a16z Podcast - Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

"The Ben & Marc Show," featuring a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. In this special episode, Marc and Ben dive deep into the REAL story behind the creation of Netscape—a web browser co-created by Marc that revolutionized the internet and changed the world. As Ben notes at the top, until today, this story has never been fully told either in its entirety or accurately. In this one-on-one conversation, Marc and Ben discuss Marc's early life and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic (a renegade browser that Marc developed as an undergrad), and the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence. Ben and Marc also reflect on the broader implications of Netscape's success, the importance of an open internet, and the lessons learned that still resonate in today's tech landscape (especially with AI). That and much more. Enjoy!Watch the FULL Episode on YouTune: https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4 Resources: Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca Marc’s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz Book mentioned on this episode: - “Expert Political Judgment” by Philip E. Tetlock https://bit.ly/45KzP6M TV Series mentioned on this episode: - “The Mandalorian” (Disney+) https://bit.ly/3W0Zyoq Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

It was this invitation to basically do anything. It was this kind of great moment where you just kind of felt like the future was like in front of you. It's very important to know that at this point and all the way up until really 1994, the overwhelming uniform, universal expectation was the internet would never be a business. I at the time completely lacked the skill set and the perspective to navigate. I would say interpersonal and in particular bureaucratic situations. I had no clue how to do any of it. So much of computer science at that point was about optimizing scarce resources

because that was all you had at that time, and they had spent decades figuring out how to do that, and we collectively decided to just break that rule. You've probably heard of the browser. In fact, billions of people use browsers as their gateway to the Internet, and you might even be using one right now to access this very podcast recording. Now, in today's episode from the Ben and Mark show,

Mark Andresen and Ben Horowitz share the real story behind the creation of Netscape, a web browser co-created by Mark that revolutionized the Internet, and, quite frankly, changed the world. As Ben notes up top, until today, this story has never been fully told, either in its entirety or accurately. In this one-on-one conversation, Mark and Ben discussed Mark's early life

and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic, a renegade browser that Mark developed as an undergrad, which is widely referenced as the first widely used browser. And the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prime. prominence. Ben and Mark also reflect on the broader implications of Netscape success, the importance

of an open internet, and the lessons that still resonate in today's tech landscape, especially with AI. That and so much more. I hope you enjoy. Who will decide the future of the internet? Read Righton, a book by A6 and Z general partner and author Chris Dixon, takes on one of the most consequential questions of our time, which is also the key to unlocking more entrepreneurship, more creativity, and more innovation. From AI that compensates artists to social networks that reward you for participating, ReadWrite Own shares a playbook for building the next era of the internet. Learn more at readwriteone.com. Okay, you idiot, like this giant commercial opportunity is staring you in the face. You literally have like inbound sales leads like coming out of your ears.

like, why don't you go raise venture capital and start a company? Yeah. And, of course, the answer was because I had no idea that there was such a thing as venture capital. Yeah, what venture capital. I literally, you know what a tractor was. Yes, exactly. The content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed

at any investor or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may make. maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the Mark and Ben Show. Today is a super special episode because we are going to talk about the origin of the web browser and the invention of the web browser. And we have one of the co-inventors with us right here in Mark.

So it's exciting. It's also exciting because this story has never really been told either in its entirety or accurately. And so we're going to get a chance to do that. For those of you who are so young that you're not quite sure what a web browser is anymore, it is kind of how most people experience the Internet. So you might call it the Internet. It's a thing, Chrome. Let's start at the very beginning because, you know, one of the things that is kind of one of the largest disinformation campaigns going is this whole idea that people, entrepreneurs and people who inventing things are kind of born with the silver spoon in their mouth. And almost none of the successful

entrepreneurs we work with is that the case for. They all come from, you know, somewhere between like refugee and middle class backgrounds. And you certainly were not born with the silver spoon in your mouth. So tell us a little bit about where you grew up. You didn't grow up in a big city. You grew up in quite a small town. What was that like? And then what is it like growing up? and how did you first encounter the internet? Yeah, so let me, if I could start our session today with two disclaimers, which maybe relate to your question. So disclaimer number one is we're going to be talking about events

that happened over 30 years ago. A little memory problems. Yeah, so, you know, I'm going to tell the truth as I remember it. I may get things wrong or other people may have different recollections. And so I have to disclaim that. It's because I can't swear to the factual accuracy of stuff that was that long ago, but I'll tell the stories I understand it. And then I'd say the other story is there are twists and turns along the way

where I would just characterize it as at the time I was irritated at other people for things that happened, I think in the fullness of time, what I realized is that I just at the time completely lacked the skill set and the perspective to navigate, I would say, interpersonal and in particular bureaucratic situations. I had no clue how to do any of it. Yeah, well, and so I think when you get into your background,

people kind of understand. I sometimes describe myself, I was feral at this point in my life. And so it's always this thing, if you could rerun prior events. Like with the skill set I have today, I could have navigated it much better and a bunch of things could have turned out different, but I certainly did not have the skill set at the time. So anyway, if it sounds like I'm criticizing other people,

it's actually not what I intend. It's going to be more ultimately criticizing myself in the sense of whatever happened that I didn't like at the time. I think I was at least partly, if not wholly responsible for. Yeah, right. You know, young men can be like that from time to time, you know. Yes, I was raw aggression at that point with very little. And yes, you, Ben, of course, remembers this

because he met me shortly after the events we're about to talk about. So first of all, the modern cliche is, you know, Elon Musk, you know, father had an emerald mine. Right. When he showed up in the U.S. with $2,000 is the actual story, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there's all these kind of fake histories that are kind of retconed into people who grew up in some cases pretty tough backgrounds. Yeah.

