Ryan McIntyre, along with his fellow Stanford classmates (Graham Spencer, Joe Kraus, Mark Van Haren, Ben Lutch and Martin Reinfried) was one of the "Excite 6" who founded the Excite search engine in the early 1990s. Ryan recounts what it was like to found a college start-up before that was a "thing," and explains how the technology was developed with the help and guidance of VCs and other early investors. We delve into the "Coke vs. Pepsi" competition with Yahoo, the madness of the "dot-com" era, and analyze the dominance of Google in the search space today.

Summary:

On HBO, the show Silicon Valley is about a young kid who comes up with a billion-dollar algorithm and attempts to build a company around the technology. Well, there's a real-life parallel, because that is what happened to Danny Lewin in the early 1990s. He co-developed an algorithm that gave birth to the Content Delivery Network industry, and the company that he co-founded on the strength of this technology is Akamai Technologies. To this day Akamai is a major backbone of the entire Internet.

But that is only one of the fascinating things about the story of Danny Lewin. Born in Colorado, Lewin's family moved to Israel at a very young age, and Lewin eventually became an special forces operative in Sayeret Matkal, the elite anti-terrorism unit in the Israeli military.

Tragically, Lewin was one of the passengers on American Airlines Flight 11, which was hijacked on September 11, 2001. There is reason to believe that Danny Lewin was possibly the first person to be killed by the hijackers on that day.

In this episode we talk with author Molly Knight Raskin who has written a book, No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet, which chronicles Danny Lewin's amazing life story. It's a fascinating book, which I encourage you to read for yourself, and this is a fascinating episode.

Buy The Book:

No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet

Summary:

Danny Sullivan is generally acknowledged as THE expert on the search industry (www.searchengineland.com). Danny first got his start coving search all the way back in 1996, and for almost twenty years, he has covered search technology as it has evolved from the likes of Excite and Yahoo into the dominance of Google and the emergence of social and mobile as the new frontier. Danny gives us a bit of his own background before we wade into the 90s search scene. We spend a lot of time discussing how and why Google grew to dominance and toward the end, Danny tells us where search technology might be going in the future.

As you know, often on this podcast, I run across issues or tidbits from the past that don’t quite fit our overall narrative. But sometimes those tidbits are just too interesting for me to ignore. One of those things I keep running across is Al Gore and his role with the early Internet.

I think it’s something that we all sort of “know.” That Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. I remember this being a small political issue at the time of the 2000 election, but I honestly never cared enough to investigate the details. Last weekend, however, I went down a research rabbit-hole and decided to find out the truth. Not because I’m a huge Al Gore fan, or because I’m looking to score points against him either. I was just genuinely interested, and wanted to find out the historical truth— not just the partisan-tinged conventional wisdom.

So, here is what I found out.

A full transcript of the CNN interview we talk about can be found here.

Summary:

George Bell was the CEO of Excite.com, took that pioneering search engine public, and became the CEO of Excite@Home when he oversaw that major merger of the dotcom era. George talks about the development of search technology, the madness of the dotcom bubble and even explains the background to one of the more notorious what-ifs in Internet history: the time that Excite had the opportunity to buy Google for a mere $750,000.

Summary:

I was absolutely thrilled that Ben Slivka agreed to come on the podcast with us. Obviously, we’ve had plenty of oral histories relating to Netscape and the development of it’s browser. But we’ve only spoken to a handful of people about Internet Explorer thus far. Obviously, Internet Explorer was every bit as vital to the development of the early web so I’ve been eager to get more background from the Microsoft side of the story. And who better than Ben Slivka, who was the leader of the original Internet Explorer project at Microsoft. Ben recounts where Microsoft was at as a company before Windows 95 and the web, and he walks us through the development of Internet Explorer from version 1.0 through 4.0 and beyond. If you’re interested in the technology- and feature-development of the modern web browser, you’re unlikely to hear a better hour of conversation. So, I know you’ll enjoy this conversation with Ben Slivka.

Summary:

Halsey Minor is an absolutely legend when it comes to the online era. Along with names like Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar and others, Halsey Minor deserves credit for creating one of the first truly great companies on the web: CNet. Halsey recounts the CNet creation story with us, but also goes into his early days on Wall Street, with another entrepreneurially-focused young man named Jeff Bezos. And toward the end of our talk, Halsey talks about the project he’s embarked upon now, which is working in the bitcoin space. Interestingly, Halsey feels that Bitcoin as a technology has the potential to be every bit as revolutionary as the web was, and perhaps even more so. So please enjoy a conversation with Halsey Minor.

