, I mean, look,
0:24:40 the actual functional use cases were quite limited.
0:24:42 And yeah, so yeah, that’s, that’s sort of,
0:24:43 that’s sort of what I saw when I got there.
0:24:45 Maybe it’d be helpful just cause I think it’s really relevant
0:24:47 both to the, the, the, what followed,
0:24:48 but also the AI discussion.
0:24:50 Maybe if I could, maybe I could go back in history now
0:24:52 to kind of where the internet came from.
0:24:55 Yeah. Yeah. Go back to like the late sixties.
0:24:58 Yeah. So, so the idea of the internet was sort of famously
0:25:01 this idea of what was called a packet switch network, right?
0:25:02 So the, the reason the internet works
0:25:04 is because it’s this peer to peer system in which computer,
0:25:06 you know, anybody can kind of plug a computer
0:25:08 into the internet and then you kind of have messages
0:25:10 that are able to go around and, and, and route.
0:25:12 And so, you know, famously this is an idea
0:25:13 that actually was developed originally
0:25:17 by the Defense Department in the 1960s called packet switching.
0:25:19 And, and in particular, there’s a guy, Paul Baran,
0:25:20 who’s kind of the original, you know,
0:25:21 kind of true founding father, you know,
0:25:24 godfather of the, of this idea.
0:25:26 And actually he’s a great, he’s a great story on this,
0:25:27 going back to your silver spoon thing.
0:25:30 So he was born, he’s a, he was a Jewish,
0:25:32 Jewish Polish immigrant to the US.
0:25:35 And so his parents came, brought him as a small child
0:25:38 of the US in the 1920s, sort of classic American
0:25:38 immigrant success story.
0:25:41 His father opened a grocery store
0:25:42 and then was able to make enough money
0:25:44 to send his kid to college.
0:25:45 Baran, you know, was a super genius.
0:25:46 He got an engineering degree.
0:25:48 And then he actually went to your alma mater.
0:25:50 He went to UCLA for a master’s degree,
0:25:53 which he got in 1959 in computer science.
0:25:55 By the way, his master’s degree in 1959
0:25:57 in computer science was on character recognition.
0:26:00 – How amazing, AI.
0:26:03 – And so he was actually, so it’s like,
0:26:06 he tried to do AI first and, you know,
0:26:07 he was early on that.
0:26:09 Yeah, you know, he got part way there,
0:26:11 but you know, he was already at that point trying to do AI.
0:26:13 And then he went, he went to work for the Rand Corporation,
0:26:15 which did a lot of work for the Defense Department
0:26:18 on military, you know, kind of strategy topics.
0:26:20 And there was a huge, this is the height of the Cold War.
0:26:23 So this is in the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis,
0:26:24 you know, where there was a real feeling that, you know,
0:26:26 there might be nuclear war at any moment.
0:26:27 And one of the big concerns
0:26:30 the Defense Department had was in a nuclear strike,
0:26:31 the way telecom systems worked at that point
0:26:33 is if you took out the central office,
0:26:35 you took out an entire telecom network.
0:26:38 And so the fear of the Defense Department was the Soviets
0:26:40 presumably knew where the central switching offices were
0:26:41 for like the AT&T network.
0:26:43 And so they would bomb those, you know,
0:26:44 in a nuclear strike.
0:26:46 And then basically what would happen is the US
0:26:49 would lose command and control of its nuclear weapons.
0:26:51 And so basically it was a way,
0:26:52 the fear was it was a way for the Soviets
0:26:54 to do a decapitation strike.
0:26:56 They take out the central switching office from AT&T
0:26:58 and then the US can’t retaliate.
0:27:00 Literally the US would not be able to fight,
0:27:01 you know, to fire its nukes
0:27:02 ’cause they couldn’t send the commands
0:27:03 to actually fire the nukes.
0:27:06 And so it was this existential kind of thing at the moment.
0:27:08 And so this guy, Paul Baran said,
0:27:09 well, what if we build a network
0:27:11 that basically is designed for packet switch
0:27:12 instead of being circuit switch
0:27:13 or everything’s going through a central place
0:27:15 for packet switch where the packets can flow around.
0:27:17 And if part of the network gets bombed or destroyed
0:27:20 or taken offline or, you know, power cut or whatever,
0:27:22 you know, the network kind of reallocates.
0:27:23 And the significance of this idea
0:27:25 is not just that it led to the internet.
0:27:27 The other significance is AT&T thought
0:27:29 it was the craziest idea they’d ever heard.
0:27:30 Yeah, yeah, right.
0:27:32 ‘Cause you need control.
0:27:33 You need control.
0:27:35 Control, there’s a central control.
0:27:36 Yeah, yeah.
0:27:37 And I was reading just before this,
0:27:38 I was refreshing myself
0:27:40 when I read Paul Baran’s obituary in the New York Times
0:27:42 and Vince Turf has quoted in the obituary saying that,
0:27:45 you know, Paul Baran was basically a laughed out of AT&T
0:27:46 when he proposed this idea, right?
0:27:48 Because it was such a heretical idea.
0:27:50 So anyway, so the point being is the internet
0:27:52 was a heretical idea from the very beginning.
0:27:56 And I thought, and both in that it would never work
0:27:59 ’cause it would be like entirely too slow
0:28:01 and the packet reassembly and all that would never work.
0:28:04 And then also that it was a dumb idea
0:28:07 because of course you want central control.
0:28:12 So like they derided him in every direction possible.
0:28:13 Yeah, yeah.
0:28:16 Well, as late, so that was 1964, 20 years later.
0:28:17 A horrible idea that would never work.
0:28:19 Horrible idea that will never work, exactly right.
0:28:21 So that was 1964 when he proposed this.
0:28:24 As late 20 years later in 1984,
0:28:26 a federal judge went to break up AT&T,
0:28:28 which at that time was the national telecom monopoly.
0:28:30 They owned and controlled everything.
0:28:33 And AT&T actually got the secretary of defense
0:28:35 in 1984, 20 years later to testify
0:28:37 that if the federal judge broke up AT&T,
0:28:39 it would permanently cripple the U.S.’s command
0:28:41 and control capability for nuclear weapons, right?
0:28:44 And so even 20 years later, people didn’t believe it.
0:28:46 It was still a heretical idea.
0:28:47 And by the way, 84 is significant
0:28:50 because of course the very next year in ’85
0:28:52 is when the NSF net was funded, right?
0:28:56 And so it was like a 20 year journey
0:28:58 to get from that original heretical idea
0:28:59 with resistance all the way through
0:29:01 to ultimately get to the point where Al Gore
0:29:03 and his colleagues figured out that actually,
0:29:04 no, it was actually a good idea
0:29:06 and they should actually put money in it.
0:29:08 So what I’d really like to know,
0:29:10 and I think a lot of people would is,
0:29:14 so you have this network with some supercomputers on it
0:29:18 and a bunch of scientists and some news groups,
0:29:21 like, how did you get to this idea?
0:29:23 ‘Cause nobody else had the idea.
0:29:25 I’d say like, first of all, nobody else had the idea.
0:29:27 And then secondly, if you had not had the idea
0:29:32 when you had it, the internet as we know it probably
0:29:37 doesn’t happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative,
0:29:40 the oracle alternative would have had an opportunity
0:29:42 to gain a network effect.
0:29:45 And so the chance of all this getting built,
0:29:48 I mean, maybe if it was invented six months later,
0:29:50 but four years later, definitely not.
0:29:53 And so what happened?
0:29:55 – Yeah, so there were serious efforts underway.
0:29:57 You alluded to this, but there were serious efforts at times.
0:29:59 Let’s just itemize the efforts.
0:30:01 And so there were three basically consumer online services
0:30:04 that came out of the 80s, AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.
0:30:07 AOL became famous later, much larger.
0:30:09 CompuServe kind of petered out at one point.
0:30:10 Prodigy was actually an IBM joint venture.
0:30:13 So they were actually kind of clued into that part of it
0:30:14 early.
0:30:17 And then, those systems existed in the early 90s.
0:30:18 And those were all these proprietary,
0:30:21 sort of proprietary stove pipes not interconnected,
0:30:23 not open, these are by definition closed systems.
0:30:25 And for people who don’t remember this,
0:30:27 if you wanted to like put content up on AOL,
0:30:32 you had to pay AOL, like you had to get their permission,
0:30:33 their approval and they could take it down.
0:30:36 And so it was, sort of any of these stove pipe
0:30:38 proprietary things, somebody really is in charge.
0:30:40 And the internet is the opposite of that.
0:30:41 And so those systems ran like that.
0:30:43 And then there were a set of companies
0:30:45 that then we’re going to do, that you’re alluding to,
0:30:46 that we’re going to do the leapfrog on that
0:30:50 and kind of do the modern, gooey version of that.
0:30:52 And that was specifically Microsoft with MSN.
0:30:53 The time was called MSN.
0:30:56 And then Apple had something at the time called eWorld.
0:30:58 And then who else was running around?
0:30:59 A whole bunch of these other companies were running.
0:31:01 And then the media companies were doing these
0:31:04 proprietary video interaction TV things
0:31:06 that would also be centralized controlled.
0:31:08 But yeah, in particular, I think probably at the time,
0:31:11 it was really the big ones would have been AOL
0:31:12 getting really big.
0:31:15 It would have been Microsoft establishing its own,
0:31:18 kind of permanent proprietary online service
0:31:19 as an alternative to the internet.
0:31:21 And then it would have been probably Apple
0:31:23 with its own proprietary system.
0:31:24 Probably would have been the big three.
0:31:26 And look, those companies would have loved for that to happen.
0:31:28 Like all three of those companies would have been much better
0:31:29 off had that happened.
0:31:32 Yeah, you get a big on every transaction.
0:31:33 Yeah, this was actually the famous,
0:31:34 the Ben just used the word big.
0:31:36 So there was a famous interview with Microsoft CTO
0:31:39 at the time that they were trying to make MSN work.
0:31:42 They were a proprietary system and interesting guy.
0:31:43 And he said, yeah, he said,
0:31:46 and he actually to his credit, he kind of said it out loud.
0:31:47 He said, yeah, the goal of this program
0:31:49 is to get a big of every online transaction,
0:31:53 big being the mafia term for your slice of the pie.
0:31:55 Yeah, vigorous, vigorous.
0:31:57 Exactly so.
0:31:59 So, and yeah, they would have had,
0:32:00 they would have had total control.
0:32:01 And so if you think about the level of control
0:32:03 that big tech has today,
0:32:05 like it would have been like that times 10.
0:32:08 And that really was where the industry was headed.
0:32:10 And those companies had a big advantage at the time,
0:32:12 ’cause one is they just had tremendous resources,
0:32:15 like they were funded to do this.
0:32:17 And then the other thing is that at the time,
0:32:19 look to just get this stuff to work was hard.
0:32:21 And they could marshal thousands of engineers
0:32:22 and they could design everything to work
0:32:23 in a completely integrated manner.
0:32:25 And they had all these graphic designers
0:32:26 to make it beautiful.
0:32:27 And they had all these performance engineers
0:32:28 to make it fast.
0:32:30 And they could run big advertising campaigns
0:32:32 and do consumer support.
0:32:34 And I’ll tell the story later
0:32:35 of how I became the consumer support.
0:32:36 I became the user support desk
0:32:39 for the entire internet for about a year and a half myself.
0:32:40 – It’s an amazing job.
0:32:41 – But you know, amazing job.
0:32:44 They would have had the ability to,
0:32:45 they had a lot of natural advantages
0:32:49 to be able to do it in the proprietary way that they wanted.
0:32:51 And so this was a critical period for that.
0:32:52 Yeah, the internet as we know it today
0:32:54 didn’t have to happen.
0:32:56 Yeah, so basically, I think in retrospect,
0:32:57 what just happened was a couple of things.
0:32:59 So one is just the generation of super geniuses
0:33:02 like Paul Baran and your friend Len Kleinrock
0:33:05 and Vint Cerf and all these really bright guys
0:33:07 who had created the internet as kind of
0:33:10 the network side of it.
0:33:11 You know, they just, they were networking people
0:33:13 and they just didn’t, they didn’t,
0:33:14 their natural, you know, kind of world
0:33:18 was not user interfaces and consumer services
0:33:20 and contents and media and, you know, gaming
0:33:23 and, you know, all these, all these application level things.
0:33:25 You know, they just, they, the way these systems are built
0:33:27 is they just assume somebody else is gonna do all that.
0:33:29 And that hadn’t really happened yet.
0:33:31 And so, yeah, so just, part of it was people,
0:33:33 they hadn’t tried.
0:33:34 Part of it was it wasn’t a business.
0:33:36 And so there was no business motivation to try to do it.
0:33:38 And then also part of it was,
0:33:39 there was another coincidental thing that happened
0:33:43 which was the arrival of the, of the graphical PC.
0:33:44 And so the arrivals, the arrival specifically
0:33:46 of the Macintosh and then followed by that,
0:33:48 the arrival of Windows, Windows version three
0:33:50 and the, and the first graphical PCs.
0:33:53 And so the, you know, before about 1992 or so,
0:33:56 you weren’t gonna have a graphical user interface
0:33:57 to anything ’cause you didn’t have graphical user interfaces
0:33:58 at all.
0:34:00 And so there was also a moment in time thing
0:34:01 that happened there.
0:34:02 So there was all that.
0:34:04 Yeah. And so then my, my part of the story was,
0:34:07 I was, I had a bunch of jobs in college
0:34:09 and was getting my computer science degree.
0:34:10 And then I ended up working for,
0:34:13 was called NCSA, which was the National Center
0:34:14 for Supercomputing Applications.
0:34:16 And you’re a freshman at the time
0:34:18 or a sophomore when you got that job?
0:34:19 No, so I actually didn’t get,
0:34:21 I actually just started working there as a junior.
0:34:23 So I worked, when I was a freshman,
0:34:26 I worked in a physics lab called the Materials Research Lab
0:34:28 there, which was actually a great entry point for me
0:34:30 ’cause that was one of the main labs
0:34:32 using the big supercomputers.
0:34:32 Yeah.
0:34:35 I kind of got plugged into that world very early.
0:34:36 And then I, and then my sophomore year,
0:34:38 I spent nine months actually as a co-op student
0:34:40 working for IBM in Austin.
0:34:43 And I worked on the workstations at the time,
0:34:44 which was again, very, very helpful for this
0:34:46 ’cause these were kind of the leading edge user interface.
0:34:48 You know, so like I worked on graphic systems.
0:34:49 Well, I’m an NA at TCPIP, right?
0:34:51 The workstations, yeah.
0:34:54 They were built in and then IBM and Austin at the time,
0:34:56 you know, this is when IBM was on top of the world.
0:34:57 It was, you know, by far the most important tech company
0:34:59 still at that point.