So I grew up in the American Midwest and rural Wisconsin. And for people who haven't spent time in Wisconsin, there's basically three Wisconsin's. There's sort of the big city of Milwaukee, which is like a kind of like a bit, almost like a Chicago kind of thing. That's its own world. And then there's Madison, which is like a very kind of hippie college town that was actually kind of a core of activity in the 60s. And then there's the rest of Wisconsin, which is called. completely disconnected from those two cities, which has nothing to do and has no interface into those two places at all. And it's sort of the rural Midwest, which is basically a farming country.

And so, you know, sort of... Grant's actually, is I understand. Yeah, I think that's right. If you get 10 minutes outside of either Milwaukee or Madison, you get into a real, real rural territory in a hurry, right? And so there were people in the farming world in the Midwest out through the 1970s that still didn't have indoor plumbing. I have memories about houses. Well, for a while, you didn't have gas heat. So you weren't that. There's also that, exactly.

So, yes, if you want to heat your house, you cut down some wood. And so, look, it's up north and it's very close to Canada, so it's extremely cold. And so it's actually this amazing thing where it's sort of frozen tundra for nine months and then three months of summer. You know, but mostly farming, you know, a lot of dairy farming, a lot of corn to feed the cows. So corn and cows. And then I would say light manufacturing, light tourism, a lot of Illinois people vacation up there, go hunting, fishing or whatever. So a little bit of that, but mostly agricultural. My town was sort of the sign of the.

outside of town forever, population 1,309. The sign never changed. Regardless of whether you had 13.08 or 13. Yeah, I don't think it actually moved around that much. So it's probably more or less accurate the whole time. And then, of course, the running joke was that's 1,309, including the cows. So, yeah, so a very small town environment, kind of lower middle class context and public eight through 12 school.

My school was very small, 25 kids in a class. So I feel like, whatever, 300 kids in the whole school. So a lot of people don't have school choice today. You didn't have teacher choice either because there's, I guess, one teacher. for every subject. No. No, exactly. And then, you know, like, this is the 70s

and then the 80s. And so this not only predates the internet, but this also predates cable TV. We had no cable TV. Long distance phone calls were still a dollar a minute. Yeah. We saw, actually, my neighborhood

growing up, actually, we had a party phone line for the entire neighborhood. That's interesting. Which is actually quite an adventure. And so there's a single phone number for the neighborhood. And so when your phone rings,

everybody in the neighborhood picks up the phone. This is true. This is true. And then there's an arbitration process, a verbal arbitration process for who the calls actually for. And then the ex,

expectation is that everybody else hangs up, but, you know, they don't have to. Well, they say there are no secrets in the small town. This is one of the reasons why. So, yeah, so it's sort of, I don't know, it's halfway between the 1930s and the 1980s or something. It just is one of those places where, you know, a lot of the country was like that at that point, which is it hadn't fully adapted. Certainly the things that we all now take for granted. And then you asked why to discover the Internet.

So I had no idea the Internet even existed until I went to college. The thing I knew that existed, and this is where I kind of got lucky in terms of when I grew up And when I came of ages, I came of age sort of precisely at the moment when the PC happened. And so I was aware of, you know, there were all these just amazing stories. This is when Steve Jobs is on the cover of Time magazine. And, you know, so there was this moment when the personal computer hit the popular consciousness. And it was sort of built in the late 70s. And then it sort of catalyzed hard in the early 80s, especially around 82.

And then, you know, our school, even though it was very small, started to get a handful of early computers. And then there were a wave of consumer computers at that time that were actually quite inexpensive. And so there were computers at that time as cheap as $200 in current. at that point, which... And this is a floppy disk, so this is pre-hard drive or post-hard drive when you got your first computer? Pre-floppy disk?

Cassette tape, exactly, yes. That's a slow loader, bro. You can power to load a game. I remember that era. Yeah, so if people don't remember, but before floppy disk, you would literally hook up a cassette tape player. And the thing with a cassette tape player

is it didn't have any kind of seek capability, right? And so the way that you loaded the program was you had to fast forward by hand to the right point in the tape. Yeah. Right. And then you're always at risk. You were going to write to the tape. You wrote a program you wanted to write it. You wrote the tape. You ran the risk. You were going to overwrite something in the past. Yeah. And then there was this really fundamental tradeoff. If you didn't have a lot of money, it's this very fundamental tradeoff, which is you could buy a short cassette tape that was small amount of stuff. Or you could buy, same price. You could buy a cassette tape that was much longer and could record a lot more, but at much lower quality quality.

And that mattered because the lower quality tapes frequently, you would not be able to read back what you had written. And so there was a real quality quantity tradeoff. This is a dambling exercise. Exactly. And then so we didn't have the internet, but we had no exposure to the internet. We'll talk about the internet prehistory in a little bit, but we didn't have that. What was happening at that time was what we're called BBSs, which is an acronym for Bulletin Board Systems. And you think about these is BBSs were kind of pre-social networks in a way and pre-internet.

