The Memoir

(This is chapter eight of my ongoing memoir of the internet industry.)

On October 28, 1994, Chip Bayers of Wired Magazine posted on Usenet about an ambitious new website called HotWired.com:

HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

Further down, Bayers' post also said this:

HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

I didn't know what to think of all the hype, or of the "tribal" design aesthetic. But I appreciated that HotWired bothered to have a design aesthetic, since most websites still featured black Times New Roman text against a pale gray background. I registered to become a "member" (a new concept at the time), but didn't find much to do with my membership. There were discussion groups, but they felt meager and artificial compared to Usenet.

The most unique thing about HotWired was not its look or its content but its business focus. Revenue model? Sponsors? Now this was something new. I didn't feel much confidence that HotWired would be able to pull this off, but it was the most ambitious concept I'd seen on the web so far, and I couldn't help wanting to quit my job and work for them immediately.

(This is chapter six of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

By the autumn of 1994 I was feeling pretty good about my crazy little website, which was bringing in more new visitors each day. I began to contemplate where this whole new web paradigm might be heading, and how it might eventually converge with the work I was doing as a database programmer on Wall Street.

Banks and investment houses were already obsessed with technological change in the late 80s and early 90s, the years before the Internet's sudden rapid spread. Access to fast, accurate and complex information had become increasingly crucial to traders and analysts in this high-flying age of arbitrage and derivative markets, so firms like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Smith Barney, Bankers Trust and Merrill Lynch were racing to revamp their database systems while information providers like Moody's, Reuters, Bloomberg and Dow Jones competed to provide the best raw numbers for these banks to crunch. This was why techies like me flocked to Wall Street during these years.

(This is chapter four of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

By the beginning of 1994 the excellent Unix operating system had reached critical mass in the corporate offices, public organizations and schools of the world. It was still unavailable in most homes, though a new user-friendly version called Linux was beginning to show up in homes with geeks. Any computer that ran Unix or Linux was automatically wired for the Internet, so this new communication platform was poised to explode.

This explosion could have gone a variety of different ways, though. A variety of early Internet publishing standards (Archie, Jughead, WAIS, WWW) jockeyed for position as the user base swelled. Fragmentation might have appeared inevitable, but instead an amazing convergence on a single publishing standard took place between the summer of 1993 and the summer of 1994. The entire Internet community adopted a presentation protocol called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a transport protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and an open linking system called the World-Wide Web. The speed and ease with which this complete convergence took place remains astonishing, and seems to have been almost magical.

(This is chapter 2 of my memoir of the internet industry, which begins here.)

The Internet was born in November 1969, just after an exciting summer that included the Woodstock festival, the Charlie Manson murders and the Apollo 11 moonshot. The first successful demonstration of the Internet went much more quietly. A computer at the University of California at Los Angeles exchanged a series of messages with a computer at Stanford University in Palo Alto, 360 miles away, and at this moment -- well, one can only imagine that champagne bottles were popped, colleagues in various corporations and universities and government offices were giddily notified, and several West Coast nerds went home very happy. It didn't make the evening news.

The Internet grew, slowly and steadily. By the time I graduated with a Computer Science degree from Albany State in May 1984, the Internet was still nothing but a rumor to anyone I'd ever met. I worked for an aerospace firm and a robotics firm in the late 80s and never once saw a TCP/IP packet that didn't come from inside my building. We all knew that the Internet was somewhere out there -- I read about it in magazines like Byte and InfoWorld -- and in late 1992 I noticed a strange new book called The Whole Internet: User's Guide and Catalog by Ed Krol. It was published by O'Reilly, the most respected technical publisher in the Unix field, but it had a strange sort of 60s-ish San Francisco feel to it that was unlike any other O'Reilly book. I thumbed through it and read about Telnet, FTP, Usenet, Archie and Gopher, but it didn't make much sense and I didn't know where to find the Internet anyway.