The first banner ads went live on the web 20 years ago today, October 27th, 1994, when the website HotWired.com first launched on the internet. We've spoken to some of the people responsible for the creation of these ads, and so, in honor of the anniversary, I have re-edited their interviews into an oral history that tells the whole story. But in case you think you've heard all this before, please note that there are segments from 4 entirely new interviews that you have NOT heard before. So, if you want to hear the whole story comprehensively, download and listen!

THE FIRST BANNER AD

Please note: The post on the website for this episode has all the ads and graphics we mention throughout the podcast, so please check that out to see the full picture.

Summary:

Younger listeners might know John Battelle as being one of the original forces behind the Web 2.0 movement, as the founder of the Web 2.0 Summit as well as Federated Media. But John was also the founding editor of both Wired Magazine and Industry Standard magazine, that great, lost magazine of record for the dot com era. For our purposes, we’ve been focusing more on HotWired, so that’s why I was super excited to speak with John and get some of the background stories from Wired the magazine as well as Industry Standard. Enjoy!

Summary:

Another conversation with writer and journalist Chris Higgins. We start up talking about the recent sad demise of the Magazine, a project Chris was heavily involved in. But then we spend most of the episode talking about the early online services and what it was like to go online before online meant the web. If you’re from this era, get ready for a nostalgia bomb. Hope you enjoy.

Summary:

Joe McCambley is one of the more prominent names in modern digital marketing and advertising. He's had major roles at Digitas, at AOL in it's modern incarnation and he's the co-founder of the Wonder Factory. I wanted to talk to Joe about his time with Modem Media, where he was one of the creative forces behind the development of the first banner ads that premiered alongside the launch of HotWired. The 20th anniversary of these first banner ads is coming up at the end of the month, and I'm putting together a special episode where I'll edit together interviews from several different people all for one comprehensive piece that will tell the story. As I told Joe after this interview, my original intention was just to use this conversation as a part of that piece. But our discussion went in such wonderful directions, delving deep into nature of modern advertising and the future of marketing in the digital age, that I decided this deserved to be it's own stand alone-episode. If you're working in digital media today, I think this is required listening.

Sponsor link:

audibletrial.com/internethistory

The "You Will" campaign can be viewed here.

The first banner ad can be viewed here. 

Summary:

Owen Thomas is one of the most prominent voices in modern web media. He is currently the editor in chief of ReadWrite.com, but he was also the west coast editor for Business Insider, the founding editor of Daily Dot, executive editor of VentureBeat, managing editor of Valleywag… and I could go on and on… Business 2.0, Red Herring, etc. I was particularly excited to talk to Owen about some of his earliest jobs, at HotWired and at Suck. Owen gives us some more great background about the launch of Hotwired and the inner workings of Suck.

Sponsor link:

audibletrial.com/internethistory

Summary:

Soon after the founding of Wired Magazine, it was decided that Wired needed a major web presence. Andrew Anker was recruited to write a business plan and launch a website that would become HotWired.com. As we’ve seen in this chapter, HotWired was among the first stand-alone media websites, and pioneered a great many things, not the least of which were the first banner ads. Andrew gives us some wonderful insights into the early days of Wired (going back to the magazine’s funding) as well as the evolution of HotWired, Suck, Hotbot and other early web properties he helped bring to life.

Summary:

We continue our survey of early web media plays with some that have lasted the test of time and some that, while not currently extant, were lasting in terms of impact. It’s a big episode. WSJ.com. NYTimes.com. EOnline. The Weather Channel. ZDNet. CNet. Salon. Slate. Wired magazine and HotWired.com. And our long lost, beloved Suck.com.

By the way, as promised, here are some early NYTimes screenshots, compliments of Rich Meislin.

Here is a screenshot of @Times on AOL

And here’s an early NYTimes.com homepage

Bibliography:

•  The Weather Channel Book
•  http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116087/weather-channel-website-chases-storms-clicks
•  http://thevane.gawker.com/the-new-weather-com-is-a-sad-shell-of-its-former-self-1550958111
•  Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet 1st edition by Motavalli, John published by Viking Adult Hardcover
•  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDNet
•  Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business
•  http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ZIFF-DAVIS+UNIFIES+ITS+ONLINE+SERVICES+UNDER+A+NEW+NAME%3a+ZD+NET-a017072062
•  http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_30/b3639039.htm
•  http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0780435/
•  http://www.informationweek.com/cnet-to-buy-ziff-davis/d/d-id/1008822?
•  http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/cnet-networks-inc-history/
•  http://www.salon.com/2005/11/14/salon_history/
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-10-20/honey-whats-on-microsoft
•  The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway
•  http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/slates_10th_anniversary/2006/06/my_history_of_slate.html
•  http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mosaic.html?pg=5&topic=
•  http://www.keepgoing.org/issue20_giant/the_big_fish.html
•  Wired – A Romance