0:35:00 And, you know, we had this,
0:35:02 we had a 6,000 person division in Austin
0:35:05 working on these Unix workstations
0:35:06 at the time, graphical workstations.
0:35:08 And again, they had the resources.
0:35:09 Everybody there was also wired,
0:35:10 everybody was on the internet.
0:35:12 These workstations were designed to be used on the internet.
0:35:13 Right, right.
0:35:14 And I was, I was.
0:35:17 At the time did not have any internet capability.
0:35:20 You know, there was no, in the early 90s,
0:35:22 there was no TCPIP, there was never none of it.
0:35:24 Yeah, well, computers, you recall this.
0:35:27 Yeah, computers, PCs and Macs up until ’93, ’94
0:35:30 didn’t even come with TCPIP built into the computer,
0:35:31 built into the operating system.
0:35:32 Right, right.
0:35:33 And you actually had to buy it,
0:35:36 what was called the TCPIP stack is a separate thing.
0:35:36 Windsock.
0:35:38 Windsock and these things.
0:35:40 And so, yeah, but the Unix workstations of that era,
0:35:42 you know, the problem with the Unix workstations
0:35:43 is they cost like $50,000.
0:35:45 And so these were not consumer products.
0:35:46 But if you had one,
0:35:48 you had internet networking built into it.
0:35:50 And then if you were at IBM, like I was,
0:35:52 or at Illinois, like I was, you were also on the internet.
0:35:54 And so, you know, I kind of got to see, you know,
0:35:58 I kind of saw the bricks being put in place,
0:35:59 you know, for what followed.
0:36:00 And then I knew how it all worked.
0:36:02 ‘Cause, you know, my job was to do engineering
0:36:03 on all these things.
0:36:05 And then basically there was this moment in,
0:36:08 basically I think it was ’92, ’91, ’92.
0:36:10 There was this moment where there were basically three
0:36:13 online efforts to kind of do a front-end,
0:36:15 new kinds of sort of user interfaces,
0:36:17 interaction models for the internet at that point.
0:36:20 And so, and it was famously, it was three of them.
0:36:21 There was one called Gopher,
0:36:22 there was one called Waze,
0:36:25 and then there was the World Wide Web.
0:36:25 Tim Berners-Lee.
0:36:27 And so, and these were, in the very beginning,
0:36:29 these were actually in a real bake-off with each other.
0:36:30 There were a lot of people who had different opinions
0:36:32 about which of these we’re gonna win.
0:36:35 Gopher was actually based on the user interfaces
0:36:37 of the BBS system in the ’80s.
0:36:39 And so, it was a menuing system.
0:36:41 And so, you could go down all these different menus
0:36:43 and download content and so forth.
0:36:45 And then Waze, W-A-I-S,
0:36:47 I think it was called Wide Area Internet Search.
0:36:50 Waze was like a pre-Google search engine.
0:36:53 And so, it was sort of the idea that you would have,
0:36:54 you know, type in search keywords and get back results.
0:36:56 And then this guy, Tim Berners-Lee,
0:37:01 in Switzerland, an English guy working at CERN in Switzerland,
0:37:03 had this kind of really, at the time, radical idea,
0:37:06 which was to take an old idea called hypertext
0:37:07 and bring it onto the internet
0:37:09 and basically be able to have documents
0:37:11 that can link the point to other documents.
0:37:13 And this is an idea that goes back to the ’50s.
0:37:15 A guy named Doug Engelbart and other guy, Ted Nelson,
0:37:18 you know, had kind of conceived of this idea decades earlier,
0:37:20 but the computer systems in the ’50s, ’60s,
0:37:21 were not quite capable of doing it yet.
0:37:25 And so, Tim basically said, he was sitting at CERN,
0:37:27 kind of doing related kinds of work that, you know,
0:37:30 he was working in kind of support of the physicists at CERN
0:37:31 in the same way that I was working in,
0:37:33 support of the physicists at Illinois.
0:37:35 So kind of a similar universe.
0:37:37 And, you know, he had this idea basically,
0:37:38 okay, we’re gonna put hypertext,
0:37:40 we’re gonna put hypertext on the internet
0:37:41 in the form of the web.
0:37:43 But I would describe this at the time,
0:37:44 as all three of these were like very,
0:37:46 I would say nascent experimental efforts.
0:37:48 And then really critically, all three were text-based.
0:37:51 And again, the assumption here was the internet basically is,
0:37:53 the assumption was the internet’s slow,
0:37:55 which for most people at that time it was.
0:37:56 And so the assumption was the internet’s slow,
0:37:57 your computer’s slow,
0:37:59 your network connection is slow.
0:38:03 And so Gopher was, you know, literally text-based menus.
0:38:04 Waze was type in a text keyword
0:38:06 and then get back text results.
0:38:08 And then the web was hypertext,
0:38:09 and it was, there’s the text document,
0:38:10 and then it contains links to other documents.
0:38:12 But like just as an example, the web,
0:38:15 and when it was originally conceived, didn’t have images.
0:38:17 It’s just, ’cause the idea that the network would have
0:38:19 the capacity to be able to do images
0:38:21 was just still too much of a reach.
0:38:23 And then basically, a bunch of people online
0:38:25 started to play with this.
0:38:28 And then we talked about what I was doing at the time,
0:38:31 but I was working on a semi-related project
0:38:33 and then figured out that with a bunch of my colleagues
0:38:35 there at the time that there was a,
0:38:38 we had the ultimate idea that led to Mosaic.
0:38:39 – So what was your other job?
0:38:42 – Yeah, so what I got hired to do at NCSA,
0:38:44 what I got hired to do is I got hired into a group
0:38:45 called the Software Development Group,
0:38:48 which was the group that was basically supposed to make,
0:38:50 it was again funded by the National Science Foundation,
0:38:53 supposed to make tools, specifically open-source tools,
0:38:56 that would make it easy for scientists to use the NSFnet
0:38:58 and to use the supercomputers, right?
0:39:00 And so those tools I mentioned earlier,
0:39:01 this thing called Telnet.
0:39:03 So we made this, we made NCSA Telnet,
0:39:05 which was the main way you would log into remote computers.
0:39:06 We had, I think at the time,
0:39:09 I think we had an FTP client server.
0:39:11 We had, so we had like a variety of these kinds of tools
0:39:13 that you would use for these things.
0:39:17 By the way, we also were doing early work in VR at the time,
0:39:18 ’cause there was this whole focus,
0:39:19 oh, there was this whole focus,
0:39:21 what was at the time called scientific visualization.
0:39:22 And this is sort of,
0:39:24 and this is sort of what later became
0:39:25 like special effects in movies,
0:39:27 but this was actually pre-Jurassic Park
0:39:29 and pre-Terminator 2.
0:39:31 And so the idea was to like,
0:39:33 the supercomputers would do these like black hole simulations
0:39:35 or weather simulations or something.
0:39:37 And then you could actually use these graphical workstations
0:39:38 to actually render movies
0:39:40 and you could actually show scientific results
0:39:41 in visual form.
0:39:43 And so the group did a lot of that.
0:39:45 Actually, a lot of those guys actually went on
0:39:47 and actually ultimately then created
0:39:48 the computer graphics industry
0:39:50 in both the computer industry
0:39:52 and then also in the, in the, in film and television.
0:39:54 So that was also a thing that was happening then.
0:39:56 And then actually the VR idea
0:39:57 was actually already present at the time.
0:40:00 And so there were attempts to do VR.
0:40:03 And our sister campus at University of Illinois, Chicago
0:40:04 actually had something called the cave,
0:40:07 which was, it was an alternate vision of VR.
0:40:09 So the main VR idea, of course,
0:40:10 was a headset strapped to your face,
0:40:11 which is what people have today.
0:40:14 At Chicago, they had the idea of the cave,
0:40:15 which was, no, you’re actually in a physical space
0:40:18 and you have giant monitors around you, right?
0:40:20 And so you’re actually in a, you’re actually in a,
0:40:22 – We’re in Las Vegas.
0:40:23 – Like the, like the sphere in Las Vegas,
0:40:24 like the sphere in Las Vegas.
0:40:26 And also like the way that a lot of these new movies
0:40:28 and TV shows are filmed now
0:40:29 and something they call the volume,
0:40:31 which are sound stages that are literally made up
0:40:33 of walls and ceilings that are giant display panels
0:40:36 showing, you know, graphic rendered scenes and imagery.
0:40:38 – And so in my race, that’s the,
0:40:41 become the most practical idea.
0:40:43 – Yeah, yeah, yeah, that works really well.
0:40:45 So the first TV show that used that technique
0:40:47 was called the Star Wars show, The Mandalorian,
0:40:48 which is a huge success.
0:40:49 And if you watch The Mandalorian,
0:40:51 it’s actually really, they did a great job on it.
0:40:54 If you watch it, it seems like they’re outside
0:40:55 all the time and they’re not.
0:40:58 The most of that, most of that series was filmed
0:40:59 when it seems like they’re outside.
0:41:01 That was filmed in a very small sound stage
0:41:05 in an environment with giant LCD displays on all sides.
0:41:06 And then with all the software,
0:41:07 it’s the control software they have
0:41:09 where they could literally shift the perspective
0:41:11 of the, of the, of like the background scenes
0:41:13 to match like the motions of the actors.
0:41:15 And they’d have like, they have overhead lights
0:41:18 so they can like replicate the sun or like sunset.
0:41:20 And so actually, so anyway, so that cave idea in 1992
0:41:22 actually is now a state of the art in Hollywood.
0:41:23 – Yeah.
0:41:24 – You know, it was too early.
0:41:25 We didn’t, you know, we didn’t have the quality
0:41:27 of the screens back then or quality of the graphics.
0:41:29 So it wasn’t ready yet, but like now it is ready.
0:41:32 So it’s another one of these back to the future things.
0:41:34 Yeah, so anyway, so that’s what the group at,
0:41:35 at Illinois was doing.
0:41:37 And then the specific project I was on
0:41:38 was a project called Collage.
0:41:39 And the idea for Collage today,
0:41:43 you describe it as sort of a forerunner to zoom.
0:41:45 Or to, you know, maybe Skype or something like that.
0:41:48 And it did have the idea of doing audio
0:41:50 and maybe hopefully doing video conferencing.
0:41:52 But the main thing was like a shared whiteboard
0:41:54 and then shared documents.
0:41:57 And so specifically the idea was real-time collaboration.
0:41:59 And so, you know, you and I are scientists
0:42:00 in two different locations.
0:42:01 We’re writing a paper together.
0:42:03 We want to be able to look at the paper at the same time
0:42:05 and be able to make edits such that we can,
0:42:07 you know, see each other’s edits like the Google Docs,
0:42:08 like the way Google Docs works today.
0:42:11 Or to have a whiteboard where you could, you know,
0:42:13 you could look at, you know, imagery
0:42:15 or you could look at, you know, draw diagrams
0:42:16 and you could share them and work on them together
0:42:19 and annotate them like you had a shared whiteboard.
0:42:20 And, you know, I think that was, that was like a good,
0:42:21 I mean, that was a good idea.
0:42:22 And like all of that stuff has happened
0:42:23 and it’s very important today.
0:42:25 It was just, I think it was in retrospect,
0:42:26 it was just before it’s time,
0:42:30 which is you just like the internet, what’s that?
0:42:32 – Out of order and what you should build first, for sure.
0:42:33 – Out of order.
0:42:34 Yeah, well, there were two problems.
0:42:35 Which is one is it was just hard to get it to work
0:42:38 ’cause you just, you needed a certain speed of, you know,
0:42:39 you needed a certain speed in network performance
0:42:41 and graphics capability on the computers
0:42:43 to make it work and it was kind of choppy.
0:42:44 And then the other problem was
0:42:46 to get a real-time collaborative system to work,
0:42:49 people have to be online at the same time, right?
0:42:50 And so you and I are, we’re collaborating,
0:42:51 we have to be online at the same time
0:42:53 and we might be in totally different time zones
0:42:54 and, you know, like it’s just,
0:42:57 so it’s hard to get critical mass for a network effect
0:42:58 if you have to be online at the same time.
0:43:00 Whereas, you know, things like email worked
0:43:02 if, you know, regardless of when you’re online,
0:43:04 you know, so-called asynchronous.
0:43:06 And so, yeah, collage was, it was a good idea.
0:43:08 It just wasn’t quite clicking.
0:43:09 And then it just, it kind of became clear to me
0:43:11 and a few of the other folks that I worked with there
0:43:13 at the time that it’s just like, okay,
0:43:14 something else is going to pop here
0:43:15 and it’s going to pop hard.
0:43:17 And it’s going to be something involving like this,
0:43:20 you know, the web go for ways like this confluence
0:43:22 of basically new thinking of user interfaces
0:43:23 is going to take place.
0:43:26 And then, by the way, it’s basically two big things,
0:43:29 the two big things that sort of we insisted on,
0:43:31 the two big leaps was one is we’re just going to assume
0:43:33 that everybody has a graphical computer.
0:43:36 We’re just going to assume that everybody has like Windows
0:43:38 or a Mac or a Unix workstation.
0:43:41 We’re not going to support not DOS, right?
0:43:43 And all systems up until that point, you know,
0:43:44 including by the way, the early, you know,
0:43:46 the first web browser, the first web browser
0:43:48 was a tech space, tech space browser,
0:43:49 you know, the Tim Berners-Lee browser.
0:43:51 It was a browser that actually was a tech space browser
0:43:53 that ran on the next cube,
0:43:55 of which there were maybe 5,000 of the world at that point.
0:43:56 – Right, because that was like one
0:43:59 of the most graphical machines ever.
0:43:59 – But he had this problem.
0:44:01 He had this problem is he had the problem.
0:44:02 So first of all, the problem of just like,
0:44:04 there was no graphical content, there was no graphical,
0:44:06 you know, you just like, just the assumption was
0:44:07 that it was going to be text-based.
0:44:09 And then the other problem was we just assumed
0:44:11 that the internet was going to be fast.
0:44:13 And that was a, again, a heretical assumption.
0:44:15 That was a heretical assumption at the time,
0:44:17 ’cause at the time the internet was really slow.
0:44:19 And most people run very slow connections.
0:44:22 And so, you know, the experience a lot of people had
0:44:23 the first time they used Mosaic on,
0:44:25 even on a broadband connection, the first time they had it
0:44:28 is you would literally watch the page load line by line.
0:44:31 And then you would watch the images load line by line, right?
0:44:34 And so, but it was a heretical idea at that point
0:44:35 to say, no, we’re just going to assume everybody’s
0:44:37 on a graphical interface and we’re going to assume
0:44:39 that everybody’s on a fast broadband connection
0:44:41 and we’re just not going to compromise.
0:44:43 We’re going to build the correct user interface
0:44:45 for that new world on those two fronts.
0:44:47 And we’re not going to compromise to try to be backward
0:44:49 compatible with the old text-based UIs
0:44:51 or with the old narrowband connections.