And so the way this would work is the host of the BBS would literally set up a set of modems in their house or apartment, often like 8 or 12 or 20 or something to take incoming calls from people with remote computers. and then you, in theory, you could dial into BBSs, and you just literally used a modem and you dialed into the phone number for the BBS. And then if you got on the BBS, it was really cool because you had access to early versions of like email and social networking and user profiles and bulletin boards and classified ads and downloading games and playing games and so forth.

And so it's kind of pre-internet, pre-AOL kind of versions of these things. The problem that I had is, again, rural Wisconsin, long just this phone calls are a dollar a minute. There are no BBSs in my town. And so I read about BBSs. I actually don't, to this day, I think I never actually used one because I couldn't afford it. And by the way, also, this is also predates broadband. And so when I first started on this stuff, this is actually pre-modem, as we understand it

today. So the form of the modem at the time was what's called an acoustic coupler. And so you take your old-fashioned telephone handset and you literally put it in these two rubber. Yeah, no, I remember those, yeah, right. In the two rubber cups. And then it's literally using your hand-held phone as the received transmit for the audio signals. And so the acoustic coupler modems were 300-baud, 300 bits for second. Yes, and noisy. Very noisy, 300 bob, yeah. Yeah, very noisy, exactly. So, yeah, very slow. So you could kind of get a glimpse. I would say the romance of the personal computer at that point was very clear, and that's what

really got me was, and basically the way that you'd bought a computer, you plugged it into your TV set in those days. And what happened was you literally, you got injected into the basic programming language interpreter. And what that showed up as is it literally the screen would say ready, and then there was a cursor. And for kind of kids my age, it was this invitation to basically do anything, right? And so it was this kind of great moment where you just kind of felt like the future was like in front of you. And then there were all these, this became a pop kind of culture thing. And so there were all these books and magazines, you know, that you could buy or subscribe to, you know, hobbyist magazine for whatever kind of computer you had. And it would

literally have printouts in the magazine of programs that you could actually sit and type into your computer, type into the basic prompt and make work. And so there was this incredible sense of adventure for what you could do on a computer. And then there was this additional thing out there, which was, wow, if you could afford it, you could be on BBSs and you could talk to other people. And so they kind of had that network thing from the beginning. It's just the economics at the time was not feasible to have it be a mass marketing. Yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Interesting. Okay, so then you get the University of Illinois. And why did you go there? Why not Madison or MIT or what have you? Financially, the state schools were the options. And then Illinois, it turns out to then and now is a great engineering school. And so Madison's very good, but Champaign-Hurbana is one of the top engineering schools in the country. And so it was just a nice coincidence that that was kind of clear.

close enough and inexpensive enough. It also haven't had national computing, supercomputing. Yeah. So this is where I got really lucky. So I dropped into Illinois as a new student, started out in DE and then decided I did not care at all about electrical engineering and switched into computer science, which was a much better fit. But, you know, I showed up as a CS student.

And basically, this was my big stroke of luck was this was University of Illinois in 1989. So this was four years into two federal programs that basically created a precondition for everything that followed with the Internet. And the two programs were something, I think it was called the National Supercomputing Act. And it was basically this effort to basically fund, it was funded for what we're called National Supercomputing Centers at four universities, one of which was Illinois. And so the campus, the federal government just dropped in a ton of money to basically buy state-of-the-air computers, including at the time really big computers, like these big craye

and thinking machines computers that cost like $25 million at the time and filled up entire rooms. Those supercomputers in those days were so big that in some cases you'd actually build a building for them and you'd build the building. but you wouldn't close the roof and you would lower the computer by a crane down through the roof into the center of the building and then you would finish the roof

and so the big iron. Exactly. So very esoteric, expensive, powerful systems. So we had those. And then the other federal program was a program to build what was called the NSFNet. The NSF there being short

for National Science Foundation, which is the government agency that all the money came through. And the NSFNet basically was the first internet backbone as we understand it today. And those programs were joined because the original purpose

of the NSF net was to connect together these supercomputing centers, and then to allow researchers, scientists in many other colleges, universities across the country to be able to remotely access these large central light supercomputers. I want to take a moment here to kind of pay credit to Al Gore on this, who famously gets just like endless shit for people kind of saying that he said that he invented the internet. And so to defend Al's honor for a moment, A, he never actually said he invented the internet. What he said is he took the lead in the Senate in creating the internet.

And what he meant by that was not that he sat down and wrote the code for it. What he meant was he was one of the real leaders, one of the main forces in the Senate, actually fund these two programs. And these two programs led directly to the internet, as we know it today. And so he and his colleagues at that time really stepped up at a pivotal moment. And I think that's actually very relevant to kind of what's happening today with AI. Like, I think that's actually the same thing that needs to happen with AI today. Well, it's kind of the opposite of what's happening with AI in universities today,

which is they're not only underfunded to do AI, but there's a push among the big tech companies to enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI and universities. by eliminating open source. So full credit to Al Gore for doing the right thing because it's clear that wasn't obvious. Yeah, that's right. We've been spending a lot of time

in Washington lately, and I've actually been telling the story to a lot of current senators in encouraging them to basically do the same thing. Yeah. The Democrats love it because it rehabilitates Al Gore.