Summary:

Rob Glaser was, and is, the founder and CEO of Real Networks. If you were around in the 90s, you’ll remember Real Audio and Real Video and the Real Media player. In the age before broadband, Real Networks pioneered streaming media on the web. Quite simply, the early web would not have been multimedia without Real, and by the late 90s, fully 85% of the streaming audio and video on the web was Real Media. But Rob was also an early Microsoft Executive, so the interview starts out with Rob giving us some fascinating stories about being recruited to join Microsoft in the early 1980s as well as his work with the successful relaunch of Microsoft Word and Excel in the mid 80s.

Summary:

What the mid-1990's debate about the so-called "clipper chip" can teach us about our contemporary debates concerning NSA surveillance of the Internet and the Web.

This episode was originally written as a piece on Medium, entitled The NSA Tried This Before, What The 90s Debate Over The Clipper Chip Can Teach Us About Digital Privacy

Summary:

A new kind of episode today. I sat down with writer, blogger and former programmer Chris Higgins to do a sort of analysis episode, expanding on some of the issues covered in Chapters 1 and 2. Hope you enjoy.

Summary:

Oliver Knowlton is another one of our Pathfinder.com alumni. He’s had a wide and varied career in media, from his role as the General Manager of Sports Illustrated to his current role as the VP of the Digital Portfolio Group at Gannett, he’s been working in various aspects of digital media for two decades. Our previous Pathfinder interviewees have given us bookends of the pathfinder story, its origin story and the denouement, as it were. Oliver’s discussion gives us a great summation of the story from someone who was there for the whole ride.

Summary:

Jan Brandt is a legend in the world of marketing. She singlehandedly led the famous AOL "carpet-bombing" campaign that put millions of AOL trial discs and CDs in everything from magazines to popcorn boxes to banks. AOL was able to leap to the front of the online pack, over competitors like CompuServe and Prodigy largely on the success of this campaign. Jan tells us how this strategy developed, the thinking that went into it and goes into great detail about what worked and what didn't. But she was also a very early AOL executive, so she is able to give us some fantastic background about AOL the company: its culture, its people and its visionaries–people like Steve Case. She takes us from AOL's beginnings, through its considerable growing pains (remember "America On Hold?") its rise to dominance in the dot-com era, and even gives us her perspective on the legacy of the AOL/Time Warner merger.

Summary:

Linda McCutcheon is another Pathfinder veteran. She came up through Time Inc. on the marketing side, so she was the one responsible for landing the first advertisements that ran on the Pathfinder site. But she also stayed at Time Warner through the entire lifecycle of Pathfinder, eventually rising to head the entire Time New Media operation. Linda gives us a great recap of entire era from the Full Service Network efforts through to the dot com days when she successfully brought Time New Media into profitability. One small note… halfway through we lost our Skype connection, ironically because her Time Warner Cable signal went down in her office. So, there is a bit of an interruption halfway through. But allowing for that, it’s a brilliant conversation about the past, present a future of media.

Summary:

Craig Bromberg has had a long and fascinating career at the intersection of media and technology. An early adopter of online technologies, Craig was a freelance writer when he was chosen by Pathfinder head Walter Isaacson to become the first editorial director of the Pathfinder project. Craig tells us about the thinking that went into the launch of the website and the strategic goals Pathfinder was intended to achieve. But he was also a participant in the byzantine corporate politics that so hobbled Pathfinder’s trajectory, and he gives us a fascinating first hand account of what it was like to fight for a specific vision inside a big organization like Time Warner. Craig has worked with media from every angle and so the second half of the interview sees us get into a fascinating discussion about where media is doing and how it can succeed in a digital age.

Summary:

We’ve been looking at how companies were feeling their way into the internet era, trying to create new industries and new mediums without precedent or a road map. But thus far, we’ve mainly been looking at pure-play tech companies. And when the web revolution came, everyone wanted a piece of it, not just the tech world. So, this episode looks at the creative and business efforts of those people companies who came from outside the traditional environs of Silicon Valley.