0:44:55 – And in a way that you were a university student
0:44:58 with no company, no need to sell anything in the beginning.
0:45:01 So it was like, fair enough.
0:45:03 – Yeah, in my computer, because I worked at IBM
0:45:06 and then I worked at NCSA and we had all this money
0:45:07 for the government at that point.
0:45:09 My computer was an SGI Silicon Graphics
0:45:12 at the time company, leading a Unix computer company
0:45:13 at the time, you know, an amazing company,
0:45:15 but they, you know, they made these workstations
0:45:19 and the workstations cost $50,000 in 1992 dollars.
0:45:21 You know, it’s like a hundred and some thousand today.
0:45:23 And, but that, you know, my computer was one of those.
0:45:25 And so, and on a fast connection.
0:45:26 And so I’m just like, look, I’m just going to build it
0:45:27 for that.
0:45:30 And then my colleagues built it versions for Windows and Mac,
0:45:32 but like, we’re just not going to compromise
0:45:33 for the old hardware that everybody else is on.
0:45:34 We’re just going to assume that in the future,
0:45:36 everybody gets something like this.
0:45:37 – Yeah.
0:45:37 – And then yeah, we, at your point,
0:45:39 like we were running on federal research money.
0:45:41 So we had no commercial, we had no commercial incentive.
0:45:43 We had no reason to go for, you know,
0:45:45 large numbers of users or, you know, try to, you know,
0:45:48 make money or whatever at the time.
0:45:50 So we, so we just basically, again,
0:45:52 and the heresy we just designed for the future.
0:45:53 And then there was a little bit,
0:45:54 I had a little bit of a glimmer.
0:45:55 I wouldn’t say I was confident on this,
0:45:57 but I had a little bit of a glimmer at the time.
0:45:59 That was like, look, if we designed for,
0:46:01 if we designed for broadband, like the,
0:46:03 if it’s a compelling enough user interface,
0:46:05 it will actually cause broadband to happen.
0:46:06 – That would be aggressive.
0:46:07 – Right.
0:46:09 This is a, my, my favorite philosopher,
0:46:10 Nicollan has this term called hyperstition,
0:46:12 which is the idea of sort of, you know,
0:46:14 sort of willing an idea into existence,
0:46:15 just by proposing it.
0:46:16 It’s sort of like pulling the future forward.
0:46:17 And it’s basic.
0:46:19 And the idea basically was if people could just see
0:46:21 what was possible with a modern, you know,
0:46:24 Unix workstation on a modern broadband network,
0:46:26 with, you know, with what we then built with,
0:46:28 if they could just see that with Mosaic,
0:46:30 they would be like, wow, I need that.
0:46:32 And then they would price it and they would be like,
0:46:34 oh my God, I can’t afford that.
0:46:34 But then they would say, well,
0:46:37 I need a version of that that I can afford.
0:46:39 And then that would be a motivation for the phone companies
0:46:41 to start to offer broadband and for the, you know,
0:46:43 for the PC, for, you know, for the PCs
0:46:44 to start to get built in internet connectivity
0:46:47 and for people to upgrade from DOS to Windows
0:46:49 and all these other things that followed.
0:46:51 And so I, as I said, I wasn’t confident about that,
0:46:52 but I had a glimmer of it.
0:46:53 Cause I was like, look, like if,
0:46:55 if you could get through this not whole,
0:46:56 and if you could get the world to the other side
0:46:59 where everybody has a GUI and everybody has broadband,
0:47:01 then all of a sudden it’s just very clear
0:47:03 that you just, you have all of these incredibly
0:47:05 compelling things that you can do that are impossible otherwise.
0:47:08 And so it was kind of a hard shove in that direction.
0:47:10 And then the other, the other, I would say big breakthrough
0:47:13 or that I would not break through the other really important
0:47:15 conceptual rule that we had at the time, which was,
0:47:17 which was sort of consistent with the internet philosophy
0:47:19 of the time was it had to be an open platform.
0:47:21 And specifically it had to be whatever it was,
0:47:24 it had to be where anybody could create servers
0:47:25 and anybody could create content.
0:47:28 And so it had to be very easy to do that.
0:47:29 And so, and you remember in those days,
0:47:31 it was sort of famous that you could implement a web server
0:47:33 and four lines of Perl script, right?
0:47:34 To do whatever you wanted.
0:47:36 And so, and you could create a webpage
0:47:37 just by writing HTML by hand.
0:47:38 – And then by the way, people did
0:47:42 and there were scaling issues with those four lines.
0:47:45 – That’s how a lot of the big internet companies
0:47:46 started out that way, yes.
0:47:47 And then that’s one of the reasons
0:47:49 why the sites always crashed is exactly.
0:47:52 But the point was, the point was to optimize for,
0:47:54 it was to optimize for the quality experience
0:47:55 and then optimize for the openness
0:47:57 and the creativity that would follow.
0:47:59 And again, there was a leap there, right?
0:48:01 And we got, you remember we got a lot of criticism
0:48:02 at the time, which was, wow,
0:48:04 a lot of computer scientists at the time were like,
0:48:06 wow, these guys are building the most inefficient,
0:48:07 computer systems have ever been built.
0:48:09 This thing is incredibly inefficient.
0:48:09 It’s unoptimized.
0:48:11 It’s wasting network bandwidth.
0:48:14 – Where’s the ace and one encoding?
0:48:16 Like this is strings.
0:48:17 You guys are crazy.
0:48:18 You’re wasteful.
0:48:19 – Yeah, we were doing wasteful.
0:48:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:48:22 Big environmental arguments and wasting.
0:48:24 You’re burning power, causing pollution.
0:48:26 Yeah, these are all text-based protocols.
0:48:29 So one of the design principles was all protocols
0:48:29 have to be text-based.
0:48:31 There were no binary protocols.
0:48:32 Text-based protocols are much less efficient,
0:48:34 much, much slower.
0:48:36 But the enormous advantage is you can program
0:48:38 a text-based protocol by writing text.
0:48:40 And you can read it by reading text.
0:48:41 Whereas if it’s in a binary format,
0:48:44 you’re always dealing with an intermediary system
0:48:45 and it’s just harder to develop for
0:48:46 and harder to understand.
0:48:47 The source, you know–
0:48:51 – So as a little counter to the belief
0:48:55 of the computer science world at the time,
0:48:57 I mean, everybody read on ASM-1 encoding
0:48:59 is that you have to do that.
0:49:00 – Yeah, any CS professor of that era
0:49:02 who looked at this said they’re doing it wrong, 100%.
0:49:04 They said they’re absolutely doing it wrong
0:49:05 ’cause it’s not optimized.
0:49:06 I mean, so much of computer science at that point
0:49:08 was about optimizing scarce resources
0:49:10 ’cause that was all you had at that time.
0:49:12 And they had spent decades figuring out how to do that.
0:49:15 And we collectively decided to just break that rule.
0:49:17 And again, it was not to break the rule just to break it.
0:49:19 It was because what was on the other side of breaking
0:49:22 that rule was openness and creativity and empowerment.
0:49:23 And anybody can do anything and then–
0:49:24 – Inclusivity, right?
0:49:27 You didn’t have to be a computer scientist,
0:49:31 networking expert to build a web server.
0:49:32 – Yeah, that’s right.
0:49:33 And the experience people had,
0:49:36 the killer version of this that ended up working really well
0:49:38 was this idea of View Source.
0:49:40 So there was this feature we built into Mosaic
0:49:41 and it was built into browsers,
0:49:43 which was, I forget exactly when it popped up,
0:49:45 but View Source, the idea basically was
0:49:46 you’re looking at a web page,
0:49:48 you’re looking at the rendered version of a web page,
0:49:49 but you could click on View Source
0:49:52 and it would show you the HTML source code for the page.
0:49:55 And so anytime you wanted to see how a web page
0:49:58 had been created to accomplish something that you wanted to do,
0:49:58 you could just look at it
0:50:00 and then it made it easy to learn and replicate.
0:50:03 And again, that was like, that was not,
0:50:07 that was like, there was no View Source
0:50:08 for like network protocols before that.
0:50:09 That was like, that was a new idea.
0:50:12 – That created so many web design jobs.
0:50:16 It was crazy, like, which could never have come about.
0:50:17 It’d be, you know, like that little
0:50:20 or a seemingly small thing was a massive thing.
0:50:21 – Yeah, no, look, I meet people.
0:50:24 I met people, I met somebody just the other day
0:50:25 who, you know, literally it’s like that.
0:50:28 It’s like, you know, they first got access to the browser
0:50:30 and, you know, from their high school or whatever
0:50:32 and college and then they literally,
0:50:33 they literally do the View Source thing
0:50:35 and they’re like, oh, I can write HTML
0:50:36 and then they got a job as a web designer.
0:50:37 – Yeah.
0:50:38 – And then that paid their way through, you know, whatever
0:50:40 to, you know, get to the career going
0:50:42 or start their company and yeah, so that was,
0:50:44 yeah, economic empowerment, yeah, inclusivity,
0:50:47 yeah, maximal, I would say maximal inclusivity, you know,
0:50:50 and then look, you know, technical whizzes could do more,
0:50:51 but like, you did not have to be a technical whizz
0:50:53 to get started and get going.
0:50:55 And then it gave you a very powerful motivation
0:50:57 to learn more and a very easy way to learn more.
0:50:59 Yeah, and so that worked out really well.
0:51:01 And then basically the mosaic idea basically was,
0:51:02 okay, pull all this stuff together.
0:51:05 So build basically the unified visual interface
0:51:07 and mosaic out of the gate actually supported all three
0:51:08 of the systems that I described.
0:51:10 So we support it out of the gate with, you know,
0:51:12 the web in a sort of text form at the time
0:51:15 and then Gopher and then Waste.
0:51:16 We actually also support FTP.
0:51:18 We supported actually native support
0:51:19 for internet news groups.
0:51:22 And so it was sort of a single graphical user interface,
0:51:23 you know, to rule them all.
0:51:25 So we had support for all this and then, you know,
0:51:26 the web obviously is the one that took off.
0:51:29 And then the other part of it for mosaic was
0:51:31 to then make the web graphical.
0:51:33 And so to transition it from a text-based, you know,
0:51:36 kind of text prompt DOS kind of situation
0:51:38 to be full graphic web pages.
0:51:39 And that was, of course, you know,
0:51:40 that was then the thing that really, you know,
0:51:43 kind of just got lit on fire.
0:51:48 Yeah, you famously invented the image tag, if I recall.
0:51:49 So there was a big dispute.
0:51:51 There was a big dispute early on.
0:51:52 So there was a big dispute.
0:51:54 So there was opposition early on
0:51:55 within the internet community.
0:51:58 And I won’t name names, but within the set of people
0:52:00 who were into this kind of thing, working on it,
0:52:02 there was actually a lot of controversy
0:52:03 around the idea of adding images.
0:52:04 And there was a big argument.
0:52:07 There are actually multiple arguments to not add images.
0:52:10 And by the way, to not images means not make it graphical,
0:52:11 right?
0:52:12 Not bring it into the gooey world.
0:52:14 And, you know, one argument was just efficiency.
0:52:17 Again, network optimization, use of resources, you know,
0:52:18 not, you know, and by the way, you know,
0:52:20 sort of an equality argument, you know,
0:52:22 not everybody has a graphical workstation.
0:52:23 Yeah, right, yeah.
0:52:24 Right, it would be unfair to them
0:52:26 if there’s web pages that they can’t view.
0:52:27 So that was part of the argument.
0:52:29 You know, there was certainly a speed performance,
0:52:31 you know, waste argument to it.
0:52:34 And then there was also a cultural argument.
0:52:35 And this was around the time
0:52:36 that the internet was starting to really open up.
0:52:39 And, you know, that kind of nirvana I was mentioning
0:52:42 where everybody is like, you know, CS degree holder,
0:52:45 you know, is starting to become a consumer thing early on.
0:52:46 And there was a lot of anxiety around that.
0:52:48 And so there was an argument at the time
0:52:49 that content of the internet
0:52:52 should remain only scientific and technical, right?
0:52:54 And if you add features and capabilities
0:52:56 like images and graphics,
0:52:57 then you are encouraging the creation
0:52:59 of sort of mass market content, right?
0:53:01 And if you have mass market content,
0:53:03 that’s going to draw more of the wrong kinds of users.
0:53:05 A valid argument.
0:53:08 It turns out that argument was correct.
0:53:13 But, well, yes, it was correct.
0:53:15 The people that made that argument
0:53:17 were correct based on their own presuppositions.
0:53:18 Yeah.
0:53:20 I was on the other side of that argument.
0:53:21 And I was on the other side
0:53:22 of each of those arguments.
0:53:23 But specifically on that argument
0:53:25 is I just always thought
0:53:26 everybody should be able to use this.
0:53:29 I was very much on the side of, this is amazing.
0:53:30 Everybody on the planet should be on the internet.
0:53:31 Everybody on the internet should be on the web.
0:53:33 Everybody on the web should be graphical.
0:53:35 Like there should, yes, there should be content
0:53:36 all over the internet that’s graphical.
0:53:37 There should be, you know,
0:53:39 all kinds of pictures and movies,
0:53:40 animations and streaming and games.
0:53:42 And like, yes, you should have all this
0:53:43 and everybody should be on it.
0:53:44 And we should maximize this.
0:53:47 And that may, and again, heretical idea.
0:53:50 That was, there were a lot of people at the time
0:53:51 who were very important at the time
0:53:53 who were very anxious about that.
0:53:54 And then, and basically we just,
0:53:56 so there was a big fight argument around that
0:53:58 and we weren’t making progress on it.
0:53:59 And then I just did a,
0:54:00 ’cause I controlled, you know,
0:54:01 I controlled Mosaic at that point.
0:54:02 So I just did a fade of complete
0:54:04 and I just declared it and I created the image tag.
0:54:07 Yeah, and people put up images.
0:54:09 And we were just, yes, I won though.
0:54:11 What’s the, I won the,
0:54:12 I won the de facto argument.
0:54:14 It’s just through sheer authoritarian action.
0:54:16 Yeah, you were a king of the internet.
0:54:19 And then as well, tell us about like,
0:54:21 okay, how did it take off?
0:54:23 When did the press recognize it?
0:54:26 And then, how did you become,
0:54:27 go from king of the internet
0:54:30 to customer support for the entire internet?
0:54:31 That’s the same thing.
0:54:32 It’s the same thing.
0:54:34 Also the main blogger,
0:54:35 maybe the first blogger,
0:54:36 depending on how you score it.
0:54:38 So it was also the sort of,
0:54:39 I was the front page for a while.
0:54:44 So yeah, so we started basically a group of us at NCSA
0:54:46 basically kind of went rogue in 1991
0:54:48 and, you know, started kind of working on this idea
0:54:49 on nights and weekends.