The Republicans, I've got to get them through the Gore part, but everything partisan in 2020. But they also seem to think it's a good idea, so I hope that will happen. So basically, my great luck was I showed up at Illinois in 89 and basically four years into these federal programs.

And so I showed up basically just got blasted into the future in one step because when I showed up there, there was just all the University of Illinois was actually wired. It was one of the hub nodes of the internet backbone and the campus was getting wired for broadband. And there were computers and computer labs, was stated there at equipment all the way up to these giant craig supercomputers that the computer science department had access to. Like it was just there. It was like being beamed into the future. Now the twist on that is the assumption in those days was you would use this stuff while you're in school. and so they had started to give out like email addresses to undergrads and things like that, right?

But the assumption was that you would use these systems while you were in school and then if you stayed and became a faculty member or something, you would use these systems for your research. But if you graduated and just went out and went into the real world, you would leave it all behind? The internet, right? There's not access to the internet chains, right?

Maybe you could kind of describe what the internet was at that point because when we say internet, people imagine a lot of things, but that's not what it was then, in terms of a user experience. Yeah, that's right. And so a couple things. So one is it's very important to know

that at this point and all the way up until really 1994, the overwhelming uniform, universal expectation was the internet would never be a business. There would never be a business. There would never be an industry. There was never going to be money to be made. There was never going to be commerce.

There was never going to be streaming video. There was never going to be stores, any of the stuff. By the way, even the idea of having newspapers online was considered bizarre. It wasn't even going to be that. It was supposed to be like scientific research papers and experimental data and things like that. So it was very much not viewed as like a commercial opportunity.

It was viewed very much not that way. And basically, I think, if I remember we've been up until like 94, I think zero of the big tech companies of that era took it seriously. Yeah, zero. In fact, well, in fact, the opposite, they were building kind of parallel systems to the Internet, often referred to as the information superhighway.

You know, Bill Gates was a huge kind of champion of the information super highway and specifically not the Internet. So, yeah. And he was kind of the biggest figure and for sure in software and probably in the industry at the time. Yes, so the big computer companies

wanted to build proprietary networks and they were doing that. And by the way, AOL was up and running by 1994. AOL kind of got going around 89, kind of the same time I showed up at Illinois, but it really kind of hit critical mass. AOL basically was a consumer-scaled version of the BBS idea that we described.

And then in 93, it famously interconnected itself with the internet. And so all of a sudden, all the AOL subscribers became internet users. And so there was that, but that didn't even happen until 93. There was certainly no vision for that, I think, in the late 80s.

and there were no consumer ISPs, and then there were no normal businesses online. And in fact, the internet up until 1993, what was the NSF net, which then turned into the internet, the operated under something that the federal government dictated called the acceptable use policy, the AUP. And because the NSF net was federally funded, commercial activity on the internet was actually banned, right, because it was viewed as a sort of inappropriate use of federal research dollars. And so it actually would not have been legal to engage in commercial activity. And so there basically was none.

And then, yeah, and then the big phone companies and the big media companies at that time, didn't even want to build like BBSs or anything internet-related. What they wanted to do was basically what we now know is streaming. They wanted to do what they called at the time interactive television. And the big killer app for internet television was called video on demand. And so it was sort of the revolutionary idea at that time that instead of watching whatever was on a TV channel at that moment, you could watch whatever you want by clicking a button

and then maybe you could order a pizza. Interestingly, there is a small minor bandwidth problem with that idea, if I recall it correctly. Yeah, it was actually an idea that was ahead of its time. Streaming video didn't really work and the way that we understand it today until it went probably 15 years later, right? 08? Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I mean, well, really, when Netflix made the cutover from CDs to streaming, which was the late 2000s, right? Yeah, I remember meeting with Reed Hastings in, I think, 2004, and Netflix was up and running, and it was very successful doing DVD rental by mail, and Reed's a technical genius in addition to being a business genius,

and he said, I'm thinking about doing streaming. And my first reaction was, that's crazy, it'll never work, because even in 2004, like most people on the Internet, they didn't have broadband connections fast, enough to do like TV quality. So like video at that point was actually these little postage stamp size videos. And I was like, oh, I don't understand who's going to want to sit there and watch a little postage stamp size thing. And Reed had correctly extrapolated that the broadband wave in the 2000s was going to result in streaming working. But just give you a sense of the delay

there, right? So even a decade later, even a decade after the founding of Netscape, development of Mosaic, and a decade later, it was still considered weird and bizarre to turn to stream videos. Yeah. So the media companies in the early 90s were not being run by technologists. And so they had a hard time, I think, mapping. There was a famous interactive television information super highway trial in the early 90s around this time, which was to do this video on demand. So to do this thing where you'd have a remote and you could press a button and watch whatever movie you wanted. And I remember it was a trial. They were trying to figure out if there would be consumer demand for this. And so one of these companies, they wired a neighborhood to do the