We’re largely going to look at big media. When the web began, it was considered to be a new medium, and so it was assumed by many if not most people that big media would logically dominate this new medium. The reason this did not come to pass is complicated, and we’ll look at some of the many reasons why. We’ll look at pioneering newspaper efforts like the San Jose Mercury News’ Mercury Center. We’ll examine unlikely big media web properties that got the web exactly right, like the Weather Channel. We’ll look at how one unlikely company, Reuters, singlehandedly disrupted the entire content industry by turning news into an online commodity. And more than anything, we’ll look at the rise and ignominious fall, of Pathfinder, onetime rival of sites like Yahoo, the portal that maybe wasn’t a portal, the greatest website you don’t remember.

I mention the Pathfinder Museum. Go there for great visual and data artifacts from the site.

There is an exceptional (and exceptionally long) profile of the Mercury Center saga from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Bibliography:

•  http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/realnetworks-inc-history/

• http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_newspaper_that_almost_seized_the_future.php?page=all

•  http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/07/business/the-media-business-in-san-jose-knight-ridder-tests-a-newspaper-frontier.html
•  Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet 1st edition by Motavalli, John published by Viking Adult Hardcover
•  There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for the Digital Future
•  http://adage.com/article/news/pathfinder-readies-year/30/
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/2005/07/new-look-at-pathfinders-new-look.html
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/2005/07/short-history-of-pathfinders.html
•  Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
•  http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/pathfindermuseum/inside/newsletter/news.html
•  http://www.zdnet.com/news/netly-news-goes-quietly-into-the-night/100629
•  http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_39/b3700102.htm

Summary:

Today we have an interview with Dave Zinman, co-founder of FocaLink Media services, which, if you'll recall, developed the first remote ad server. We previously spoke to his co-founder, Jason Strober. Dave is a long time advertising industry veteran. He was also at Yahoo and is currently the CEO of InfoLinks. I hope we've done a good job in these interviews of giving you a decent understanding of how online advertising developed and how it functions to underpin the internet as we know it today. Dave gives us some fascinating insights on all of this, and especially toward the end of the interview, we get in depth about how modern advertising functions. We get into retargeting, the modern advertising method that represents the the apex of advertising evolution. How does Facebook make all it's money? It's retargeting that makes it possible. So, get ready for an excellent master class on how modern advertising works.

Oh, and there's a bonus story, right at the end, about the founding of eBay.

Summary:

Kevin O’Connor is the co-founder of the granddaddy of all Internet advertising companies, DoubleClick. Chances are, if you’ve seen a banner ad over the last decade or so, it was served up behind the scenes by DoubleClick’s DART technology. Now the backbone of Google’s banner ad inventory, DoubleClick was one of the first internet advertising companies formed, one of the largest of the dot-com era, and as we discuss in this interview, DoubleClick is really the Godfather of the New York City Silicon Alley tech scene.

One of the more interesting things to me, is when Kevin talks about the early controversy that DoubleClick ran into in terms of user privacy and cookies and control of user information. In the late 90s, the firestorm that DoubleClick encountered just for doing basic ad tracking was a huge deal. Now, in the age of Facebook and the NSA listening to everyone, that whole brouhaha seems… I dunno… naive? Were we ever really so young as an Internet? Anyway, Kevin has a lot of good stuff to say about that.

Summary:

When you talk about Yahoo, most people know the names Jerry Yang and David Filo. But if you talk to people who were there at the time, there is another name that everyone mentions: Tim Brady. Tim was Yahoo’s employee number 3. He wrote the original Yahoo business plan. He became Yahoo’s project manager, and as much as anyone, he played a major role in building the company that Yahoo became in the 1990s. Tim was also a college buddy of Jerry Yang’s, so he offers us excellent background on Yahoo’s founding and the thinking that went in to the company’s development.

Summary:

Yahoo became the web’s first truly great company, and in this episode, we examine why. Turning to advertising as a business model, Yahoo was among the first to find a way for the Internet to generate real money. In addition, we look back at the “portal wars” as Yahoo, Excite, AltaVista, et al, competed to become all things to all internet people, and in the process, helped set off the dot com mania.

Summary

This is a wide ranging and fascinating interview with John Danner. John was the co-founder of another of the major internet advertising pioneers, NetGravity. John gives us some more great background on how the technology and culture of the advertising industry evolved, and because NetGravity was the company that built Yahoo's first advertising system, we get some great details about early Yahoo. But John also gives us some incredible insights about what it was like during the dot com era madness. If you're currently an entrepreneur or aspiring to be an entrepreneur, you're going to want to listen closely to the 2nd half of this interview because John speaks some serious truths about the realities of growing a venture backed business.