0:54:51 And in particular, my partner at the time,
0:54:53 Eric Bina and myself,
0:54:55 you know, we were the first two to kind of work on this.
0:54:57 And just a full kind of acknowledgement here,
0:55:00 Eric and I co-wrote the first version of Mosaic,
0:55:01 which was for UNIX workstations.
0:55:03 And then we had other colleagues who, you know,
0:55:06 who are, you know, very famous in the history
0:55:08 who developed the Windows version
0:55:09 and developed the Mac version.
0:55:10 And so, you know, we did develop
0:55:12 for all three of those platforms,
0:55:14 but the first version was the UNIX version.
0:55:15 Eric and I built it.
0:55:17 I always, I always credit it as I did the front end
0:55:18 and then Eric did all the hard work.
0:55:19 – Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:55:21 He was a great programmer, I guess, yeah.
0:55:23 – He was fantastic, absolutely outstanding programmer.
0:55:25 He is an outstanding programmer.
0:55:28 And so I did the UI and Eric did the rendering engine.
0:55:29 And so Eric built,
0:55:31 the rendering engine is the core of it.
0:55:32 Like the rendering engine is the thing
0:55:33 that actually renders the page
0:55:34 and has all the user interface elements
0:55:36 and makes the links work and displays the images
0:55:37 and all this stuff.
0:55:38 And that was definitely the harder,
0:55:40 the harder half of it from a programming standpoint.
0:55:41 So I give Eric, you know,
0:55:43 I give Eric like at least half the credit,
0:55:45 if not more for that.
0:55:46 And then my role was the front end.
0:55:49 So it’s kind of everything around the rendering engine.
0:55:50 And so it was the rest of the UI.
0:55:51 And then it was the other, you know,
0:55:54 I did the networking protocols and all the, you know,
0:55:56 user, everything, user preferences and all the cache,
0:55:58 you know, sort of caching in all the things
0:56:00 to kind of make the rendering engine work.
0:56:01 So it was the two of us.
0:56:02 And it was really like the core of work
0:56:06 was sort of a crash renegade project kind of off books.
0:56:07 And for me, it was like off books in two ways.
0:56:09 It was not what I was supposed to be doing at work,
0:56:12 but it was also, I was doing this instead of going to class.
0:56:15 This is when I almost got kicked out of college also.
0:56:17 Yeah, so we sort of a crash course over the course
0:56:18 of I guess the fourth quarter of ’92.
0:56:21 And then, you know, we kind of worked really hard
0:56:23 over the holiday break of ’92 to kind of get it working.
0:56:24 And then I forget the exact sequence,
0:56:27 but we put out the first kind of acceptable version,
0:56:29 which I think was the 0.9 version.
0:56:31 And like around Christmas or a little bit after ’92.
0:56:33 And then I think got to quote 1.0
0:56:35 and kind of the spring of ’93.
0:56:38 And yeah, and basically it went vertical
0:56:40 basically out of the gate with the 0.9 version.
0:56:42 So it was basically a, yeah.
0:56:45 So it’s sort of a year of preparatory work in ’92,
0:56:47 and then it was sort of ’93 was the vertical takeoff.
0:56:49 And ’93 was a very important year for me
0:56:51 because it was my senior year in college also.
0:56:53 And so, and I was off a semester,
0:56:56 I was off cycle by semester for reasons.
0:56:59 And then, and so anyway, so January to December in ’93
0:57:01 where my, that was my senior year in college.
0:57:04 And so this was like my chance to like really do that.
0:57:06 And then, ’cause I just assumed I was gonna graduate
0:57:08 and you know, leave and get a job at the end of the year.
0:57:10 So I had about a 12 month run there
0:57:11 where the thing really took off.
0:57:12 And then yeah, look, it was the tiger.
0:57:14 Oh, and then we had other colleagues who did the,
0:57:18 did the, what was the, not the first web server,
0:57:19 but the first kind of widely used,
0:57:21 I would say robust scalable web server.
0:57:23 And again, that also again gave us a lot of ability
0:57:26 to move quickly ’cause we actually controlled for that period.
0:57:28 We controlled both the client and the server.
0:57:29 – Yeah.
0:57:30 – And so we can move very fast.
0:57:31 Yeah, so that, yeah.
0:57:34 So the two of them came out and then people started
0:57:35 to figure this out and it started to get, you know,
0:57:38 widely used among existing internet users.
0:57:39 And then it was an immediate reason
0:57:40 for people to get online at home.
0:57:42 And it was really the first reason for a lot of people
0:57:43 to try to get online at home.
0:57:45 And so it also I think helped catalyze the boom
0:57:48 in what were called at the time consumer ISPs
0:57:50 and for people to upgrade their PCs to be graphical
0:57:53 and then have network, you know, have the network stack.
0:57:55 And so the 93 was like this upward, you know,
0:57:56 the straight kind of upward hurricane.
0:57:58 But again, it was in this context of we’re working
0:58:01 for a research institute funded by the federal government.
0:58:04 And so, you know, we have, you know, we have no money.
0:58:05 We have no revenue.
0:58:06 We have no business model, you know,
0:58:09 – ‘Cause we got a product out there that’s taken off.
0:58:10 – It’s taken off like crazy.
0:58:12 And then we put it out as open source,
0:58:14 but under what’s called a hybrid license.
0:58:17 We put it under a hybrid license that says it’s free for,
0:58:19 it’s all free for academic and individual use
0:58:20 and not profit use.
0:58:22 But if you want to use it for commercial applications,
0:58:23 you have to come talk to us.
0:58:24 – Oh, right.
0:58:25 – And then I had the mailbox
0:58:27 for the incoming commercial queries.
0:58:31 And I remember when it hit like 400 of basic companies,
0:58:32 you know, like general councils and, you know,
0:58:34 procurement officers at big companies saying, you know,
0:58:36 we want to deploy this throughout our company.
0:58:37 You know, who do we pay?
0:58:38 And we had no way to take the money.
0:58:40 We didn’t even have like a price sheet.
0:58:40 We didn’t have any of this.
0:58:43 And then very critically, we didn’t have any support, right?
0:58:45 So we didn’t have any customer support resources.
0:58:47 And so we had the support email address
0:58:49 and I also had that email box.
0:58:50 – Yeah.
0:58:52 – And so in my spare time between coding sessions,
0:58:54 I would literally just like answer questions.
0:58:54 – Yeah.
0:58:56 – And, but it was literally, it was, you know,
0:58:58 it was supposed to be tech support for Mosaic,
0:59:00 but it turned into tech support for the entire internet.
0:59:02 So I, I helped a lot of people.
0:59:04 – I think all the difference between that was the internet
0:59:07 for everybody, you know, and a lot of ways still is.
0:59:09 – Exactly. And so, so it really started to take,
0:59:11 it then sort of became a formal project.
0:59:14 It kind of got, got embraced and became a real project
0:59:15 and got more resources.
0:59:16 And then, but we were, you know,
0:59:18 we were kind of just dying from the overhead
0:59:19 and, you know, we needed more servers
0:59:21 and we needed more people and the whole thing.
0:59:25 And so we wrote, I remember we wrote a proposal to,
0:59:27 for a grant, we wanted an incremental grant
0:59:28 from the National Science Foundation
0:59:31 and it was to staff a customer support desk
0:59:32 so that we could support as we could hire, like,
0:59:34 you know, whatever people.
0:59:35 – Customer support.
0:59:37 – Yeah, so this is actually my first trip to Washington DC
0:59:39 as we, we, we, we issued this grant.
0:59:41 We sent it to Dan and, and it,
0:59:42 and the National Science Foundation, people to their credit,
0:59:44 they were fascinated by this whole thing
0:59:45 and they were glad that it was working.
0:59:46 But, you know, we sent in this grant,
0:59:48 it was the only place we had any sense of where to get money
0:59:49 and we sent in this grant
0:59:51 and literally it came back denied.
0:59:54 You know, the National, the National Science Foundation
0:59:55 is not in the business of, you know,
0:59:56 funding customer support.
0:59:59 One of the, one of the sort of fun twists here is,
1:00:01 okay, you idiot, like this, like giant commercial
1:00:03 opportunity is staring you in the face.
1:00:06 Like you’ve, you literally have like inbound sales leads
1:00:08 like coming out of your ears.
1:00:09 Like why don’t you go raise venture capital
1:00:10 and start a company?
1:00:11 – Yeah.
1:00:12 – And of course the answer was
1:00:13 because I had no idea that there was such a thing
1:00:14 as venture capital.
1:00:16 – Yeah, venture capital.
1:00:16 – I literally,
1:00:19 – Yeah, you know what a tractor was.
1:00:21 – Yes, exactly.
1:00:23 You know, I had no conception whatsoever for, you know,
1:00:25 for, I had just no clue at the time
1:00:26 that it was actually a tractable thing
1:00:28 that you could, you could, you could do that.
1:00:30 And that was like something that like, you know, really,
1:00:31 you know, rich, famous, fancy people did.
1:00:32 Or, you know, I don’t know,
1:00:34 people got lucky or people in Silicon Valley or something,
1:00:35 but like people in Illinois,
1:00:36 certainly we’re not doing that.
1:00:37 And so, you know,
1:00:40 and there was no venture capital in Champaign-Urban
1:00:40 at that point.
1:00:41 And then there was exactly,
1:00:43 there was exactly one software startup at that point
1:00:44 called Spyglass,
1:00:46 which is a name that will come up later in the story.
1:00:47 – Yeah.
1:00:49 – But, but it was not doing well.
1:00:51 And so it was like, it was more of a cautionary tale.
1:00:52 And so we basically just, yeah,
1:00:54 we had the tiger by the tail and then we just kind of held on,
1:00:56 held on for dear life kind of through that year.
1:00:57 – Incredible.
1:00:59 – And then when did they kind of,
1:01:03 when did the kind of media and the press get wind of it?
1:01:04 – So this is a funny story.
1:01:06 So, so there was a Wall Street Journal reporter
1:01:07 named Jared Sandberg.
1:01:08 – Yeah.
1:01:10 Well, yeah, yeah, I remember Jared Sandberg.
1:01:11 He was a funny guy.
1:01:12 – He was a great guy.
1:01:13 He was a great guy.
1:01:15 You know, this is 30 years ago.
1:01:17 So we’re using the was here for people who were still
1:01:18 in perfectly good health.
1:01:19 – Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:01:22 He was a great character.
1:01:23 – Yeah, yeah.
1:01:24 And it wasn’t as a great writer, a great reporter.
1:01:26 And so he had sort of the tech beat
1:01:27 at the Wall Street Journal at the time.
1:01:29 And he figured this out early and called me up
1:01:30 to the blue probably in, I don’t know,
1:01:33 late ’92, early ’93, like super early.
1:01:34 And he had the story ready to go.
1:01:36 And he was intensely frustrated
1:01:38 because he could not get his editors to run it
1:01:41 because it was not an important story.
1:01:42 – Yeah, of course Simon.
1:01:43 You know, everybody’s talking about it.
1:01:45 It’s just a bunch of idiot kids with bad grades.
1:01:46 Can’t do writing software.
1:01:47 – Yeah, yeah.
1:01:48 On this internet thing that nobody cares about,
1:01:51 that’s never gonna be a thing that’s about to get quashed,
1:01:53 you know, squashed by MSN and AOL
1:01:54 and interactive television.
1:01:56 And like, I tell you again,
1:01:58 to talk about the heresy aspect of this.
1:02:01 Like, this is why I’m so distrustful of experts.
1:02:03 Like, this is my origin story
1:02:05 for why I don’t trust anybody with credentials
1:02:06 or anything anymore.
1:02:08 So I remember, another one.
1:02:10 So I was working on, I remember working,
1:02:12 it must have been, it was like December of ’92
1:02:13 or January ’93.
1:02:15 So I’m like working around the clock
1:02:16 in my little office at NCSA.
1:02:18 And you know, this is at Urbana-Champaign.
1:02:19 It’s also, you know, it’s a little further south
1:02:21 where I grew up, but it’s still frozen tundra
1:02:22 most of the year.
1:02:24 And the wind comes whipping over the Illinois plains
1:02:25 and everything is frozen.
1:02:27 And you know, you’re slipping fall every 10 feet,
1:02:27 you know, in the middle of winter.
1:02:29 And it’s just this kind of crazy thing.
1:02:30 And I’d be working in the middle of the night,
1:02:33 none of the restaurants are open and I’d get hungry.
1:02:35 And so I’d walk down to the one convenience store
1:02:37 that was open 24 hours and I’d buy my,
1:02:39 whatever my hot dog or my cookies and something to drink.
1:02:41 And I remember walking in one night
1:02:44 and there was this new magazine on the newsstand called Wired.
1:02:46 And it was Wired issue number one.
1:02:48 And I was like, oh, that’s interesting.
1:02:51 It’s a magazine about, it appears to be a magazine
1:02:52 that’s about things that I’m interested in,
1:02:54 which was a novel concept at the time.
1:02:56 And so I bought it and I took it back to my office
1:02:57 and I read it cover to cover.
1:02:59 And they did not have the word internet in it once.
1:03:05 And I was like, okay, you know, I was like, okay, like,
1:03:07 I guess, I don’t count, you know, I guess, I, you know,
1:03:09 I don’t count, we don’t count.
1:03:10 This whole thing doesn’t count.
1:03:12 You know, these are the experts,
1:03:14 like they have a magazine, right?
1:03:15 – They’re pros. – You know, these,
1:03:16 yeah, these are the pros.
1:03:18 And like, you know, what we’re working on
1:03:20 is clearly not important enough to merit the magazine.
1:03:22 And so I was just like, okay,
1:03:23 I guess we’re just gonna keep working on our thing.
1:03:25 But like, you know, it’s sort of like this constant message
1:03:27 from the media, which is like, this is not important.
1:03:28 This is not important.
1:03:29 This is not important.
1:03:31 So anyway, so Jared had this whole story is ready to go
1:03:33 and he could not get his editors to run it.
1:03:35 And then later in ’93,
1:03:37 John Markoff at the New York Times figured this out.
1:03:39 – Oh, a good tech reporter.
1:03:41 I mean, John Markoff’s smart guy, yeah.
1:03:44 – And a legendary, legendary, you know, tech reporter
1:03:45 going back, you know, quite, quite a bit, you know,
1:03:48 still very active, but at the time he was like a veteran
1:03:49 and was very well respected in the industry
1:03:51 and wrote a bunch of good books and so forth.
1:03:53 And so he wrote a story for the New York Times.
1:03:54 So the good news is he wrote a story.
1:03:58 The bad news is it featured my boss and my boss’s boss.
1:04:00 – Who had nothing to do with the project?
1:04:02 Who had you work on something entirely else?
1:04:04 – My boss at the time too, his credit, you know,
1:04:06 he was aware and he, you know, he kind of, you know,
1:04:09 he kind of, you know, he didn’t vigorously oppose us
1:04:10 and then he supported us
1:04:12 and then he ultimately sort of adopted as a project.