streaming of a video, but it wasn't digital switched. It was analog switched. And so they had a dedicated long, basically, analog line wired to each house. And then in the back office, they had a bank of VCRs, video tape players. And they had a video tape player for each house. And then they had a wall of video cassettes with all the movies that were optioned. And then they had a guy on roller skates. And they had to get to the roller skates to get there quick enough because the user expectation was you click the button, you watch the movie. And so the guy on roller skates had to like shoot over to the wall of videotapes, pull down the right tape and then shoot down the hall to the right VCR and get the tape in the VCR and press play before the couch potato is like giving up because the stream business

started. Oh my God. And so, yeah, that idea was a bit early. But on the University of Illinois campus, like broadband existed, like I said, email existed. You asked how do people use the internet in those days, so sort of pre-web. It was mostly, well, there was the leading apps at that point. There was an app called Telnet that you would use to basically log into another computer on the network. And that was actually very important because that's how the scientists would use the supercomputers. And actually the group I was in at Illinois actually built one of the main telnet apps. There was an app called FTP that was a file downloading app. And so you could upload and download files. There was early email. So that worked. There was early what were called

news groups, which is like basically forums, kind of early social networking. Ben, I think at the time, those were probably the four main things that people did. And it was all scientists and computer science majors on the internet, if I recall. I mean, there was real nobody else. Yeah, so this is at the time 89. I'm going to guess there were somewhere between 500,000, 2 million people total online. And yeah, it was basically the, it was basically the faculty staff and students at these four supercomputing centers. It was the remote users, and then it was like the defense contractors got wired up early. And then there were branches of the government that got wired up early. And then there was like the national labs. And, you know, there were, and then a handful of hobbyists would

figure out a way to get online. And so, yeah, so basically it was, you know, first of all, it was like 100% people in the West, you know, overwhelmingly the U.S. in Europe. It was, you know, very heavily, obviously English dominated from the very beginning. It was extremely technical, scientific oriented. Almost everybody on it had a scientific or technical degree. It was also very, as a consequence of all that, the, you know, is this incredible, you know, brilliant, you know, this is like a million of the smartest people in the planet.

So the caliber of the people and the quality of the discussions was like sky high. Oh, yeah, I remember the old news groups were unbelievable. I remember, like, if there was like a bug and a compiler, like you could find out about it, and, you know, there would be workarounds. And, like, the level of expertise on those things was absolutely astounded.

And look, many of the smartest people in the scientific and technical world at that point were in there, and they would talk to you if you had something interesting to say. And so if you posted on a news group, they would respond. And so it was like this distributed community of like, you know, the smartest scientific technical minds in the planet. It was really special. And then also because there was no money, you know, there was no ads, you know, there were no scams. There was no fraud. There was no, you know, spam. You know, like I remember there was actually a scandal that there was a guy who figured out that this was like a right for, you know, basically scam, you know, kind of thing. And he started, did the first spam. And he started, did the first spam. And emails and news group messages. And it was like a big scandal at the time that somebody would actually do that because like a guy just literally started to do that. But, you know, it had run for years without anybody even trying that. Yeah, that's what a community. That's the true meaning of community, right? Like you have all people of the same culture in one place. That scale. That's amazing. Yeah. So people who were on that at the time kind of always look back at that and they miss it because that has never been reconstituted. You know, look, a lot of those people in their equivalence today are like on X or they're on the other social platforms, but they're, you know,

they're a minority population in a much larger, you know, context everywhere now, whereas at the time they were the entire population. Yeah, so that was a super magical thing. But, but yeah, I mean, look, the actual functional use cases were quite limited. And yeah, so, yeah, that's sort of, that's sort of what I saw when I got there. Maybe it'd be helpful just because I think it's really relevant both to the, the, the, what followed, but also the AI discussion. Maybe if I could, maybe I could go back in history now to kind of where the internet came from. Yeah, yeah, go back to the late 60s. Yeah, so the idea of the internet was sort of famously this idea of what was called a

packet switch network, right? So the reason the internet works is because it's this peer-to-peer system in which computer, you know, anybody can kind of plug a computer into the internet and then you kind of have messages that are able to go around and route. And so, you know, famously this is an idea that actually was developed originally by the Defense Department in the 1960s called packet switching. And in particular there's a guy, Paul Baran, who's kind of the original, you know, kind of true founding father, you know, godfather of this idea.

And actually, he's a great, he's a great story on this, going back to your Silver Spoon thing. So he was born, he was a Jewish, Jewish, Polish immigrant to the U.S. And so his parents came, brought him as a small child to the U.S. The 1920s, sort of classic American immigrant success story. His father opened a grocery store and then was able to make enough money to send his kid to college. Baran, you know, was a super genius. He got an engineering degree. And then he actually went to your alma mater.