An Interview With Compaq Co-Founder and CEO Rod Canion

This Sunday, AMC is premiering a new original series called Halt And Catch Fire. Set in the early 1980s, it tells the story of a band of cowboy entrepreneurs and engineers who join the PC Wars by cloning an IBM machine and taking on Big Blue for control of the nascent personal computer industry.

AMC’s show is fictional, but it turns out, there is a true life story that is similar to this course of events, and it led to the creation of one of the greatest technology companies of all time, Compaq Computers.

Rod Canion was one of the co-founders of Compaq back in the early 80s, and he was there for the real world PC wars. He’s written a book about the time period, Open: How Compaq Ended IBM’s PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing. In the interview below, I spoke to Rod about the book, the process of taking on Big Blue and cloning the IBM-PC, and how a series of incredible calculated gambles paid off to eventually build one of history’s most successful technology companies.

Summary

In this episode we continue our exploration into the roots Internet advertising. We’re speaking with Jason Strober, another Internet Advertising pioneer and co-founder of Focalink Media Services, Inc. Focalink was responsible for arguably the first remote ad server, a crucial technical component that made online advertising possible. Jason recounts for us the early, “wild west” days when a small group of ambitious people made an entire industry up from scratch, and with it, laid the financial foundation for the Internet as we know it.

Summary

Hadi Partovi was one of the original 9 people on the Internet Explorer project. He left Microsoft in the late 90s to found Tellme Networks, which was eventually acquired by Microsoft for $800 million dollars. This precipitated a second stint at Microsoft where he was General Manager of MSN.com during MSN’s only year of profit, and where he incubated Start.com (which became Live.com, which now points to Microsofts’ online Outlook efforts). After leaving Microsoft a second time, he joined up with his brother Ari to found iLike, which was purchased by Myspace, and both Partovi brothers worked for a time as Senior Vice Presidents at Myspace. In between all this, Hadi and Ari were early investors in Zappos, Facebook and Dropbox, served as advisors to Facebook and still serve as advisors to Dropbox. Hadi is currently the founder and CEO of Code.org, a non-profit working to help schools teach coding to students around the world.

Here is a link to a recent interview with both Partovi brothers.

The post page for this episode is here.

Summary:

As the early web grows, the explosion of content and websites creates chaos. Early search engines are among the most popular sites on the early web, as users try to find their way around the new medium. Sites like Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista and others try to take an algorithm and data-based route to organizing the chaos, but the site that leaps to the front of the pack, Yahoo!, goes in the other direction, creating a hand-sorted directory.

We learn how Jerry Yang and David Filo started Yahoo! in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University and prepare to make the first great brand of the Internet Era.

Bibliography:

•  http://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-out-looking-like-a-toy/
•  Gainesville Sun, July 31, 1995 http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1320&dat=19950731&id=MENWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=k-oDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3855,7057240
•  http://stuff.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
•  http://www.cybertelecom.org/dns/history.htm
•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.01/excite.html
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-02-11/what-hath-yahoo-wrought
•  http://www.thinkpink.com/bp/WebCrawler/History.html
•  http://www.wordstream.com/articles/internet-search-engines-history
•  http://web.archive.org/web/20090501140446/http://www.clubi.ie/webserch/engines/infoseek/history.htm
•  http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/18/business/digital-equipment-offers-web-browsers-its-super-spider.html
•  http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2215868/53-of-Organic-Search-Clicks-Go-to-First-Link-Study
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/03/02/238576/
•  “Found You On Yahoo” Red Herring, October 1, 1995
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/03/02/238576/
•  Yang, Jerry; Filo, David; Yahoo! Unplugged: Your Discovery Guide to the Web
•  Reid, Robert H.; Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business
•  Kaplan, Philip J.; F’d Companies: Spectacular Dot-com Flameouts
•  Angel, Karen; Inside Yahoo!: Reinvention and the Road Ahead

What If I Told You…

… there was a crazy entrepreneur who was the true founder of what would become America Online? He was the guy who hired Steve Case back before AOL was AOL.

What if I told you that same entrepreneur invented true, networked, online gaming—not in the era of the Xbox 360, but back in the days of the Atari 2600?

What if I then told you that same entrepreneur invented a Napster/Pandora/Spotify/Sirius-like music service, all the way back in 1981, before the compact disc was even widely available?