1:04:13 And so he kind of used his way into it,
1:04:14 but he ultimately was very supportive.
1:04:17 And then, but my boss’s boss was the director of NTSA
1:04:18 at the time.
1:04:19 And look, this is one of those things where I like,
1:04:21 I owe these guys a tremendous amount
1:04:22 because they created this environment
1:04:24 that I was able to do my work in.
1:04:26 And I wouldn’t be here today if not for them, but, you know,
1:04:27 you know, I kind of,
1:04:29 I kind of a little bit of an iffy relationship
1:04:29 with my boss to start with.
1:04:33 And then I had never met my boss’s boss, right?
1:04:34 And there was no reason for me to meet my boss’s boss
1:04:36 ’cause I’m like an undergraduate like staff member.
1:04:38 Like, you know, he’s a big, like a huge,
1:04:39 he’s like a huge important researcher,
1:04:41 astrophysicist and, you know,
1:04:42 directing this huge supercomputing center.
1:04:44 So he had no reason to meet me.
1:04:46 But, you know, the story shows of the New York Times
1:04:47 and it’s smiling photos of the two of them
1:04:49 and not, you know, Eric and me.
1:04:52 And I’m like, oh, okay, I see how this works.
1:04:54 – And how did you feel at the time?
1:04:57 ‘Cause I know how you would feel now if that had happened.
1:04:59 Like, how did you feel then?
1:05:00 – It was just a little bit,
1:05:01 I don’t know, it was a little bit,
1:05:02 it was a little bit annoying,
1:05:03 but it was also a little bit of like,
1:05:05 look, it’s the New York Times.
1:05:07 Like, I don’t know, you know,
1:05:10 I don’t, I guess they write about important people, right?
1:05:11 And these are important people
1:05:12 ’cause they’re running this thing.
1:05:13 And I’m not an important person
1:05:14 ’cause I’m only writing code.
1:05:15 – Yeah, yeah.
1:05:18 – And, you know, it’s like the project is important enough
1:05:19 where they write about the project,
1:05:20 but like the people actually writing the code
1:05:22 are not important enough to talk about.
1:05:23 And so it’s like,
1:05:24 it’s kind of the same reaction I had to “Wired Magazine”,
1:05:26 which is a little bit annoying,
1:05:27 but I guess it means I just need to go back to work.
1:05:30 ‘Cause there’s nothing else to be,
1:05:31 it’s not like I can call the,
1:05:33 it would never occur to me to call the editor
1:05:34 the New York Times and complain.
1:05:35 – One screen rather.
1:05:38 – Nor would he have taken my call, you know?
1:05:40 And so he certainly didn’t know who I was
1:05:41 ’cause it certainly wasn’t in the story.
1:05:44 So, you know, it was just like, it was like whatever,
1:05:45 but it’s like this weird, you know,
1:05:47 it’s like the Play-Doh shadows on a cave wall thing.
1:05:50 Just like, okay, there’s all these things
1:05:51 that people believe, right?
1:05:53 Including up to the internet is like doomed
1:05:54 and it’s never gonna be a thing
1:05:56 and it’s gonna get swamped and all these things.
1:05:58 And then we’re just like, okay,
1:05:59 no, we just have this stuff in front of us
1:06:01 and it just plainly works and we believe in it.
1:06:03 And I guess we’re just gonna keep working on it.
1:06:04 And maybe people will figure out maybe they won’t.
1:06:06 Anyway, so Jared Samberg calls me up.
1:06:08 I remember the day that story broke in the New York Times.
1:06:10 Jared Samberg calls me up and he’s just absolutely livid.
1:06:13 And he told me that he got the morning paper.
1:06:14 And you know, this is like six months later
1:06:15 or something after he, you know,
1:06:17 he would have had the scoop.
1:06:19 He would have had the first story on basically
1:06:20 on all of this stuff.
1:06:21 And he literally told me the story.
1:06:22 He said he charged into his office that morning
1:06:24 and slapped the New York Times down at the desk
1:06:26 in one of these dramatic moments and said, you know,
1:06:27 “See, I told you so, you know,
1:06:28 “John Markov front page of the business section.
1:06:30 “I told you this was actually a story.”
1:06:33 And his boss was like, “Oh yeah, I guess you were right.”
1:06:35 – Oh my God, that’s so crazy.
1:06:38 – So that’s how, again, the heresy,
1:06:39 like that’s how heretical it was.
1:06:41 It was like actually, it was actually hard
1:06:42 to get it in print.
1:06:44 And I think the only reason it showed up in the New York Times
1:06:46 is John Markov was such a legend.
1:06:47 He was just a legendary,
1:06:48 he was further along in his career at that point.
1:06:51 So 93 was a phenomenal year
1:06:53 ’cause it was the take-off year for the web,
1:06:56 for the browser, for all this stuff, for Mosaic.
1:06:58 Yeah, and so it was, and then, you know,
1:07:00 the other part of it was just the ping pong effect
1:07:02 was very interesting, which was, it was basically was,
1:07:05 you know, it started out with like a few people with browsers
1:07:07 and then a few people with web servers
1:07:09 putting up these little individual pieces of content.
1:07:11 But then you got in this kind of feedback loop
1:07:13 back and forth, kind of ping pong thing
1:07:14 where basically every time there was a new
1:07:16 compelling piece of content put online,
1:07:19 there was a reason for people to start using the browser.
1:07:21 And then every time more people started using the browser,
1:07:22 there was an additional incentive
1:07:24 to put more content online, right?
1:07:26 And so it was like the writers,
1:07:28 you needed writers and readers.
1:07:30 And so more writers meant more readers,
1:07:31 more readers meant more writers.
1:07:35 And so, and this is what our partner Andrew Chen
1:07:36 refers to as the cold start problem, right?
1:07:39 Is by default, if you have a situation like that
1:07:41 where you’re gonna have a network, you know,
1:07:43 at scale it’s gonna be great,
1:07:44 but like to actually get it to scale
1:07:45 is actually really hard.
1:07:48 And most things that need to have that kind of network effect
1:07:50 never get passed the cold start problem, right?
1:07:54 They just, they strangle early because, you know,
1:07:55 there’s just not enough, not enough writers,
1:07:56 which means there’s not enough readers,
1:07:58 there’s not enough readers, there’s not enough writers.
1:08:01 – But this, the openness completely was a winner for you.
1:08:02 Yeah.
1:08:03 – That’s right.
1:08:04 And so what happened from the very beginning
1:08:07 was people all over the world started creating web servers
1:08:08 and started putting up content.
1:08:12 And they either used NCSA Mosaic, NCSA web server,
1:08:13 which actually later became Apache.
1:08:15 So it’s actually still kind of in use today.
1:08:18 You know, it’s, you know, this derivation is much later.
1:08:19 Or, you know, they literally could write their own web servers
1:08:21 for the reasons we described earlier.
1:08:24 And so there was no content arriving online.
1:08:25 Just to give people a sense of this,
1:08:28 in the early 93, it was like one new website a day.
1:08:30 And by the way, by one new website,
1:08:31 I don’t mean like one new website,
1:08:33 I don’t mean like a new eBay a day or something.
1:08:35 I mean like a new web page.
1:08:36 Yeah, I remember it was a big day,
1:08:38 the first restaurant menu came online.
1:08:40 It was like a big, it was like an Indian restaurant
1:08:42 and like some second tier city in England
1:08:44 just decided to, somebody put the menu online.
1:08:46 And then it was, I remember the first webcam.
1:08:50 So the first streaming video, first webcam was a coffee pot.
1:08:51 And it was literally a coffee pot
1:08:53 ’cause the guy had actually rigged up a camera,
1:08:55 an early webcam at the time, camera at the time,
1:08:57 with the coffee pot down the hall
1:08:58 in some computer science department somewhere
1:09:00 so that he could see when the coffee pot was empty
1:09:01 and go refill it.
1:09:02 And then he basically just,
1:09:03 so just pure utility for him.
1:09:05 And then he put the coffee pot online.
1:09:06 It was the first webcam.
1:09:07 And so we all sat for like a week
1:09:08 and just watched the coffee pot.
1:09:10 Yeah, yeah, well I put it around the land
1:09:12 when I can put it on the internet.
1:09:12 Yeah, exactly.
1:09:14 And then, you know, you can see it from home, right?
1:09:17 And so, you know, we all watched the communal coffee pot.
1:09:18 And so, you know, there was that.
1:09:21 And anyway, so then one of the features built into Mosaic
1:09:23 was what was called the what’s new page.
1:09:25 And that was another, something that I had at the time,
1:09:27 which was basically, it was sort of one of the first blogs
1:09:30 or maybe the first one where it was every day, it was okay.
1:09:33 It was literally, here are the new web pages for that day.
1:09:34 And it was this period doubling thing
1:09:35 where it started out being,
1:09:38 here’s the new web page for today, right?
1:09:42 And then it was a big deal when it started to be to a day,
1:09:44 right? And then four a day, and then six a day,
1:09:45 and then eight a day.
1:09:46 And then, you know, by the end of the year,
1:09:48 you know, I couldn’t keep up anymore.
1:09:51 Yeah, the what’s cool web page.
1:09:52 Well, then we added the what’s cool page, right?
1:09:53 And the what’s cool page was the good stuff,
1:09:56 exactly the editorial function.
1:09:58 So yeah, so that was, yeah, that was a key moment.
1:10:01 Getting to the windows and the Mac versions were key moment
1:10:02 ’cause, you know, they followed
1:10:04 and those guys did a great job on those.
1:10:05 And that really opened things up.
1:10:07 And then, and again, this was leading up to, I guess,
1:10:11 AOL formally interconnected into the internet in September 93.
1:10:13 So this was leading up to that period.
1:10:15 And they, I don’t remember in AOL released their first
1:10:17 built in, I don’t remember that when they first built in
1:10:19 a web browser into AOL.
1:10:20 Yeah, that was right, I think, yeah.
1:10:21 I think it was, yeah.
1:10:23 But you could kind of, you could kind of get a sense,
1:10:25 you know, it started to become clear that number one,
1:10:27 that they were going to interconnect to the internet,
1:10:29 that they were going to bring their users out of the internet.
1:10:31 And then it seemed inevitable that they would build
1:10:32 in a web browser so that you started to get momentum
1:10:33 from that.
1:10:36 And then, oh, and then the NSF basically this coincided
1:10:39 with the NSF handing off the NSF net
1:10:41 to the commercial telecom companies.
1:10:44 So this was what happened where, so all of this activity,
1:10:47 like Mosaic, was driving the network bandwidth, right,
1:10:49 on the backbone, crushing the backbone.
1:10:52 The NSF was not in the business of providing
1:10:53 commercial backbone services.
1:10:55 And so they did a handoff to the three big telcos
1:10:58 at the time and, you know, did the handoff as part of that.
1:11:01 The acceptable use policy was revoked.
1:11:04 And so then commercial use of the internet became legal.
1:11:06 Immediately after that happened,
1:11:09 there was a really pivotal moment in history,
1:11:11 which is there was a big computer company
1:11:12 at the time, you’ll remember called DEC,
1:11:14 and they had a research lab in Palo Alto
1:11:16 called the DEC Western Research Lab.
1:11:19 And there was a guy there whose name I’m blanking on,
1:11:21 but he, I think it was Brian Reed, if I remember correctly.
1:11:23 And he was a computer science guy there
1:11:24 and he was into this stuff.
1:11:29 And there was a cult science fiction book retail store,
1:11:31 tiny little hole in the wall bookstore on El Camino Real
1:11:34 in I think Mountain View called Future Fantasy Books.
1:11:37 And it was a cult retailer of like obscure science fiction
1:11:38 and fantasy novels.
1:11:41 And it was, it had, you know, it’s local clientele,
1:11:43 but it also had a lot of, especially Japanese
1:11:44 and German tourists, when they were in town,
1:11:47 they would go by and they would buy all these science fiction
1:11:49 novels that they couldn’t get back in their own countries.
1:11:51 And so he had this international clientele.
1:11:54 And so this guy at DEC, I remember went and talked to the,
1:11:56 you know, kind of very hippie, you know,
1:11:58 kind of, you know, ponytail old school,
1:12:00 you know, owner of the Future Fantasy bookstore and said,
1:12:02 oh, you know, let’s put your bookstore, you know,
1:12:02 on the internet.
1:12:05 And the guy’s like, I have no idea what any of those words meant.
1:12:07 Could you please explain each of them to me in sequence?
1:12:09 And Brian basically described, he’s like,
1:12:11 we’re going to put your, we’ll create a website for you.
1:12:13 We’ll put a catalog online and we’ll let people,
1:12:16 you know, all these people, all these foreign buyers
1:12:18 will be able to buy books from, you know,
1:12:19 Japan and Germany.
1:12:20 They’ll be able to see the catalog on the web
1:12:22 and they can click and buy, which was a new idea.
1:12:24 And then, you know, you can ship to the books
1:12:25 and your business will grow so much.
1:12:26 And the guy’s like, that’s great.
1:12:29 He said, the problem is I don’t actually own a computer.
1:12:31 And Brian’s like, well, what do you have?
1:12:32 And he said, well, I do have a fax machine.
1:12:34 And Brian said, let me get back to you.
1:12:37 And so the, the deck guys literally created
1:12:40 the future fantasy website and they, they got,
1:12:42 they figured out how to digitize his inventory
1:12:43 and they created the first e-commerce site,
1:12:44 at least for books.
1:12:45 – It’s the original Amazon.
1:12:48 – Amazon and, and then they set up a fax gateway
1:12:50 where you would order on the web
1:12:52 and then it would fire off a fax message
1:12:54 to this guy’s store and then he would ship you the book.
1:12:56 And then, and then of course in sequence,
1:12:57 you can imagine what happened next.
1:13:00 So, so step one, his business doubled overnight.
1:13:01 – Yeah.
1:13:02 – It’s like the best thing that ever happened.
1:13:05 And then of course step two is Jeff started Amazon
1:13:06 and then, you know, destroyed, destroyed, you know,
1:13:09 destroyed, destroyed, destroyed him and that’s like him.
1:13:11 But there was like a year there
1:13:12 where he had like the best year of his life.
1:13:13 – Yeah.
1:13:14 – Shipping books all over the world.
1:13:15 And so that was the, that was the,
1:13:17 I think that may have been the first e-commerce,
1:13:19 like the, at least the first like formally commerce,
1:13:20 e-commerce thing.
1:13:21 And so that, that was in that period.
1:13:23 – Wow, wow, wow.
1:13:24 – Okay. So then you graduate.
1:13:26 So what do you do?
1:13:27 – Yeah. So, yeah.
1:13:30 So I, and I just, look, this was like a, this was,
1:13:31 I was an undergrad staff member.
