1994–2000: How Things Have Changed

The year was 1994.

I had just moved to New York city the pre­vi­ous fall and was caught into the glory of Gotham. In the process, I had man­aged to start mak­ing friends in the online com­mu­nity there. This was the year Mosaic had been born and the first year of the mod­ern net, as far as I see it. Peo­ple out­side of uni­ver­si­ties were start­ing to con­nect to BBSes that were con­nected to the Inter­net all the time (this was rel­a­tively new, as most BBSes used to be one or two modem sys­tems, allow­ing only a cou­ple of users to con­nect simul­ta­ne­ously) and a few enter­pris­ing souls had set out to cre­ate a global event: first night in cyber­space. Half inter­na­tional friend­ship fest, half edu­ca­tional effort, our goal was to teach the world about the Inter­net and meet some of the peo­ple we had exchanged flur­ries of emails with and chat­ted with online. In New York, ECHO (the East Coast Hang­out) and the Dor­sai Embassy had part­nered to hook up Grand Cen­tral ter­mi­nal with 5 com­put­ers. ECHO brought the in-crowd, a mix of artists, and online afi­ciona­dos who cre­ated one of the top online com­mu­ni­ties in the world and Dor­sai brought the geeks, peo­ple like myself who felt that spend­ing a week­end installing in-house net­works and debug­ging lines of a new OS called Linux was a wor­thy cause.

We were high on life and high on the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the Inter­net, eager to show the world that they too could join peo­ple from places as remote as Lon­don and San Fran­cisco in the first global party. Stuck in a lit­tle cor­ner, we had 5 com­put­ers (gen­er­ally lent by ECHO users) and a mis­sion: to change the world.

We did not know how much we would end up doing in the process. Mean­while, in some dark recesses of Sil­i­con Val­ley, the small group of pro­gram­mers who had brought us Mosaic were work­ing furi­ously on putting the fin­ish­ing touch on a new ver­sion that would be even bet­ter. A few days before they had posted the first beta of the program.

The name of the com­pany was Mosaic Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The new prod­uct was a faster web browser called Netscape. And every­one on the net could email [email protected], who prob­a­bly didn’t expect he would be on the cover of Time mag­a­zine less than 24 months later.

As the event went on, tens of thou­sands of peo­ple logged on to cel­e­brate together. At the time, the net was only a cou­ple of mil­lion peo­ple worldwide.

Back then, I didn’t know that this night would change a lot of things for me. Back then, I was des­per­ately try­ing to find a job that was some­what related to the Inter­net but there just weren’t that many. That night, all that changed. I’ve been think­ing back to the day when my career went into high speed and I got caught into the Inter­net wave. That night was the begin­ning as far as I am concerned.

I had made a rep­u­ta­tion ear­lier that year by start­ing to get involved in a Usenet news­group called alt.internet.media-coverage. It was a place where any­one on the Inter­net could go and talk about cov­er­age of the net in the media. In those days, that cov­er­age was so scarce that we spent our time dis­sect­ing the few sto­ries that were printed about the net.

Unbe­knownst to me at the time, a lot of peo­ple in that group were also work­ing reporters. One of those reporters was my friend Angela Gunn, whom I first met face to face on Decem­ber 31st, 1993. She was at the event and our meet­ing ended up not only get­ting me my first legit­i­mate mag­a­zine writ­ing gig (for Web Week) but also my sec­ond job in the Inter­net indus­try and the one that even­tu­ally ended up in my helm­ing internet.com and kick started my career.

Angela and I talked through the night about how the net was going to change every­thing. I think it would be hon­est to say that even we under­es­ti­mated how sweep­ing a change it would end up being.

Fast for­ward to today. It’s only 6 years later and over half of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion is now online. Abroad, the net is start­ing to catch up and mas­sive amounts of peo­ple are start­ing to join in. Email addresses are as com­mon as phone num­bers, and E-commerce (a word that didn’t even exist 6 years ago) is redefin­ing the way peo­ple buy and sell every­thing. Every busi­ness has a web­site or is con­sid­er­ing get­ting one, from multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tions (who now have entire depart­ments tend­ing to their Inter­net and Intranet sites) to the guy around the corner.

Jeff Bezos, of Amazon.com (two names that were unknown to most peo­ple only a few years ago), is 1999 Time mag­a­zine man of the Year, and every other ad on TV is for a .com­pany. Mil­lions of new jobs have been cre­ated and the next great Inter­net busi­ness plan and the next great Inter­net IPO have become the new Amer­i­can obsession.

Back in 1994, there was no such thing as Amazon.com or Ebay. If you wanted to check out com­merce on the web, you could buy hot sauce from HotHotHot (the site is still around at its orig­i­nal URL). Short of that, you were just out of luck.

Back then, you were lucky if you had a high-speed 28.8k modem. 56k was far down the road, DSL or cable modems just didn’t exist. Back then, to con­nect to the net required a fair amount of tech­ni­cal savvy as one had to con­fig­ure their com­puter and make a num­ber of dif­fer­ent soft­ware pack­ages work together since there was no drop-in-the-CD-and-follow-a-simple-set-of-instructions to get on the net kit and the con­cept of hav­ing and Internet-ready com­puter was unheard of.