That Man Is William von Meister

And he is the subject of this episode. I’ve enjoyed all of the episodes we’ve done so far, but I have to say this has been the most fun. It’s exciting to shed some light on a bit of history that I think has been criminally overlooked. And to be honest, it’s just such a crazy story, about a hard drinking, heavy-smoking, women-chasing entrepreneur, seemingly from the Mad Men cloth, who was “a pathological entrepreneur” with a “reality-distortion-field” that would give Steve Jobs a run for his money. It’s a story of about a dozen harebrained businesses, none of which were really successful (excepting of course that some or all of them lent their DNA to the company that would become AOL) but all of which were way ahead of their time, and in many ways, presaged technologies we take for granted today.

Details:

Some of the articles I mentioned about the GameLine System:

• Here
• Here
• and Here

Also, the books mentioned as source materials:

• Kara Swisher: aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web
• Michael A. Banks: On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders
• Alec, Klein: Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner

Also, this:

Summary

Craig Kanarick was one of the people responsible for the first ever banner ad, which appeared on Oct. 27, 1994 on Hotwired.com. As mentioned in the podcast, there’s no “first” ad, as several were launched in a rotation at the same time. But as mentioned on the podcast, a lot of people like to think of the first ad as this one, for AT&T, which you can see here:

And for more information about the “You Will” AT&T campaign, read about it here, or dig this.

Craig went on to found Razorfish, along with his childhood friend Jeff Dachis. Razorfish was a pioneering design, technology and advertising studio that brought many large brands and corporations onto the web for the first time. Razorfish was also a pioneer of the web-tech scene in New York City, which has come to be called “Silicon Alley.” Craig is currently the founder of Mouth.com, headquartered in the DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, as is this podcast (thus, the DUMBO-ish picture I chose above). In our conversation, I mention some contentious media coverage that Razorfish received back in the day, in my opinion, painting them as poster-boys for dotcom-era excess. I offer some of those articles for context:

• New York Magazine
• Wired
• 60 Minutes II

Summary:

America Online survives the inevitable run-in with Microsoft, only to come out the other side stronger.  The company has to endure major PR fiascos and network capacity issues, but eventually sees itself firmly established as one of the major players of the dot com era.

Bibliography:

•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/aol.html?pg=6&topic=
•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffaol.html?pg=3&topic=&topic_set=
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-04-14/the-online-world-of-steve-case
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-08-25/has-the-net-finally-reached-the-wall
•  Swisher, Kara; AOL.com

www.InternetHistoryPodcast.com

@brianmcc

@nethistorypod

Summary:

We take a step back to look at the early online services: CompuServe, Delphi, GEine, the WELL and especially, early AOL. Why? Well, because online services very much served as “training wheels” for the Internet. Online services were NOT the Internet, exactly; at least not at first. But they very much helped get people used to living life in an online environment. AOL especially would grow and enjoy success to the point that it became one of the most powerful companies in technology. We take a look at how America Online grew to dominate the online services market before the inevitable showdown with (who else?) Microsoft.

Bibliography:

•  Banks, Michael; On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders
•  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/happy-30th-birthday-compuserve/24853
•  Stryker, Cole; Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan?s Army Conquered the Web
•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.06/prodigy.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=
•  http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/08/business/at-age-9-prodigy-on-line-reboots.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1995-02-12/prodigy-is-in-that-awkward-stage
•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.09/aol.html?pg=4&topic=
•  http://www.quora.com/AOL-History/How-much-did-it-cost-AOL-to-distribute-all-those-CDs-back-in-the-1990s
•  Swisher, Kara; AOL.com

www.InternetHistoryPodcast.com

@nethistorypod @brianmcc

Summary:

Rob McCool is another of the core group of original Mosaic programmers who went on to found Netscape. Unlike a lot of the others we have spoken to, he worked more on the server side of the equation for both projects. Rob was also the original author of the NCSA HTTPd web server, later known as the Apache HTTP Server, so we can think of him as the Godfather of Apache. He was a contributor to the initial specification of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), and later what became known as the Netscape Enterprise Server. Rob went on to work at both Yahoo and Onlive. He is currently at Google, where he works on structured Knowledge Bases and semantics.

Summary:

Jon Mittelhauser is another of the core group of original Mosaic programmers who went on to found Netscape. Jon worked on the Windows versions of both Mosiac and Navigator eventually became the project manager for the Netscape Navigator project on the whole. He gives us great background and details about the development of browsers, the creation of features (he is the father of the hand icon, for example, and was instrumental in bringing image support to the web) and early web advancements in general.