1:13:33 I was getting paid $6 and 25 cents an hour,
1:13:35 capped, I think at 30 hours a week.
1:13:36 It was fun, you know, it’s fine.
1:13:37 I was having a great time, you know,
1:13:39 and I just assumed as graduating with a computer science degree,
1:13:40 I’d go get a job.
1:13:42 I, you know, I didn’t, I didn’t know where or what,
1:13:43 but I figured I’d do it.
1:13:45 And again, that like, it was weird.
1:13:46 It was like a schizophrenic experience.
1:13:48 Cause like all of this stuff was, it was just like, you know,
1:13:50 like all day long, I was just dealing with like this,
1:13:53 just tremendous cascade of incoming, you know,
1:13:54 stuff and seeing all this like activity,
1:13:55 but like there was no money in it.
1:13:56 There was no funding.
1:13:57 There was no venture.
1:13:59 There was no startups.
1:14:00 There was no business.
1:14:00 There was no nothing.
1:14:02 And then the media was telling me, it’s, you know,
1:14:04 primarily it’s stupid and the magazines, you know,
1:14:07 and all this stuff and it just, and so again,
1:14:09 I was sort of still, I was sort of halfway between this,
1:14:10 like I’m seeing the future in front of me,
1:14:12 but also it was like the rest of the world
1:14:13 is not taking it seriously.
1:14:15 And so maybe I’m just like, you know,
1:14:16 I just like smoking my own exhaust.
1:14:19 And maybe this is just like all gonna get crushed next year
1:14:21 by MSN and it’s just all gonna be over.
1:14:23 And like, it’s just like some weird, you know,
1:14:24 it’s like, like I said, it’s just like the assumption was
1:14:27 you left this stuff behind when you, when you graduated.
1:14:30 And so I had like the advanced version of that conundrum.
1:14:31 And so I was just like, well, you know,
1:14:33 I guess I need to get a job.
1:14:35 I talked to the NCSA guys about staying there.
1:14:37 They did offer me a job to stay there,
1:14:39 but you know, to kind of keep doing what I was doing,
1:14:40 but it would have been a, you know,
1:14:41 would have been a staff programming job
1:14:43 and, you know, staying in Urbana.
1:14:44 And I kind of wanted to get to,
1:14:47 I wanted to get to A coast.
1:14:49 I was somewhat ambivalent as to which coast,
1:14:51 but I definitely wanted to get to A coast.
1:14:54 And so I decided I needed a job.
1:14:56 And so I, one of the things I had control of
1:14:59 was the about page for the web browser.
1:15:02 And so I added to the about page for the web browser
1:15:03 that everybody used at the time.
1:15:04 I added saying, by the way, you know,
1:15:06 one of the primary authors of this browser
1:15:08 is graduating and is available to be hired.
1:15:10 – Good classifier.
1:15:12 – Please send job offers to, you know, this mailbox.
1:15:14 And I got, you know, to my credit,
1:15:17 I got about a dozen job offers and a bunch of offers
1:15:18 in the East coast, a bunch of offers in the West coast.
1:15:20 And they got an offer from a little software company
1:15:22 out in California.
1:15:24 I got two, basically two offers in Silicon Valley
1:15:26 that I strongly considered.
1:15:28 One was a little software company that I joined.
1:15:29 And then the other was,
1:15:31 I got an offer actually from Sun at the time,
1:15:34 which had a unit, they had a software unit of Sun
1:15:35 at the time called First Person,
1:15:38 which was creating what became Java later
1:15:39 with James Gosling.
1:15:40 It was his project.
1:15:42 And they, I almost went there,
1:15:45 but they had a phantom stock option program.
1:15:47 – That doesn’t sound good.
1:15:48 – I didn’t know much,
1:15:50 but like if you’re applying the word phantom
1:15:53 to your stock option program, that’s not a good sign.
1:15:54 Well, they had a classic problem,
1:15:55 which is they had a software group
1:15:57 that they wanted to give an incentive to
1:15:58 and they wanted to kind of have-
1:16:01 – Hardware company where you have small stock options, right?
1:16:03 – And so they wanted this thing
1:16:04 to be like a separate research thing,
1:16:06 but they didn’t want to spin it off.
1:16:07 They wanted to retain control of it.
1:16:10 And so they were creating basically a shadow,
1:16:11 a shadow stock option program.
1:16:12 And I was just like, I don’t understand this.
1:16:14 This sounds like a scam.
1:16:14 So I turned that down
1:16:16 and then I went to this little software company called EIT.
1:16:18 So yeah, so I literally got a job.
1:16:21 And yeah, and then moved out to California
1:16:22 in basically January ’94.
1:16:24 Yeah, so basically I went to work for,
1:16:26 you know, there’s this little software company called EIT
1:16:27 and they were sort of a,
1:16:29 they were a little basic contract research organization,
1:16:31 very smart, like CS people in Palo Alto,
1:16:33 doing like work for the government,
1:16:35 for companies, you know, kind of very leading edge stuff.
1:16:37 And then they just had, you know, to their credit,
1:16:39 they were on the internet idea early.
1:16:42 And so, you know, they wanted to kind of create,
1:16:43 see if they could create like internet software products,
1:16:45 which was a very kind of new idea at the time.
1:16:47 And so, you know, they made me an offer
1:16:49 and they flew me out and I moved out and it was great.
1:16:50 And I went to work there.
1:16:52 And, you know, I was like, okay, you know,
1:16:53 I’ll work on some internet,
1:16:55 it gives you a way to make money on internet software.
1:16:57 And then, you know, what happened was just,
1:16:59 I just kept having this kind of out-of-body experience though,
1:17:01 which was just like, and then at that point,
1:17:04 the internet started to get like serious media coverage.
1:17:06 And, you know, if you remember those days,
1:17:08 the books started to show up.
1:17:10 And so, you know, before people had the internet,
1:17:13 what happened was there were books about the internet.
1:17:16 And this is where the O’Reilly Publishing Company
1:17:17 became famous at the time and so forth,
1:17:20 is you’d have, actually at the peak of this in ’94, ’95,
1:17:23 you’d have walls and walls of books about the internet
1:17:25 in bookstores and they’d be like guides to the internet,
1:17:26 how to use the internet,
1:17:27 how to write web pages, how to do all these things.
1:17:29 And then there would often be like a floppy disk
1:17:30 in the back of the book
1:17:32 which would have the software, you know,
1:17:33 get the TCP/IP stack.
1:17:37 – That your TCP/IP stack for Windows all that, yeah, yeah.
1:17:38 – Yeah, and then they’d have Mosaic
1:17:40 or they’d have, you know, whatever on the disk.
1:17:42 And so, you know, this started to become a thing
1:17:43 and people started to figure this out
1:17:45 and the press started to take it seriously
1:17:47 and there started to be more interesting content.
1:17:48 And so it’s like, okay, the thing is going
1:17:50 and I’m like, you know, I kind of like,
1:17:52 I left Mosaic behind and so I, you know,
1:17:53 I didn’t have the, you know,
1:17:54 the email addresses anymore and so forth
1:17:56 but I knew how much commercial demand there was.
1:18:00 And so, it was just like really schizophrenic thing.
1:18:01 It was just like very unclear.
1:18:03 And again, like I said, I had never heard of venture capital
1:18:05 so I didn’t really have a sense that you could start a company.
1:18:06 I didn’t really know what to do.
1:18:08 And then, you know, another great kind of stroke of luck
1:18:10 in my life was I got a call from Jim Clark
1:18:13 who’s the, you know, co-founder of our company Netscape,
1:18:15 you know, who was this legendary figure.
1:18:17 And I won’t do the full version of all this
1:18:18 because this gets into stuff that has already been,
1:18:20 people have talked about it a lot in the past.
1:18:21 He’s already plenty well documented.
1:18:23 But, you know, he had been a co-founder
1:18:25 of the founder of this company, Silicon Graphics,
1:18:28 which was one of the leading tech companies of the era.
1:18:29 And then he got sideways with the CEO there.
1:18:31 He decided to leave and start his second company
1:18:33 but he had a non solicit agreement with, you know,
1:18:35 all the great people that he had, you know,
1:18:37 he couldn’t hire the people at SGI.
1:18:40 – Yeah, SGI was an amazing team that he had put together.
1:18:41 – Amazing team, but he had a formal, you know,
1:18:43 he had a formal agreement that he couldn’t hire them.
1:18:46 So, and he had stock SGI with every smart person he knew.
1:18:47 So he, you know, most of the people
1:18:49 who he wanted to work with were, he couldn’t get.
1:18:51 And so he basically was like,
1:18:53 he was literally like sniffing around for talent
1:18:55 and a guy who worked for him, Bill Foss,
1:18:57 who later joined Netscape.
1:18:59 Apparently, I mentioned to Jim one day is like, you know,
1:19:01 one of the guys who made this mosaic browser is like,
1:19:03 apparently he just like moved to Silicon Valley.
1:19:06 And he likes, you know, the about page that the browser says,
1:19:09 he’s available, you know, maybe you should go talk to him.
1:19:12 And so Jim called me up and we had breakfast
1:19:14 and which was a very traumatic experience for me
1:19:17 because I was not eating breakfast in those days
1:19:19 because I was not getting up early enough to have breakfast.
1:19:21 – Yeah, yeah, I remember those.
1:19:23 He used to wake up much later.
1:19:24 – Yeah, I was like programmer hours.
1:19:26 And so I had to be up at seven in the morning
1:19:28 to meet Jim for breakfast at El Farnayo
1:19:30 in Palo Alto at seven a.m. on Sunday.
1:19:32 So I had to recalibrate my entire sleeping schedule
1:19:34 that week to try to make the meeting.
1:19:36 And I was still blurry when I got there,
1:19:37 but they had good coffee.
1:19:39 And so anyway, so Jim and I, you know, again,
1:19:42 without belaboring it, Jim and I decided to start a company,
1:19:44 but it was still this weird thing where,
1:19:46 and Jim knew all about the internet, the browser,
1:19:47 and, you know, I was still watching everything,
1:19:48 but it was still this thing of like,
1:19:50 it’s just not, it’s not a,
1:19:52 it’s just the overwhelming assumption in the industry was,
1:19:53 this is not a serious thing.
1:19:54 This is not a real thing.
1:19:56 This is a momentary thing.
1:19:57 It’s going to go away.
1:19:58 The big companies are going to take over.
1:20:00 This is not going to be a,
1:20:01 the internet’s not going to be a commercial medium.
1:20:02 It’s not going to happen.
1:20:06 And so our first two business plans for our company
1:20:07 actually were not this.
1:20:09 It was, we had a business plan.
1:20:10 We had, our first business plan was to do
1:20:13 interactive software for interactive television.
1:20:15 So the, to build software to replace the guy
1:20:17 on the roller skates that I told you about.
1:20:18 Jim had, because Silicon,
1:20:19 Jim’s company had been one of the main companies
1:20:20 building those systems.
1:20:22 And so he had the insight on that.
1:20:24 And so we were going to do that,
1:20:26 but then we sort of priced out like what, you know,
1:20:29 we sort of modeled out sort of how interactive TV was going,
1:20:30 what it was going to cost and how it was going to work.
1:20:32 And we actually concluded it wasn’t going to work.
1:20:34 It was, it was, it was, it was too expensive
1:20:35 and the technology wasn’t ready.
1:20:36 So we gave up on that idea.
1:20:38 And then, and then plan number two was Jim had
1:20:40 a really good relationship with the CEO of Nintendo,
1:20:43 because SGI had done this deal to do
1:20:45 the first 3D graphics chip for a game console,
1:20:47 which is the Nintendo 64.
1:20:51 And so he went to visit the guy in Japan who ran Nintendo.
1:20:55 This is super genius guy, Yama Ushisan,
1:20:58 who ran, basically built modern Nintendo,
1:20:58 as we know it today.
1:21:02 And basically struck a handshake deal to basically build,
1:21:05 you know, the online service for the Nintendo gaming machines.
1:21:07 And so to build basically what today you would call
1:21:10 Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network,
1:21:11 but to do that, you know.
1:21:14 – That’s probably a little early for that idea.
1:21:15 – Also too early.
1:21:18 – Yeah, that was closer though.
1:21:21 – It was closer, but like, again, it was modems, right?
1:21:22 It would have been all dial-up.
1:21:23 And so you would have,
1:21:24 you would have been doing interactive gaming
1:21:27 on dial-up modems with like 14, 14 kilobit modems
1:21:28 and with low latency.
1:21:31 And so it, and actually Nintendo actually had
1:21:34 had an online service on their earlier devices in Japan.
1:21:35 And they actually had an early online,
1:21:36 Nintendo online or whatever they called it
1:21:39 that had like, it had like early e-commerce
1:21:40 and it was a proprietary system,
1:21:41 but it had like early e-commerce
1:21:43 and I think it had food delivery in the 80s.
1:21:45 And so there was like an early version of this,
1:21:46 but it didn’t quite take.
1:21:48 And so this idea was to do the modern version of it.
1:21:50 But we, again, we modeled the whole thing out.
1:21:51 I like built all the spreadsheets
1:21:53 and all the modem banks you would need and all this stuff.
1:21:57 And we just, we figured out that it couldn’t quite work.
1:21:59 And so literally we took a walk
1:22:00 and it was like, it was like, it was like a discouraging thing
1:22:03 ’cause it’s like we had these two ideas they didn’t pan out.
1:22:04 And it’s like, you know, should we like, you know,
1:22:06 should we still, is there still anything to do together?
1:22:08 And, you know, and I remember saying on the walk,
1:22:10 I was like, you know, well, this internet thing
1:22:12 keeps going, right?
1:22:14 Like it’s going.
1:22:16 And think about what we had just experienced there
1:22:18 between Jim and I, which was like, okay,
1:22:21 what basically what the press was telling everybody
1:22:22 and all the experts were telling us was,
1:22:24 it was either gonna be the big companies
1:22:25 were gonna do interactive television
1:22:27 or it was gonna be these, you know, home,
1:22:28 you know, sort of video game like service.
1:22:30 It was gonna be, the assumption was it was gonna be
1:22:33 one of those, but those were gonna replace the internet
1:22:34 when this stuff got serious for consumers.
1:22:37 And then, and we basically concluded that the,
1:22:38 when daddy comes home,
1:22:41 you little kids can go play in your room.
1:22:42 – Oh yeah.
1:22:44 Yeah, if you read, if you look at the magazines
1:22:45 and I keep bringing up the magazines
1:22:46 ’cause at the time, again,
1:22:47 this is like the internet’s getting started.
1:22:49 And so the way people got their news
1:22:51 was literally reading one of the three big news magazines
1:22:52 or reading one of the three big newspapers.
1:22:53 Like that’s how you learned about things.
1:22:55 And that’s where all the experts showed up.