Back then, if you told some­one at a party that you worked in the Inter­net indus­try, you would have met blank stares and pro­ceeded to explain what the Inter­net was, how it worked, and gen­er­ally bor­ing peo­ple in the process.

Back then, my par­ents were sus­pi­cious of what I was doing espe­cially when I was explain­ing to them that com­pa­nies would put their con­tent on the Inter­net for free for every­one to read and that some­how, we would find a way to make it work eco­nom­i­cally but we were really quite sure how.

Back then, when I sug­gested to peo­ple at CNN that they should enhance their broad­cast with extra con­tent online and post the full tran­scripts of their broad­cast on the Inter­net for free, I was pretty much laughed out of the place.

Back then, the only threat to Microsoft was Mac­in­tosh and the Mac had a much eas­ier to use inter­face since Win­dows 95 was more vapor­ware than real­ity, hav­ing been delayed for the bet­ter part of a year. Linux was known to only a few peo­ple who had dared down­load it from some obscure server in Fin­land and had installed it on their 386s or 486s. The big advan­tage over win­dows 3.1 was not that it had a bet­ter inter­face but that you could tel­net into it, just like you would into any reg­u­lar Inter­net server… and it was Unix… and it was free. I per­son­ally had got­ten exposed to it because a Dor­sai user named Bob Young was spe­cial­iz­ing in sell­ing CDs that had stuff you could down­load off the Inter­net on them. The big advan­tage of those CDs was that you could get a CD with a com­plete archive instead of spend­ing hours or days down­load­ing the same soft­ware. The name of the com­pany was Red Hat and they were based in West­port, CT. A morn­ing in 1995, that fact became very impor­tant to me per­son­ally: one of the machines at Internet.com was run­ning off Linux and we needed to rebuild the whole sys­tem. I called Bob up and we drove over to his office to get a copy of the lat­est ver­sion of Linux he had received. He burned it on the CD right in front of us and saved the day for us. At the time, none of us real­ized that Linux was going to become the new threat to Microsoft and that Bob was going to become a bil­lion­aire on paper in the process.

Back then you could surf the whole web in a few days since there were less than 10,000 web sites. Yahoo didn’t yet have its own domain name and was sit­ting on Jerry Yang’s per­sonal work­sta­tion at http://akebono.stanford.edu.

Back then, domain names were free. It would take another year before Inter­NIC started to charge $50 per year to own a domain and most were worth about that much. It would take until 1995 for the first sale of a domain name from one party to another, when Cnet bought TV.com for $15,000.

Back then, the net was still rel­a­tively quiet. Stream­ing media was still a thing of the future (RealAu­dio would debut stream­ing audio in 1995 and a small Israeli com­pany called VDOnet would launch stream­ing video a few months later), as were Java, JavaScript, Shock­wave, Flash, VBScript, and XML.

Back then, the most traf­fic the Inter­net was see­ing was FTP data, and the web was still in fourth place as the most used appli­ca­tion on the net, behind FTP, Email and Usenet. Also, spam didn’t exist yet. It would take a few extra months for two Ari­zona lawyers (Can­ter & Siegel a.k.a. “The Green Card Lawyers”) to spam Usenet.

The top online ser­vice in the coun­try was Com­puServe, fol­lowed by Prodigy, Genie, and AOL. None of them were con­nected to the Inter­net and all of them were expected to die off. While this was the case, other ser­vices were not con­nected to the net: we didn’t have Inter­net bank­ing (although online bank­ing was pos­si­ble by using pro­pri­etary soft­ware the bank would give you) nor was there any online trad­ing going on.

All this in 6 years. Oh my, how far we’ve gone. So with this in mind, I’d like to thank all of you for a won­der­ful six years and take this time to remind you that we still have a lot to do. After all, together, we are still work­ing on cre­at­ing the build­ing blocks and mov­ing them around.

Let’s see if we can do as much in the next 6 years as we have in the past ones.

We may have made a lot of money in the process. We may have made a lot of changes in the process. We def­i­nitely changed the world in the process.

But let’s not for­get what we set out to do: to build some­thing new, some­thing that we could leave behind and proudly look at when we’re older.

I would like to chal­lenge every­one on this list to come up with a way to give back to the com­mu­nity that has given us so much. Whether it is by spend­ing a lit­tle time teach­ing a net begin­ner how to move around this world we cre­ated, help a school or non-profit orga­ni­za­tion to get online, or help make more data acces­si­ble through the net, please take some time off your busy sched­ule and go out and make a dif­fer­ence. We did in the last 6 years: why should we stop now.

As the year 2000 approaches, please do make that pledge to your­self and together, we’ll help this grow a lit­tle further.

That’s about it for my lit­tle ser­mon. As a clos­ing note on this year, I’d like to renew my thanks to every­one I’ve worked or exchanged ideas with in the past year and I hope we’ll do some more of that. So have a great New Year’s eve cel­e­bra­tion and I’ll see you on the other side of the cal­en­dar, the one that starts with a 2.