OCTOBER 5, 2000
SPECIAL REPORT--THE NET'S FUTURE
Commentary by Alan Hall
How the Web Was Wove | E-commerce wasn't even a concept in 1989. Here's how this unintended consequence came to be the Net's rocket fuel
| In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, invented a way to link together documents on research projects so they could be accessed over computer networks. He called it the World Wide Web. "The dream behind the Web is of a common...space in which we communicate by sharing information," he later wrote. "There was a second part of the dream, too...the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror -- or in fact the primary embodiment -- of the ways in which we work and play and socialize."
Berners-Lee missed one key point: His invention would be the seed for the commercialization of the Internet. The Web -- more than the network of cables, servers, and routers that made a new medium of global communication possible -- would open the Net to online marketing, advertising, and a gold rush of investment.
Those were innocent times. Back then, the nascent Internet -- which had grown out of a Defense Dept. project to develop an advanced communications network, called ARPANET, that began in 1969 -- was still largely the province of academics and the military. The National Science Foundation had set up a network to link major computer research sites, mainly at universities. But
the Net was already beginning its geometric growth spiral. In 1984, there were 1,000 host servers. That number grew to 10,000 by 1987 and broke past 100,000 in 1989. Over the next decade, the number would soar -- to 80 million today.
ENTER THE CAMEL. This was a special world in which all citizens had equal rights -- and could exercise them with impunity. The buzzword was "netiquette." Kids who could type 100 words a minute (though with minimal accuracy) invented characters to compensate for the emotional ambiguity of onscreen text. Remember the "smiley face" -- :-) -- to say "I'm happy" or "I'm joking"? Advertising, or even unsolicited e-mail, was verboten. Transgressors from this code of politeness were "flamed." And for a while, business was either disinterested or intimidated.
Even then, though, the camel of e-commerce was easing its nose under the tent. Private networks, such as CompuServe and Prodigy, were signing up thousands of users, even at the now archaic communications rates of 300 to 2400 baud. Realtime chat, invented in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen, a graduate student at the University of Oulu in Finland, became a new form of communication that was supplanting the telephone.
In 1988, Vinton Cerf, one of the architects of the Internet and an executive at MCI Corp., made one of the first moves toward the commercialization of the Net. While acknowledging himself as a member of the "Internet community," Cerf "made a conscious decision to pursue connection of the Internet to commercial electronic mail carriers," he wrote in an online reminiscence. "It wasn't clear that this would be acceptable from the standpoint of federal policy, but I thought that it was important."
SURFIN' SAFARI. A year later, both MCI Mail and CompuServe had opened the floodgates by providing the first commercial electronic-mail connection to the Internet, not just on their private networks. And in 1990, The World (world.std.com) became the first provider of dial-up Internet access. Just a few years later, CompuServe, America Online, Delphi, and others would offer it to their customers.
CERN released Berners-Lee's program to the world in 1991, and within a year, the Web had established an identity. "We DO have a global village," enthused Jean Armour Polly, in the June, 1992, issue of the Wilson Library Bulletin. The title of her article "Surfing the Internet: An Introduction" almost immediately became part of our language. That year, the number of host computers connected to the Net topped 1 million.
But the global village would quickly come to resemble Los Angeles far more than ancient Athens. The engine of change was Mosaic, a Web browser developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, by Marc Andreessen, a senior in computer science, and Eric Bina, a research
programmer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications there.
Mosaic put a vibrant new face on the Web. The bland text-only format was supplanted by colorful graphics, photos, and display type. Soon, the browser could show video clips and allow users to play audio. In October, 1993, the month of the release of versions for the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, 20,000 copies were downloaded from the NCSA server alone. A technology reporter from one national publication was so impressed with a demonstration of Mosaic that he
began his story with "I have seen the future...."
DECLINE OF A CULTURE. Indeed, he had. Madison Avenue, which had previously found the Web about as compelling a medium as CB radio, suddenly took notice. And a thriving young industry dedicated to creating commercial Web sites sprang up overnight. When Netscape, the company founded by Andreessen and James Clark of Silicon Graphics, went public two years later without having made a penny, it logged the third-largest NASDAQ IPO share value ever.
The transformation from a global storehouse of knowledge to a mega-mall had begun. Sure, there were some rough spots. When the misguided Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel e-mailed an advertisement to thousands of people, its computer was jammed by "flames" of protest.
These days, we hear less and less about "Internet culture." E-mail ads are commonplace, and sometimes we even buy something on the Net -- and Berners-Lee admits that he does, too. Advertisements grace most Web sites and occasionally we read one. And we listen patiently as broadcast announcers labor through the now familiar "w-w-w-dot-website-dot-com."
WORLD BAZAAR. Some may yearn for the "good old days" before Vice-President Al Gore conceived the notion of an Information Superhighway. But in much less than a decade, the Web has revolutionized computing and communications. It has added its own language to our lexicon and opened up new avenues in education, commerce, and industry. It is a technology with a power to change civilization on our ever-smaller planet that may rival the harnessing of fire. And the show is far from being over.
Was the Internet co-opted by commercial greed? Or did it simply morph into the form that people really wanted? Today, it's a hybrid of TV, magazines, the daily newspaper, the public library, and the mall. It's a high-tech bazaar that combines wisdom, tawdriness, commerce, entertainment, and communication. In fact, Tim Berners-Lee got what he wished for: a mirror and embodiment of
who we are.
The message is the same one that the deafening roar of the first A-bomb delivered to the physicists who sought to tame the power of the atom: You can invent it, but you can't control what they do with it.
Hall writes about science and technology for Business Week Online in New York
Edited by Thane Peterson
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Copyright 2000, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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