1:22:57 And if you just go back and look at the magazine covers
1:22:59 from that era, it’s basically all these big company CEOs
1:23:01 just pouring scorn on the internet
1:23:03 and declaring that it’s a joke and a toy.
1:23:04 And the thing that they’re gonna come out with
1:23:06 their proprietary thing is gonna be so much better.
1:23:11 And so we literally had this moment where it was just like,
1:23:13 well, if we have proven to ourselves
1:23:15 that interactive TV is not gonna work,
1:23:16 and if we’ve proven to ourselves
1:23:18 that you can’t build this based on these video game boxes,
1:23:20 then by process elimination,
1:23:22 it kind of has to be the internet.
1:23:24 It’s the only thing that works, right?
1:23:26 And it’s like, and yes, it has every issue
1:23:27 that people complain about.
1:23:29 It’s slow, it’s inefficient, it’s insecure.
1:23:30 There’s no business on it.
1:23:32 There’s no this and that and the other.
1:23:35 And it’s hard to get online and all this stuff.
1:23:36 There’s all these reasons to believe it wasn’t gonna work,
1:23:40 but we literally knocked out all the other ideas
1:23:44 and said, okay, this thing, it has to be the thing.
1:23:45 It’s the only thing that works.
1:23:48 And Jim is a total whiz on these things
1:23:49 and knew all about this stuff.
1:23:50 And so we sat down and said,
1:23:53 well, what if we did this incredible heretical idea?
1:23:56 And he had very heretical as late as, this is April 94.
1:23:59 So still very far into this, but still very heretical,
1:24:02 which is like, how about we build a software company
1:24:04 to make internet software?
1:24:08 And that was just like, wow, that seems like a risky,
1:24:09 crazy idea.
1:24:11 Now in retrospect, it was like the most obvious idea
1:24:13 of all time at that moment.
1:24:15 But that’s the true story of how we actually got
1:24:16 to that idea.
1:24:20 So anyway, we ended up basically commercializing,
1:24:21 we ended up basically building the commercial version
1:24:23 of everything that we had built at Illinois.
1:24:25 It just, we got through the hard way.
1:24:27 It was not the obvious idea.
1:24:30 – Counter-programming conventional wisdom
1:24:34 and media advice is still works now.
1:24:36 It’s amazing.
1:24:37 – It’s incredible.
1:24:38 I just, I have this constant,
1:24:41 I live in this constant state of out-of-body,
1:24:43 kind of experience amazement where these people
1:24:45 just show up on TV or in the papers or whatever.
1:24:47 And they’re just, they have all these credentials
1:24:48 and they’ve got all these degrees.
1:24:50 They’ve got all these initials after their names
1:24:51 and they’ve got these incredible resumes
1:24:53 and they’ve got all these publication credits.
1:24:55 And they’ve got all this stuff and these government grants
1:24:57 and like on like every possible credential
1:24:59 and Harvard at MIT and like all this stuff.
1:25:01 And they just, they say shit.
1:25:06 And I just, I’m, and I’m just like, like, okay.
1:25:09 Like maybe they’re right, but like if they’re wrong
1:25:11 and they’re wrong like a lot of the time, like, okay.
1:25:13 What consequences do they bear for being wrong?
1:25:15 And the answer is none at all.
1:25:16 – Zero, yeah.
1:25:18 And they’re just back on tomorrow.
1:25:20 – On tomorrow with some new line of bullshit.
1:25:22 And, and they, there’s this great book.
1:25:23 I often tell friends, it’s this great book.
1:25:25 This guy Phil Tetlock who’s a professor
1:25:27 who studies this exact topic.
1:25:28 And it’s this great book called,
1:25:29 it’s called expert political judgment.
1:25:31 And he did this comprehensive study of the,
1:25:33 he came at it through political predictions.
1:25:36 So basically, you know, experts showing up in, you know,
1:25:38 columns in the newspaper and on TV talking about like,
1:25:39 is there going to be, you know, war here, you know,
1:25:41 what’s going to happen with Israel or whatever,
1:25:42 all these predictions.
1:25:43 And he, he goes through and he basically,
1:25:46 he basically, the conclusion of it is the, the sort of
1:25:49 average, well-credential expert in the media on any topic
1:25:50 evolving sort of politics or global affairs
1:25:54 is somewhat less, is somewhat less than random,
1:25:55 likely to be correct.
1:25:58 So, so, so the, right, the credentialed experts
1:26:00 to score it like 40% and a monkey flinging,
1:26:03 you know, shit at a dartboard is like 50%.
1:26:03 Right?
1:26:06 And the big thing that he points out is there,
1:26:09 there’s no, there are no repercussions for being wrong.
1:26:12 There are no, there’s no career damage.
1:26:13 There’s no economic damage.
1:26:14 There’s no nothing.
1:26:15 And then he says the thing, if they were,
1:26:16 if they were being, if they were being epistemically
1:26:18 honest, the thing that they would do is like when,
1:26:20 when the talking heads on TV talking about something,
1:26:22 there would be a scoreboard and it would show like
1:26:23 their last 20 predictions and then it would have like,
1:26:26 you know, red or green, were they right or wrong?
1:26:27 It’s ’cause it’d be the only way to ever have a sense
1:26:29 of whether you’re talking to somebody who knows
1:26:30 what they’re talking about.
1:26:32 And that scoreboard, of course, never appears.
1:26:34 – Never materialized, yeah.
1:26:37 – You never, ever, ever, ever see it.
1:26:39 And he pointed, he wrote this book like 20 years ago
1:26:40 and like everybody read it and they’re like,
1:26:41 yeah, that’s right.
1:26:42 And then everybody just completely ignored it
1:26:44 and kept doing things the same way that they’re doing it.
1:26:47 And so I just, I had this like, I had this experience
1:26:49 where I just feel, I just feel like a complete,
1:26:51 like, I, I mean, you know, it worked out,
1:26:54 but like I, I still feel dumb is in the sense of like,
1:26:56 I read all this stuff, I believed it all at the time.
1:26:58 It caused me to be insecure about the thing
1:27:01 that I was actually doing, that I saw was actually working.
1:27:04 I knew it was working like, and I knew why it was working
1:27:06 and I knew why it would keep working.
1:27:08 And even still it was just this wall of, wall of doubt
1:27:10 and skepticism that kind of kept, kept, kept eating away
1:27:11 at me.
1:27:12 So yes.
1:27:14 – The good news is we’ve used that to our advantage,
1:27:16 you know, many times since then.
1:27:20 I remember when, when we made the Coinbase investment,
1:27:24 I guess Bitcoin, which was the, the, the one cryptocurrency
1:27:28 at the time was, I don’t know, was some number
1:27:32 of hundreds of dollars and everybody, economists,
1:27:34 everybody was writing that it was a complete scam
1:27:37 and total bullshit and never be worth anything.
1:27:40 And here it is, I don’t know what it’s worth today,
1:27:43 like $63, $64,000, something like that.
1:27:46 And all you had to do is just listen to the experts
1:27:49 and do the opposite and you make so much money.
1:27:50 – Yeah, it’s amazing.
1:27:52 Yep, it’s amazing, but I tell you, it’s hard.
1:27:54 Like, I, you know, I don’t know about you, like,
1:27:55 I feel like I still have this problem.
1:27:58 Like I, I, I now have like 30 years of evidence
1:28:00 that this, this is all the case and, and, and even still,
1:28:02 it’s just like, I still have this problem where I’m like,
1:28:05 okay, the experts say it’s still like a real effort of will.
1:28:09 You know, it’s basically, they don’t actually know
1:28:09 what they’re talking about.
1:28:11 They don’t actually have any predictive capability.
1:28:13 They’re, they’re in a system where the incentives
1:28:14 are absolutely terrible.
1:28:17 – Well, I always find like, if somebody’s super dismissive
1:28:20 about something, that’s a great thing to study.
1:28:25 Cause it’s almost surely not a dead zero, right?
1:28:28 Like it may not work, but there’s no way it’s as bad
1:28:31 as they’re, you know, saying it, if somebody says something
1:28:36 is like a scam or a Ponzi scheme or a bullshit or this,
1:28:40 then that’s almost always worth looking into.
1:28:42 So you started Netscape with Jim Clark.
1:28:44 It was actually called Mosaic, right?
1:28:45 At the time.
1:28:46 – Mosaic, Mosaic.
1:28:49 Yeah, so, so we, so we, you know, again, I had graduated.
1:28:52 We, you know, the other people, you know, the other,
1:28:53 our other colleagues at Illinois were, you know,
1:28:54 working either, they were either students
1:28:56 or staff members there.
1:28:58 Everybody was working under federal research funding
1:29:00 on a specifically non-commercial project, you know,
1:29:03 which was open source, you know, there’s, and so,
1:29:04 and you know, like I said, there was no, you know,
1:29:06 there was no, the university didn’t have,
1:29:08 there was no commercial anything, you know, of value,
1:29:10 at least according to what everybody thought at the time.
1:29:13 And so we, we start Netscape, we, we actually go out,
1:29:15 Jim and I actually flew back out to Urbana in the middle,
1:29:18 and it was still an incredible snowstorm
1:29:21 and hired, you know, I think basically all but one,
1:29:23 I think of the original Mosaic team members
1:29:24 to join us in Netscape.
1:29:25 So that was the original, the original thing.
1:29:27 Most of them were able to move out to California
1:29:30 and were core members of, of what followed at Netscape.
1:29:31 And so, and then we booted up the company.
1:29:33 We, and then we, we named it Mosaic.
1:29:35 And, and that was sort of the first issue
1:29:36 that got us in trouble.
1:29:38 And the reason we named it Mosaic was not because we planned
1:29:40 to literally like offer Mosaic as a product.
1:29:43 We, we very specifically decided we were going to leave
1:29:44 the source code behind.
1:29:47 – Hey, you, you wrote it like when you were skipping class.
1:29:48 – Really?
1:29:49 – Yes.
1:29:51 We knew it was not a commercial,
1:29:52 we knew it was not commercial grade.
1:29:55 We knew it had all, you know, just had, it had just issues.
1:29:56 It had issue performance issues.
1:29:58 It had, you know, you just, you create one of these things,
1:29:59 you know all the issues.
1:30:01 And so we, we just knew it had all these issues.
1:30:02 And so we knew we needed to start from,
1:30:04 we wanted to start from scratch and build kind of the correct
1:30:05 commercial product.
1:30:08 And we, and we, and we knew what we needed to do to do that.
1:30:10 And so we, we, we very specifically did not bring
1:30:12 the source code with us, but you know, all the, all the
1:30:14 stand HTML and HTTP and all these standards were open,
1:30:16 open standards and they were all free to, you know,
1:30:17 people on the internet were able to use them
1:30:18 and do whatever they wanted.
1:30:20 So, so we’re like, okay, we, we have no like,
1:30:22 we have no copyright issues here, but you know,
1:30:23 we’re not taking the code.
1:30:25 And then on the, on the trademark side, you know,
1:30:28 we, we, there, there’s a long history and Silicon Valley
1:30:30 of companies that are sort of named after the projects
1:30:32 that spawn them, often out of a university setting
1:30:33 or some other setting.
1:30:35 And so there were two, two famous examples,
1:30:37 Sun Micro, Sun Microsystems at the time,
1:30:40 which was a, you know, a huge, a huge successful company.
1:30:43 The name Sun actually came from the project at Stanford,
1:30:45 which was Stanford University Network, S-U-N.
1:30:47 And so that was like that, the name of that company was
1:30:48 like an homage to the Stanford environments
1:30:49 that those guys came out of.
1:30:51 And then Oracle was the code name of a project
1:30:53 that Larry Ellison had done for the government
1:30:54 in the 1970s, right?
1:30:57 And so there was this like, what I thought at the time
1:30:58 was like a time-honored tradition of like,
1:31:01 you can basically use the name as an homage and, you know,
1:31:03 Illinois does, they don’t have a commercial, you know,
1:31:04 interest in this and so what we’ll just do it.
1:31:07 But in retrospect, that was sort of the crack.
1:31:09 You know, we sort of introduced a crack in the armor
1:31:10 from the very beginning by doing that.
1:31:13 And then basically what happened was as, as, as I was leaving
1:31:17 moving to California, the other people at Illinois
1:31:18 started to figure out that there was actually, you know,
1:31:20 they got access to the commercial mailbox
1:31:23 that had all the commercial inbound licensing requests.
1:31:24 And so they started to get a sense
1:31:25 that there might be money in it.
1:31:28 And so the founders of this, that company,
1:31:31 Spyglass I mentioned, which was like the one software company
1:31:33 in Champaign Urbana actually approached,
1:31:35 without me having any awareness of this,
1:31:37 they approached the University of Illinois Administration
1:31:39 and they basically struck a deal to license the Mosaic,
1:31:42 our code to license the Mosaic software code
1:31:44 that we had written for commercial sales.
1:31:47 And they, they started offering a commercial product
1:31:50 called Spyglass Mosaic, you know, and totally within rights
1:31:53 of the University to do this and within Spyglass to do this
1:31:55 and that deal was great and off they went.
1:31:57 But, but then we, we then announced Netscape.
1:31:59 And of course we were the team that had written
1:32:01 all that code and then this started to become, you know,
1:32:03 by now the press has started to take it seriously.
1:32:04 So we started to become, you know, famous and well-known
1:32:06 and Clark was this legend.
1:32:08 And so we started to get all this press coverage.
1:32:09 And so Spyglass started to get really worried
1:32:11 that we were going to, you know, snuff them, you know,
1:32:12 and we were going to lap them with the products.
1:32:16 And so Spyglass enlisted the administration
1:32:19 of the University of Illinois to basically try to kill us.
1:32:25 And the form of, the form of the murder attempt was to,
1:32:28 they didn’t receive, they didn’t sue us.
1:32:29 And they didn’t sue us because they didn’t have a good claim
1:32:31 because like we weren’t actually violating copyright
1:32:34 and you know, the trademark, you could just change the name.
1:32:36 So they didn’t actually have like a good legal case to sue us.
1:32:38 And so instead of suing us, what they did instead
1:32:41 was they called Spyglass any situation we were in
1:32:43 where we were competing with Spyglass for a sale,
1:32:45 they, the University of Illinois administrators
1:32:46 would call the customer and tell them
1:32:48 that they were going to sue us.
1:32:49 – Good Lord.
1:32:51 – That’s a thing to do to a startup.
1:32:54 That’s like the dirtiest thing you can do to a startup.
1:32:56 – It’s like a super nefarious, you know,
1:32:58 and you know, cause like who wants to, you know,
1:33:01 any big company doesn’t, you know, is already kind of,
1:33:02 you know, worried about doing business
1:33:03 with the startup to start with.
1:33:04 And if the startups literally about to get sued,
1:33:06 like why, why take the risk?