He went to UCLA for a master's degree, which he got in 1959 in computer science. By the way, his master's degree in 1959 computer science was on character recognition. Oh, amazing. AI. So, like, he was actually, so it's like he tried to do AI first. And, you know, he was early on that. Yeah, you know, he got partway there, but, you know, he was already at that point

trying to do AI. And then he went to work for the RAND Corporation, which did a lot of work for the Defense Department on military, you know, kind of strategy topics. And there was a huge, this is at the height of the Cold War. So this is in the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis. where there was a real feeling that there might be nuclear war at any moment. And one of the big concerns the Defense Department had was in a nuclear strike, the way telecom systems worked at that point is if you took out the central office,

you took out an entire telecom network. And so the fear of the Defense Department was the Soviets presumably knew where the central switching offices were for the AT&T network, and so they would bomb those in a nuclear strike. And then basically what would happen is the U.S. would lose command and control of its nuclear weapons. And so basically it was a way, the fear was it was a way for the Soviets to do, a decapitation strike, they take out the central switching office from AT&T,

and then the U.S. can't retaliate. Literally, the U.S. would not be able to fire as nukes because they couldn't send the commands to actually fire the nukes. And so it was this existential kind of thing at the moment. And so this guy, Paul Baran, said, well, what if we build a network that basically is designed for packets switch, instead of being circuit switch or everything's going through a central place, it's a packet switch where the packets can flow around,

and if part of the network gets bombed or destroyed or taken offline, or, you know, power cut or whatever, the network kind of reallocates. And the significance of this idea is not just that it led to the Internet. The other significance is AT&T thought it was the craziest idea they'd ever heard. Yeah, yeah, right, because you need control. You need control. For control, there's no central control.

Yeah, yeah. And I was reading, before this, I was refreshing myself when I read Paul Baran's obituary in the New York Times. And Vince Turf is quoted in the obituary saying that, you know, Paul Brand was basically laughed out of AT&T when he proposed this idea, right? Because it was such a heretical idea. So anyway, so the point being is the Internet was a heretical idea for the very beginning. And I thought both in that it would never work because it would be like entirely too slow and the packet reassembly and all that would never work.

And then also that it was a dumb idea because, of course, you want central control. So like, they derided him in every direction possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, as late, so that was 1964, 20 years later. A horrible idea that would never work. Horrible idea that will never work. Exactly right. So that was 1964 when he proposed this.

as late 20 years later in 1984, a federal judge went to break up AT&T, which at that time was the National Telecom Monopoly. They owned and controlled everything. And AT&T actually got the Secretary of Defense in 1984, 20 years later, to testify that if the federal judge broke up AT&T, it would permanently cripple the U.S.'s command and control capability for nuclear weapons. Right. And so even 20 years later, people didn't, you know, people didn't believe it. It was still a heretical idea. And by the way, 84 is significant because, of course, the very next year in 85 is when is when the NSF net was funded, right? And so it was like a 20, it was a 20 year journey to get from that original heretical idea with resistance all the way through to ultimately get to

the point where Al Gore and his colleagues figured out that actually, no, it was actually a good idea and they should actually put money in it. So what I'd really like to know, and I think a lot of people would, is so you have this network with some supercomputers on it and a bunch of scientists and some news groups, like, how did you get to this idea? Because nobody else had the idea. I'd say, like, first of all, nobody else had the idea. And then secondly, if you had not had the idea when you had it, the internet, as we know, it probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting built,

I mean, maybe if it was invented six months later, but four years later, definitely not. And so what happened? Yeah, so there were serious efforts underway. You alluded to this, but there were serious efforts at times. Let's just itemize the efforts. And so there were three basically consumer online services that came out of the 80s, AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. AOL became famous later, much larger.

CompuServe kind of petered out at one point. Prodigy was actually an IBM joint venture, so they were actually kind of clued into that part of it early. and then and that and they you know those systems existed into the early 90s and those were all these proprietary you know sort of proprietary stove piped not interconnected not open you know these are by definition closed systems and for people who don't remember this if you wanted to like put content up on a while you had to go you had to pay a while like you had to get and you had to get their permission their approval and they could take it down and so it was you know any of these stove pipe proprietary things you know somebody really is in charge and the internet is the opposite of that and so that you know those systems ran like that and then there were a set of companies that then we're going to do, you're alluding to, that we're going to do the leapfrog on that and kind of do the modern GUI version of that. And that was specifically Microsoft with MSN,

at the time was called MSN, and then Apple had something at the time called E-World, and then who else was running around? A whole bunch of these other companies were running, and then the media companies were doing these proprietary video, you know, interaction TV things that would also be centralized controlled. But yeah, in particular, I think probably at the time,

it was really the big ones would have been, you know, it would have been AOL getting really big. It would have been Microsoft, establishing its own, you know, kind of permanent proprietary online service as an alternative to the internet. And then it would have been probably Apple, you know, with its own proprietary system, probably would have been the big three. And look, those companies would have loved for that to happen.

Like all three of those companies would have been much better off had that happened. You'd get a Vig on every transaction. Yeah, this was actually the famous. So Ben just used the word Vig. So there was a famous interview with Microsoft CTO at the time that they were trying to make MSN work. Nathan. Their proprietary system. And an interesting guy.

And he said, yeah. Yeah, he said, and he actually, to his credit, he kind of said it out loud. Yeah. He said, yeah, the goal of this program is to get a Vig of every online transaction, you know, Vig being the mafia term for, you know, your slice of the pie. Yeah, vigorous. Vigorous. Exactly.

So, and, you know, yeah, they would have had, you know, they would have had total control. And so if you think about the level of control that Big Tech has today, like, it would have been like that times 10. And that really was where the industry was headed. And those companies had a big advantage at the time because, one is they just had tremendous resources. Like they were funded to do this. And then the other thing is that, you know,

at the time, you know, look, to just get this stuff to work was hard. And they could marshal thousands of engineers and they could design everything to work in a completely integrated manner. And they had, you know, all these graphic designers to make it beautiful. And they had all these performance engineers

to make it fast. And, you know, they could run big advertising campaigns and do consumers, you know, do consumer support. And I'll tell the story later of how I became the consumer support. I became the user support desk for the entire internet for about a year and a half myself. It's an amazing job.