Summary:

Aleks Totic was one of the original Mosaic engineers at the NCSA, responsible for the Mac version of Mosiac. They don’t call him “Mac Daddy” for nothing. He was then one of the 6 original programmers recruited by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark to form Netscape. Aleks gives us some excellent behind the scenes anecdotes about both projects, and what it was like to head out to California to work on some crazy startup before doing something like that was “cool.”

A few fun nuggets of history we mention in the conversation:

•  Click to hear Marc Andreessen ask, “What is global hypermedia?” back in 1993. 
•  The famous whiteboard. They packed up the truck and moved to Beverly Mountain View 
•  Original Mozilla t-shirt designs.
•  20-year old photos of the NSCP team.

Summary:

Microsoft was on top of the world at the dawn of the Internet Era… but like Jack Dawson in Titanic? Microsoft would pivot, and pivot hard, once it realized that the Internet was The Next Big Thing. This episode outlines how younger Microsoft employees agitated for a greater focus on the Internet, and how Bill Gates “got” the Internet religion. Microsoft’s embrace of the Internet is truly one of the greatest acts of agility in corporate history. Windows 95 and Internet Explorer are launched, and the seeds are sewn for the great anti-trust battle to come.

Bibliography:

•  How the Web Was Won; Andrews, Paul; Broadway, 1999
•  https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fabout%2Fcompanyinformation%2Ftimeline%2Ftimeline%2Fdocs%2Fdi_killerapp_InternetMemo.rtf&ei=ThtoUsvfDq234APWkICIDw&usg=AFQjCNHO04HZPALsUN9Rp4v1jKDYQ8eRpQ&sig2=_bymmx2MJUK8z9gzgACCTw&bvm=bv.55123115,d.dmg
•  Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace; Wallace, James
•  http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2008020017_webgatesmemo275.html
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-07-14/inside-microsoft
•  http://www.zdnet.com/news/browser-wars-high-price-huge-rewards/128738
•  The Microsoft File : The Secret Case Against Bill Gates; Rohm, Wendy
•  http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,985115-2,00.html
•  http://news.cnet.com/2009-1032-995681.html
•  Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business; Reid, Robert

Summary:

Chris Wilson has been working on browser technology for the better part of two decades. A member of the original Mosaic team, he went on to work first at Spry (producing Internet in a Box) and then later at Microsoft, where he was a major developer of Internet Explorer for almost 15 years.

Chris tells us about developing the first Windows port of Mosaic, describes how he was one of the original champions of CSS as a technology, gives us more background about the evolution and life cycle of Internet Explorer, and even described his brief tenure working on Microsoft's first foray into search engine technology!

The quora thread I mention briefly can be found here.

Summary:

Lou Montulli is a web pioneer. In 1991 and 1992 he co-authored a text web browser called Lynx with Michael Grobe and Charles Rezac while he was at the University of Kansas. This web browser was one of the first available and is still in use today.

In 1994 he became a founding engineer of Netscape Communications (employee number 9) and programmed the networking code for the first versions of the Netscape web browser.

He is also responsible for several browser innovations, such as HTTP cookies, the blink tag, server push and client pull, HTTP proxying, and the implementation of animated GIFs into the browser. While at Netscape, he also was a founding member of the HTML working group at the W3C and was a contributing author of the HTML 3.2 specification. He is a member of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame.

Lou was also a co-founder of Epinions.com. He was the CEO of Memory Matrix, and when that company was purchased by Shutterfly, he served as Shutterfly’s Vice President of Engineering. He is currently the co-founder and Chief Scientist at Zetta.net.

• More about Lynx here.
• Here is the famous fishcam!
• Here is the post we discuss where Lou lays out the reasoning behind the birth of the browser cookie.
• The birth of the <blink> tag.

Summary:

Netscape has set the standard and taken the lead. But how long will it last? We take a step backwards in this episode and examine why Microsoft was so dominant at the beginning of the Internet Era. We ask the questions: Did Bill Gates really miss the Internet? And: Was the Information Superhighway and the Internet one and the same thing? And we look back on all the things that were distracting Microsoft at the dawn of the Internet Era.