1:33:09 And so our whole sales pipeline froze up and you know,
1:33:10 we’re running on, you know, we’re running a venture capital
1:33:12 and like, you know, money’s getting, you know,
1:33:13 and so like we don’t have that, you know,
1:33:15 so not, you know, VC wasn’t in those days,
1:33:17 what it is today, we didn’t have that long of a runway.
1:33:18 And so we needed revenue.
1:33:21 And, and so this, this became a big problem.
1:33:22 And so we, we kind of got everybody together
1:33:23 and talked about it.
1:33:24 And so we, we then decide,
1:33:25 and I’m very proud of this decision.
1:33:29 We preemptively sued the University of Illinois on this case.
1:33:31 And we sued them for, you know,
1:33:32 certain interference of trade.
1:33:34 There’s these, there’s these sort of laws
1:33:35 that are not great laws to sue on,
1:33:36 but they worked in this case,
1:33:38 which is this thing called torturous interference.
1:33:39 You can kind of, you can, in theory,
1:33:42 it’s illegal to like just gratuitously interfere
1:33:43 in somebody else’s business,
1:33:45 try to unhook other people’s contracts.
1:33:48 It’s, it’s not great law that doesn’t often get enforced,
1:33:49 but like at least it is on the books.
1:33:50 And so we sued Illinois.
1:33:53 They, furious negotiation followed.
1:33:56 We offered them at the time $4 million worth of stock
1:33:59 in the company when the company was worth,
1:34:00 I don’t know, 20 million or something.
1:34:04 – And most of you youngsters eventually sold for 10 billion.
1:34:07 So you can do that matter.
1:34:08 – Yeah. So it was, yeah, it was a billion,
1:34:09 you know, it was a billion plus or, you know,
1:34:11 some depending on exactly what, but, you know,
1:34:13 but it would have been, it would have been a lot of money.
1:34:16 And they turned that down and instead they demanded cash.
1:34:16 And so-
1:34:18 – One thing you didn’t have.
1:34:19 – We didn’t, we didn’t have.
1:34:20 Although, you know, we, we, at that point,
1:34:21 it was starting to work.
1:34:22 And so we raised money from Kleiner Perkins
1:34:24 and we had other investor interests.
1:34:26 And so we, we, and we had sales, you know, starting to come in.
1:34:28 And so we, we, we, we, we paid them the cash
1:34:31 and did the settlement and got them off our backs.
1:34:34 Yeah, that decision on their part,
1:34:35 yeah, it costs them at least a billion dollars
1:34:38 in direct stock, plus all the downstream philanthropy
1:34:41 from me, plus, plus all the downstream philanthropy
1:34:43 from Jim Clark, plus all the other founding engineers.
1:34:47 – They lost a few buildings, I would thank you.
1:34:48 – They lost, I think, a campus.
1:34:49 – Yeah.
1:34:51 – You know, I, I, I’m just going to speculate.
1:34:53 They lost probably $3 billion in, you know,
1:34:55 1990s dollars with that decision.
1:34:58 Now, again, this is why I gave the disclaimer up front.
1:35:00 Like, you know, look, like the alternate universe,
1:35:02 Mark, with a different skill set would have,
1:35:04 you would have had a very different way of dealing with us.
1:35:05 – Yeah.
1:35:08 – But like Mark, as he actually existed on earth one,
1:35:10 like, I never met the University of Illinois administrators.
1:35:11 Like, I didn’t, you know,
1:35:12 I didn’t know the president of the university.
1:35:13 – Yeah.
1:35:15 – I’m like a random undergrad, right?
1:35:17 And so like, I didn’t know the president of the university.
1:35:19 I, you know, I could have called him, you know.
1:35:21 – Yeah, that’s true, that’s true.
1:35:22 Although it’s still like, you know,
1:35:25 the calculus that they made, but it’s a bureaucracy
1:35:30 to, to harass their own students and side with like,
1:35:32 somebody who wrote him a check is,
1:35:36 is still a little on the evil side, I would say.
1:35:39 – Yeah, I thought it was really bad.
1:35:40 I get really upset.
1:35:42 I was really upset for a long time.
1:35:44 To be totally honest, I’m still upset.
1:35:46 Every, every subsequent administration,
1:35:49 every subsequent new administration at the university
1:35:51 has attempted to reach out and repair the bridge.
1:35:52 I have not returned the calls.
1:35:55 – Yeah, no, you’re a grudge holder.
1:35:58 You and my biggest grudge holders, I know.
1:36:00 – I greatly value my grudges, they’re very important to me.
1:36:03 So, yeah, so, yeah.
1:36:05 And, you know, the broader point, Ben,
1:36:06 that you brought up is really key,
1:36:08 which is like, look, there are a small number
1:36:10 of universities in the world that,
1:36:11 and you’d put certainly Stanford in this category
1:36:13 and MIT and a bunch of others,
1:36:14 but, you know, there’s a certain number of them
1:36:16 that really understand, and this is maybe Stanford’s
1:36:18 great genius over the last 50 years.
1:36:20 As an institution is, you kind of understand
1:36:21 that it’s actually really good.
1:36:23 If this kind of thing happens, like if your students
1:36:25 or even your faculty, you know, go off and do something new
1:36:26 and are successful in business.
1:36:29 And then the, you know, the money that you’ll get,
1:36:30 the money that you’ll get back in philanthropy
1:36:32 is going to be orders of magnitude higher
1:36:34 than whatever technology licensing fee you could extract
1:36:37 or whatever threat you could extract people, you know,
1:36:39 money you could extract people out of or whatever.
1:36:41 – Well, it goes back to the original mosaic story, you know,
1:36:44 like it seems like you’re giving a lot up by being open,
1:36:47 but, you know, you’re actually opening the whole world to you.
1:36:50 It’s actually a great metaphor for life,
1:36:53 which is, you know, if you’ve lived in abundance,
1:36:54 you will get abundance.
1:36:57 And if you live in scarcity, you’ll screw yourself.
1:37:00 And I think good that those universities are abundant
1:37:03 and it’s good that you are abundant with the internet.
1:37:06 And that’s how we live in the world we are in today.
1:37:09 So what an amazing.
1:37:11 Yeah, I often think about the alternate universe.
1:37:16 If, you know, if you don’t write mosaic,
1:37:19 if it doesn’t work, if you don’t start Netscape,
1:37:22 like it does seem like we would have had an elect.
1:37:25 Most systems or many systems are proprietary, right?
1:37:28 Like the smartphones are, you know, everybody pays a tax
1:37:31 to download their app from the app store
1:37:33 ’cause Apple alone said it’s not open.
1:37:36 And, you know, Google is an extremely powerful company
1:37:38 because, you know, if you want to search something,
1:37:40 that’s where you have to go and so forth.
1:37:45 And these, you know, it was just such an amazing anomaly
1:37:48 in the industry that the internet happened
1:37:49 and that anybody could join
1:37:50 and anybody could put up a website
1:37:52 and anybody could build a great business.
1:37:53 And, you know, in fact, including Google,
1:37:56 including, you know, some of the big tech today
1:37:59 was all created because of the openness of the internet.
1:38:01 So, thank you for that.
1:38:03 And thank you for the conversation.
1:38:04 What a good start.
1:38:04 – Oh, I’m not done yet.
1:38:07 – Oh, we got one more, nevermind.
1:38:07 Pause.
1:38:09 – I got more, I got to bring it, I got to bring it,
1:38:10 I got a great climax to the whole thing.
1:38:12 – Okay, okay.
1:38:13 Climates.
1:38:15 – So let me just start with, you know,
1:38:16 Ben, I’m glad you just went through what you just went
1:38:18 through, I totally agree.
1:38:20 And specifically look like this has a lot to do
1:38:22 with the debate raging around AI right now,
1:38:24 which is, you know, these big companies,
1:38:25 you know, the big companies in those days
1:38:27 had every reason, you know, they had all these stories.
1:38:28 By the way, a lot of the story,
1:38:30 the big companies told about the internet early on
1:38:31 was it’s unsafe.
1:38:32 – Unsafe.
1:38:32 And it was.
1:38:35 And it wasn’t true to that.
1:38:37 It was, you know, but it was literally going to be,
1:38:38 I mean, there was an, it took a long time
1:38:40 for e-commerce to take off in retrospect,
1:38:41 relative to how fast it could have taken off,
1:38:42 ’cause people literally just were worried
1:38:44 that their credit card was going to get stolen.
1:38:46 Like you had to get over that hump.
1:38:48 And there was just this constant fear of like cybercrime
1:38:50 and this and that and then spam and like abuse
1:38:51 and like all these things.
1:38:53 And so, and so the big companies always had like
1:38:56 all these reasons why they needed to have total control.
1:38:57 And, you know, the government needed to protect them
1:38:59 and they needed to have all these regulations
1:39:00 and they needed to have, you know,
1:39:02 that it just, the world needed to be a world
1:39:03 not of open systems like the internet,
1:39:05 it needed to be a world of proprietary systems.
1:39:07 And look, a lot of the way the world works today
1:39:08 is for proprietary systems.
1:39:11 You know, the banking system is not open, right?
1:39:13 You know, you’re just, if the bank decides to debank you,
1:39:15 they debank you or whatever it is.
1:39:16 Or if they don’t want to let the money go through,
1:39:17 they don’t let the money go through.
1:39:20 And so, you know, most of the world,
1:39:21 most of the economy is with these big companies
1:39:22 with total control.
1:39:25 And so, yeah, I think it’s, I wanted to go through that
1:39:27 ’cause I think it’s a major miracle
1:39:29 when you’re able to actually get one of these open systems
1:39:31 to work and it’s like, and then years later,
1:39:32 you’re just like, oh my God, I can’t believe
1:39:34 we almost have the much worse world
1:39:36 where the big companies ran everything,
1:39:38 but it is amazing how the pattern keeps repeating
1:39:42 and it’s specifically repeating again today with AI.
1:39:44 Again, ironically, and to your point,
1:39:46 ironically, some of the companies that are lobbying hardest
1:39:48 for regulatory capture and cartel, you know,
1:39:50 kind of government cartel status for AI
1:39:52 are companies that exist today
1:39:53 because the internet was open.
1:39:56 And so, they are engaged in a particularly
1:39:59 advanced form of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics.
1:40:01 – I think the founders are gone.
1:40:05 So, been taken over by the other people.
1:40:08 – The other people, although I still blame the founders.
1:40:10 Anyway, so, okay, so the climax of the story,
1:40:11 ’cause I just can’t resist ’cause I just think
1:40:13 this is so amazing given what happened, what followed.
1:40:16 So, okay, so then we settled with Illinois,
1:40:17 we get underway, we’re shipping our products,
1:40:19 we’re starting to get revenue, we’re starting to work.
1:40:21 This is around, I think, you know, the time you joined us
1:40:22 kind of during this period.
1:40:25 And so, but we’re competing.
1:40:26 We’re competing with, you know,
1:40:27 there’s a bunch of other companies that are starting,
1:40:29 you know, people figured out that this was actually a,
1:40:30 the internet was gonna be a thing.
1:40:32 And so, a bunch of other software companies
1:40:33 got funded and started.
1:40:35 And then, this company, Spyglass, was still out there.
1:40:38 And Spyglass was selling, they were selling,
1:40:40 Spyglass was like, they were selling our own code against us.
1:40:41 – Yeah.
1:40:42 – Right?
1:40:44 – It’s a little maddening.
1:40:45 – Yeah, it’s a little frustrating.
1:40:47 But, you know, again, they have the legal right to do it,
1:40:48 but like, it’s a little frustrating.
1:40:49 And, you know, it’s fine.
1:40:51 And we’re, you know, we’re competing with them whatever,
1:40:52 but it’s a little bit fine.
1:40:54 You know, there’s like price war going on and, you know,
1:40:56 we’ll, you know, the sort of back and forth going on.
1:40:59 And then Spyglass gets this call from Microsoft
1:41:01 and said, the Microsoft guys call Spyglass.
1:41:04 And they’re like, yeah, we wanna license Spyglass Mosaic.
1:41:05 So we can build it into Windows.
1:41:08 And the Spyglass guys say, you know, yeah, that sounds great.
1:41:09 You know, basically how much per, you know,
1:41:12 how much per copy are you gonna, you know, pay us for that?
1:41:14 And Microsoft says, you don’t understand,
1:41:16 we’re gonna pay you a flat fee.
1:41:17 You know, which is the same, you know,
1:41:19 which is the same, you know,
1:41:20 the same thing that Microsoft did when they originally
1:41:22 licensed DOS way back when.
1:41:24 And so, but Microsoft said, you know,
1:41:25 basically, or at least my understanding
1:41:28 of what Microsoft said was, you know, don’t worry about it.
1:41:30 Like, you know, we’re gonna sell it as an add-on to Windows.
1:41:32 And, you know, so we’ll have like Microsoft, you know,
1:41:34 Mosaic and then you’ll still have Spyglass Mosaic
1:41:36 and you can sell it on, you know,
1:41:38 other operating systems or compete with us
1:41:39 or whatever, do whatever you want.
1:41:41 And so they, they struck the deal.
1:41:43 I think it was like a million dollar one-time payment.
1:41:45 And the Spyglass guys thought they had struck gold
1:41:47 ’cause they had this like massive endorsement, you know,
1:41:50 the big blow to us ’cause we didn’t get the Microsoft deal.
1:41:51 And then they were gonna, you know, sort of, you know,
1:41:53 the whole industry is gonna benefit from this
1:41:54 and then they’re gonna go out and sell lots of other versions
1:41:56 of Spyglass Mosaic.
1:41:57 And then there was this,
1:41:58 Microsoft had the press conference
1:42:00 where they originally announced Internet Explorer,
1:42:03 their browser, which was Spyglass Mosaic,
1:42:05 again, our code, re-labeled.
1:42:07 And there’s a famous, famous moment
1:42:09 where the Microsoft guys are on stage
1:42:12 and then they do the, you know, the one more thing part.
1:42:14 And then, oh, by the way, we’re gonna make it free.
1:42:15 And there’s a famous moment, you know,
1:42:17 the Spyglass CEO with his head in his hands
1:42:19 in the front row, you know, of the press conference,
1:42:22 you know, realizing that his business had just ended.
1:42:25 You just, you know, he sold out his entire business
1:42:26 for a million dollars.
1:42:28 So that was the end of Spyglass.
1:42:31 So, you know, all’s well that ends well.
1:42:32 – Yeah, happy ending.
1:42:33 – Not that I’m competitive
1:42:34 and not that I don’t hold grudges.
1:42:36 – Well, that’s hilarious.
1:42:38 Thank you all for listening to the Mark and Ben Show.
1:42:40 We won’t tell the Netscape story,
1:42:42 which is also a good story, but, you know,
1:42:44 maybe if you reply in the comments, you wanna hear it.
1:42:46 Well, we’ll consider that one too.
1:42:48 But thank you again, and we enjoyed it.
1:42:49 We hope you did too.