But, you know, amazing job. They would have had, you know, they would have had the ability to, you know, they had a lot of natural advantages to be able to do it in the proprietary way that they wanted. And so this was a critical period for that. Yeah, the internet, as we know today didn't have to happen. Yeah, so basically, I think in retrospect, what just happened was a couple of things. So one is just the generation of super geniuses like Paul Baran and, you know, your friend, you know, Len Kleinrock and Vint Cerf and, you know, these, all these really bright guys who had created the internet as, you know, kind of the network side of it. You know, they just, they were networking

people and they just didn't they didn't their natural you know kind of world was not user interfaces and consumer services and content and media and you know gaming and you know all these all these application level things you know they they just they the way these systems are built is they just assume somebody else is going to do all that and and that hadn't really happened yet and so yeah so there just part of it was people they hadn't tried part of it was it wasn't a business and so there was no business motivation to try to do it and then also part of it was there was another coincidental thing that happened, which was the arrival of the graphical PC. And so the arrivals, the arrival specifically of the Macintosh, and then followed by that, the arrival of Windows

version 3 and the first graphical PCs. And so before about 1992 or so, you weren't going to have a graphical user interface to anything because you didn't have graphical user interfaces at all. And so there was also a moment in time thing that happened there. So there was all that. Yeah. And so then my part of the story was, I had a bunch of jobs in college and was getting my computer a science degree. And then I ended up working for what's called NCSA, which was the National Center for Supercomputer applications, which was... You're a freshman at the time or a sophomore when you got that job? No, so I actually didn't get that. I actually didn't start working there until I was a junior. So I worked when I was a freshman, I worked into a physics lab called the

Materials Research Lab there, which was actually a great entry point for me because that was one of the main labs using the big supercomputers. Yeah. And so I kind of got plugged into that world very early. And then I, and then my sophomore year, I spent nine months actually as a co-op student working for IBM in Austin, and I worked on the workstations at the time, which was, again, very, very helpful for this because these were kind of the leading edge user interface, you know, so like I worked on graphics systems. And they had TCIP, right? The works systems, yeah. They were built in. And then IBM and Austin at the time, you know, this is when IBM was on top of the world. It was, you know, by far the most important tech company still at that

at that point. And, you know, we had this, we had a 6,000 person division in Austin working on these, these Unix workstations at the time, graphical work stations. And again, they had the resources everybody there was also wired everybody was on the internet these workstations were designed to be used on the internet right right and i was at the time did not have any internet capability you know there was no in in the early 90s there was no tcpip there was never none of yeah well computers you you recall this yeah computers PCs and max up until 93 94 didn't even come with TCP built into the computer built into the operating system right right you had to actually you actually had to buy it what was called a ccpip stack is a separate thing windsock and

these things. And so, yeah, but the Unix workstations of that era, you know, the problem of the Unix workstations is they cost like $50,000. And so these were not consumer products. But if you had one, you had internet networking built into it. And then if you were at IBM like I was or at Illinois like I was, you were also on the internet. And so, you know, I kind of got to see, you know, I kind of saw the bricks being put in place, you know, for what followed. And then I knew how it all worked because, you know, my job was to do engineering on all these things. And then basically there was this moment in basically, I think it was 92, 91, 92. There was this moment where there were basically three online efforts to kind of do

front ends, new kinds of sort of user interfaces, interaction models for the internet at that point. And so, and it was famously, it was three of them. There was one called Gopher. There was one called Ways. And then there was the World Wide Web, Dimmerner's Lee. And so, and these were, in the very beginning, these were actually in a real bakeoff with each other. There were a lot of people who had different opinions about which of these were going to win. Gofer was actually based on the user interfaces of the BBS system from the 80s.

And so it was a menuing system. And so you could go down all these different menus and download content and so forth. And then WAIS, I think it was called Wide Area Internet Search. Waze was like a pre-Google search engine. And so it was sort of the idea that you would have, you know, type in search keywords and get back results. And then this guy, Tim Berners-Lee and in Switzerland, English guy working at CERN in Switzerland, had this kind of really, at the time, radical idea, which was to take an old idea called hypertext

and bring it onto the Internet and basically be able to have documents that can links that point to other documents. And this is an idea that goes back to the 50s. A guy named Doug Engelbart and another guy, Ted Nelson, you know, had kind of conceived of this idea decades earlier, but the computer systems in the 50-60s

were not quite capable of doing it yet. And so Tim, Tim basically said he was sitting at CERN, kind of doing related kinds of work that, you know, he was working in kind of support of the physicists at CERN in the same way that I was working. and support of the physicists at Illinois. So kind of a similar universe.

And, you know, he had this idea basically, okay, we're going to put hypertext. We're going to put hypertext on the Internet in the form of the web. But I would describe this at the time as all three of these were like very, I would say, nascent experimental efforts. And then really critically, all three were text-based.

