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Chapter One

Evangelists and Entrepreneurs

The rapid proliferation of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the late 1990s would not have been possible without the PC revolution of the '80s. But the story of the Internet is much more a tale of the triumph of network computing — the science of getting computers to talk to one another.

Back in the day when the world's most powerful computers took up entire rooms, and were controlled by punch cards and powered by vacuum tubes, scientists began looking for ways to access the country's half dozen supercomputers from afar.

In the late 1950s, in response to the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race and the paranoia of the Cold War, President Eisenhower set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later chanied to DARPA) to fund research and development of special projects for the Defense Department. One of its first tasks was the creation of a national computer network called the ARFANET to link these computers. The ARPANET would be a distributed network in which any computer could reach another computer though numerous paths on the network. Among the goals of the new network was to create a new way for surviving command centers to maintain communication with each other in the case of nuclear war, even if direct links between them were broken.

A series of technological breakthroughs in the following decades paved the way for ARPANET to emerge as the basis for a worldwide electronic communication network, Soon after, in 1969, Stanford and UCLA exchanged the first line of text over the ARPANET TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)emerged in the '70s network protocol as a kind of universal computer language; its worldwide adoption allowed local area networks (LANs, as office networks are known), to communicate with other networks over the Internet. By linking LANs to one another, the Internet became a network of networks.

In the 1980s, the Defense Department opened up the use of the Internet to scientists sharing information over the system. Through the late 1980s, librarians, academicians, and a small but growing collective of hobbyists were using the Internet. In 1991 the National Science Foundation helped make the Internet available to commercial enterprises for the first time.

That same year, a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN — the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland — released to the public a new system called the World Wide Web, which allowed users to view Internet sites as represented graphically in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The first Web users used FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to access CERN's computers and see the new visual Internet.

By the early 1990s, New York computer buffs had developed a handful of dial-up bulletin board services (BBSs) like Echo and SonicNet; meanwhile, a vibrant community of developers was working to turn the CD-ROM into the first successful interactive multimedia technology. The most visible of the CDROM developers was Voyager, a company that got attention for both its innovative work and its self-destructive management team.

But the advent of the Web displaced the promise of CD-stored interactive media, and soon the fledgling CD-ROM industry had all but disappeared. In its wake it left a budding group of computer graphic artists and digital entrepreneurs who helped seed the early Internet industry.

Another large talent pool emerged from the ranks of early Internet ventures like Prodigy, an online services company headquartered in White Plains, New York, that was victimized by America Online.

With the invention of Mosaic and Netscape, which enabled Internet users to browse graphical Web pages on the Internet, artists and technologists in New York began to experiment with visual effects and building some of the first websites in the world. Teaching themselves HTML, they soon mastered the science of codingfor the Web.

And out of dinner parties thrown by Mark Stahlman and his Cyber Salon, the New York New Media Association (NYNMA) was formed, which helped build the concept of community through monthly events known as CyberSuds.

Jack Hidary [CEO, EARTHWEB] The people who created DARPA realized that in order to create a research community focused initially on nuclear research — because they were doing a lot of nuclear research at the time they needed to connect their computers together. It was that simple. The first test bed was about four universities and two national laboratories. Stanford was in there, Columbia was in there, Los Alamos. So you had five, six different sites, all connected together. And it worked, and it also gave them a measure of redundancy, because if one node between Los Alamos and Stanford went down, you could still connect to Los Alamos another way.

This redundant system made things fundamentally different from the circuit-based switching we have in, say, our telephone system. The analogy I would use is the highway system. Imagine if I wanted to create a highway from here to L.A. just for me to drive on. That's basically what our telephone system is today, because you have to create one single circuit dedicated to your conversation between here and L.A. And that's expensive, just as a single highway between here and L.A. just for us would be. Instead, our highway system is very much like what the Internet is. We have on-ramps and off-ramps, but we all share.

ARPANET quickly grew and added university after university, because it was so useful and required very little maintenance. Each node maintained itself, which was the beauty of the system...