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.