Next: III: The Web
Previously: II: The Creation

 

III: The Web

 

In 1991, cern, one of the world’s largest physics laboratories, based in Geneva, introduced the World Wide Web, a vast document-linking structure developed by the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee and his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau. This robust new global-information resource made possible the emergence of “browsers”—software used to navigate the and maneuver through text and images on-screen. The first browser to take off was Mosaic, created by Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois. Entrepreneur and Silicon Graphics founder Jim Clark soon took notice and partnered with Andreessen to create Netscape Communications.

 

 

Robert Cailliau: The Web is actually a coming together of three technologies, if you like: the hypertext, the personal computer, and the network. So, the network we had, and the personal computers were there, but people didn’t use them, because they didn’t know what to use them for, except maybe for a few games. What is hypertext? It is a method of giving a text more depth, structuring it, and letting the computer help you explore it. Links, like we know today—you see some blue underlined word and you click on it and it takes you somewhere else. That’s the simplest definition of hypertext.

 

 

Lawrence H. Landweber is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin. In 1979 he founded CSNet, which connected universities without access to the Arpanet.

 

 

Lawrence Landweber: What do people use networks for? They use e-mail. They send files around. But until ’93 there’s no killer application that would draw in real people. I mean, people who are not academics or not in the technical industries. The World Wide Web turns the Internet into a repository, the largest repository of information and knowledge that’s ever existed. Suddenly, people who want to check on the weather or keep track of the stock market—suddenly, there’s a wealth of stuff you can do.

 

 

Robert Cailliau: We looked for a name for several weeks and couldn’t come up with anything good, and I didn’t want yet another one of these stupid things that doesn’t tell you anything. In the end Tim said, Why don’t we temporarily call it the World Wide Web? It just says what it is.

 

At one point cern was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic. He said, Robert, do you want to be rich? I thought, Well, it helps, no? He apparently didn’t care about that. What he cared about was to make sure that the thing would work, that it would just be there for everybody. He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that cern put the whole thing in the public domain.

 

 

Marc Andreessen: Mosaic was built at the University of Illinois. I was an undergrad student, but I was also a staff member at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which is basically a federally funded research institute. When Al Gore says that he created the Internet, he means that he funded these four national supercomputing centers. Federal funding was critical. I tease my libertarian friends—they all think the Internet is the greatest thing. And I’m like, Yeah, thanks to government funding.

 

Mosaic was a side project that one of my colleagues and I started in our spare time, for several reasons: One, we didn’t think the real project we were working on at the time was going to go anywhere. And, two, all this interesting stuff was happening on the Internet. And so we basically said to ourselves, you know, if a lot of people are going to connect to the Internet, if only because of e-mail, and if all the P.C.’s are going to be going graphical, then you’ve got this whole new world where you’re going to have a lot of graphical P.C.’s on the Internet. Somebody should build a program that lets you access any of these Internet services from a single graphical program.

 

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but at the time, that was an original idea. When we were working on Mosaic during Christmas break between 1992 and 1993, I went out at like four in the morning to a 7-Eleven to get something to eat, and there was the first issue of Wired on the shelf. I bought it. In it there’s all this science-fiction stuff. The Internet’s not mentioned. Even in Wired.

 

 

Sky Dayton founded EarthLink, an Internet-service provider, in 1994.

 

 

Sky Dayton: I owned a couple of coffeehouses in L.A., and I had a computer-graphics company that I co-owned. And I heard about this thing called the Internet. I thought, That sounds kind of interesting. The first thing I did is I actually picked up the phone and dialed 411, and I said, I’d like the number for the Internet, please. And the operator is like, What? I said, Just search any company with the word Internet in the name. Blank. Nothing. I thought, Wow, this is interesting. What is this thing anyway?

 

 

Jim Clark: I worked for a long time at Silicon Graphics, trying to build a competitive computer company, but eventually got frustrated. So in early ’94, I resigned and left the board and walked away from $10 million worth of stock options. Just left it on the table. The day I resigned, I met Marc Andreessen.

 

One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with the Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.

 

 

Jann Wenner is the founder and editor of Rolling Stone.

 

 

Jann Wenner: Jim and Marc set up a demonstration. I’d never seen a hyperlink before. I don’t think anybody had. And it was kind of drop-dead amazing. That you could click on this blue, highlighted, underlined word and then, bam, go to a whole new level of information was dazzling. So I said, Look, this is fantastic, I get it, but I don’t want to go through the cost of building a Web site. We didn’t have the staff or the technology, let alone the money, to do such a thing. But I would invest in two seconds. And I actually sent them a check, but they sent the check back. They said, If you don’t build a Web site, we’re not taking your money.

 

 

Lou Montulli, the creator of the early Internet browser Lynx, was one of the founding engineers at Netscape and, later, Epinions.com (now Shopping.com). He co-founded Memory Matrix.

 

 

Lou Montulli: Jim had the Jedi mind trick, the ability to convince you of pretty much anything. And he really filled our heads up with the idea that we can go and we can change the world—and we’re going to make a buttload of money doing it.

 

Initially, of course, there was no entry from Microsoft, so Netscape very, very quickly took over the entire browser market. We went from zero to more than 80 percent in a year. The thing that really drove it home for me as to how much impact we were having on the world is the first time I saw the “http” on a prime-time television show. Here’s this thing that probably a year earlier nobody in the world has ever heard of, and now they’ve got a U.R.L. on a prime-time commercial: Hey, come to our Web site and check this out.

 

 

Jim Clark: Sometimes, you know, you just happen to be at the right place at the right time. Once we went public, everyone—everyone—had a new idea. We basically created the late-90s boom in technology stocks, and it became out of control, as you know.

 

Vint Cerf: Suddenly, the genie is out of the bottle.

 

Next: IV: The Browser Wars

 

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