Bibliography:

•  Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft; Bank, David, Free Press, 2007
•  How the Web Was Won: How Bill Gates and His Internet Idealists Transformed the Microsoft Empire; Andrews, Paul; Broadway, 2000
•  http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/business/judge-clears-antitrust-pact-for-microsoft.html
•  The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story; Lewis, Michael; W.W. Norton & Company, 1999
•  http://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/r14/1994/0113/13021.html
•  How America Got On-Line: Politics, Markets, and the Revolution in Telecommunications; Stone, Alan; M E Sharp Inc., 1997
•  http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,978216,00.html
•  http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/smith.html?pg=8&topic=
•  http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/12/business/time-warner-s-time-machine-for-future-video.html
•  Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace; Wallace, James; Wiley, 1998
•  Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire; Wallace, James and Erickson, Jim; HarperBusiness, 1993
•  Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft; Clark, Jim and Edwards, Owen; St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000
•  The Billionaire Shell Game: How Cable Baron John Malone and Assorted Corporate Titans Invented a Future Nobody Wanted; Davis, L J; Doubleday, 1998
•  The Highwaymen: Warriors of the Information Superhighway; Auletta, Ken; Random House, 1997
•  http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,984696,00.html
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/07/20/245683/index.htm
•  Road Ahead, The (Hardcover Version); Gates, Bill and Myhrvold, Nathan; Viking, 1995
•  The Road Ahead: Completely Revised and Up-to-Date (Paperback version); Gates, Bill and Myhrvold, Nathan; Penguin Books, 1996

Image Credit:

LurkerTech.com

Summary:

Netscape launches and is a smashing success. Jim Barksdale officially comes on as CEO. Netscape fights off legal threats from the NCSA and the University of Illinois. Despite it’s young age and lack of profits, Netscape files to go public in THE historic IPO of the era. Flush with cash, flush with fame, Netscape girds for battle with a new foe: Microsoft.

Bibliography:

•  http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/newsrelease1.html
•  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1994-10-23/from-the-man-who-brought-you-silicon-graphics-dot-dot-dot
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/
•  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Layout_engine_usage_share-2009-01-07.svg
•  Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft; Quittner, Joshua; Michelle Slatalla; Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998
•  http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984131,00.html
•  http://books.google.com/books?id=fzoEAAAAMBAJ&q=mundane+collection+of+not+entirely+debugged+device+drivers#v=snippet&q=mundane%20collection%20of%20not%20entirely%20debugged%20device%20drivers&f=false

Image Credit:

Assorted Materials

Summary:

Marc Andreessen heads out to Silicon Valley. He hooks up with startup legend Jim Clark. They decide to form a company, Netscape, to build upon Mosaic’s previous success. They “get the band back together” by recruiting most of the original Mosaic development team. Netscape Navigator is developed. The company hustles to establish itself before other, larger competitors catch on to the opportunity that is the web browser market.

Bibliography:

•  Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business; Reid, Robert H.; Wiley, 2nd Edition, 1999
•  The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams; Kaplan, David A.; William Morrow, 1999
•  Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft; Clark, Jim; Edwards, Own; St. Martin’s Press, 1999
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/
•  http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ik5mk/iama_coauthor_of_the_first_widely_used_web/
•  http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
•  Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft; Quittner, Joshua; Michelle Slatalla; Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998

Image Credit:

Start-Up: The Book

Summary:

Ayoung Marc Andreessen and a team of programmers at the NCSA on the campus of the University of Illinois create and publish the Mosaic browser, thereby creating the world wide web’s first killer app. Mosaic enjoys meteoric, overnight discuss. But the higher ups at the NCSA take the project away from the “kids” who created it. Examining Mosaic as the “trial run” for the product that would eventually be called Netscape Navigator.

Bibliography:

•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/
•  Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business; Reid, Robert H.; Wiley, 2nd Edition, 1999
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995/09/04/205894/index.htm
•  http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/14/business/6-tips-on-how-to-earn-52-million-by-age-24.html
•  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1994/12/12/80043/index.htm
•  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c8iWUh3Sv4
•  https://vimeo.com/7053726
•  http://www.thocp.net/biographies/andreesen_marc.htm
•  http://users.rcn.com/thomst/marca.html
•  Forbes ASAP, August 28, 1995, The Coming Software Shift, George Gilder
•  A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime; Naughton, John; Overlook Hardcover, 2000
•  http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html
•  http://www.breakingwindows.net/1link10.htm
•  The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams; Kaplan, David A.; William Morrow, 1999
•  http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~gaj1/shiftgg.html
•  Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft; Clark, Jim; Edwards, Own; St. Martin’s Press, 1999

Image Credit:

Kottke