And again, the assumption here was the Internet, basically is the assumption was the Internet slow, which for most people at that time it was. And so the assumption was the Internet's slow, your computer is slow, your network connection is slow. And so Gofer was, you know, early text-based menus, Waze was type in a text keyword

and then get back text results. And then the web was hypertext, and it was, there's a text document and then it contains links to other documents. But just as an example, the web, when it was originally conceived, didn't have images. It's just because the idea

that the network would have the capacity to be able to do images was just still too much of a reach. And then basically people started, you know, a bunch of people online started to play with this. And then, you know, and then I was, we talked about what I was doing

at the time, but I was working on a, on a semi-related project and then figured out with a bunch of my colleagues there at the time that there was a, you know, we had ultimately this idea

that led to mosaic. So what was your other job? Yeah, so what I got, so what I got hired to do at NCSA, what I got hired to do is I got hired into a group called the software development group,

which was the group that was basically supposed to make, it was again, funded by the National Science Foundation, supposed to make tools, specifically open source tools that would make it easy for scientists to use the NSFNet

and to use the supercomputers. Right? And so those tools, I mentioned earlier, this thing called Telnet. So we made this, we made NCSA Telnet, which was the main way you would log into remote computers. We had, I think at the time, I think we had an FTP client server.

We had, you know, so we had like a variety of these kinds of tools that you would use for, you know, for these things. By the way, we also were doing early work in VR at the time because there was this whole focus. Oh, there was this whole focus. What was at the time called scientific visualization. And this is sort of, and this is sort of what later became like special effects in movies.

But this was actually pre like Jurassic Park and pre-Terminator 2. And so this been the idea was to like, you know, these supercomputers would do these like black hole simulations or weather simulations or something. And then you could actually use these graphical workstations to actually render movies. And you could actually show scientific results in visual form. And so that the group did a lot of that. Actually, those guys actually, a lot of those guys actually went on and actually ultimately then created the computer graphics industry in both the computer industry and then also in the in the film and television. So that was also a thing that was happening then.

And then actually the VR idea was actually already present at the time. And so there were attempts to do VR. And our sister campus at University of Illinois, Chicago, actually had something called the cave, which was, it was an alternate vision of VR. So the main VR idea, of course, was a headset strapped your face, which is what people have today. At Chicago, they had the idea of the cave, which was, no, you're actually in a physical space and you have giant monitors around you, right? And so you're actually in a, you're actually in a, you're actually in a, in Las Vegas. Like the sphere in Las Vegas, like the sphere in Las Vegas. And also like the way that a lot of these new movies and TV shows,

film now in something they call the volume, which are sound stages that are literally made up of walls and ceilings that are giant display panels showing, you know, graphic rendered scenes and imagery. And so my phrase, that's the become the most practical idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. That works really well. So the first TV show that used that technique was called the Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, which is a huge success.

And if you watch The Mandalorian, it's actually really, they did a great job on it. If you watch it, it seems like they're outside all the time and they're not. The most of that, most of that series was filmed when it seems like they're outside. That was filmed in a very small sound stage in an environment with giant LCD displays on all sides. And then with all the software, it's a control software they have where they could literally shift the perspective of the, of the, like, the background scenes to match like the motions of the actors. And they'd have like, oh, they have overhead lights so they can like replicate the sun or like sunset. And so actually, so anyway, so that cave idea in 1992 actually is now state of the art in

Hollywood. Yeah. You know, it was too early. We didn't, you know, we didn't have the quality of the screens back then or quality of the graphics. So it wasn't ready yet, but like now it is ready. So it's another one of these back to the future things. Yeah.

So anyway, so that's what the group at Illinois was doing. And then the specific project I was on was a project called collage. And the idea for collage today, you would describe it as sort of a forerunner to Zoom or to, you know, maybe Skype or something like that. And it did have the idea of doing audio and maybe hopefully doing video conferencing. But the main thing was like a shared white. board and then shared documents. And so specifically the idea was real-time collaboration. And so, you know, you and I are scientists in two different locations. We're writing a paper

together. We want to be able to look at the paper at the same time and be able to make edits such that we can, you know, see each other's edits, like Google Docs, like the way Google Docs works today. Or to have a whiteboard where you could, you know, you could look at, you know, imagery or you could draw diagrams and you can share them and work on them together and annotate them like you had a shared whiteboard. And, you know, I think that was like a good, I mean, that was a good idea. And like all of that stuff has happened and it's very important today. It was just, I think it was in retrospect, it was just before its time, which is, you just, like, the internet, what's that? Out of order and what you should build first, for sure.

Out of order. Yeah, well, there were two problems, which is one is it was just hard to get it to work because you just, you needed a certain speed of, you know, you needed a certain speed of network performance and graphics capability on the computers to make it work. And it was kind of, it was kind of choppy. And then the other problem was to get a, to get a real-time collaborative system to work. People have to be online at the same time. Yeah. Right. And so you and I are, we're collaborating. We have. to be online at the same time, and we might be in totally different time zones, and, you know, like, it's just, so it's hard to get, you know, critical mass for a network effect if you have to be online at the same time, whereas, you know, things like email worked if, you know, regardless of when you're online, you know, so-called asynchronous. And so, yeah, collage was, it was a good idea. It just wasn't, wasn't quite clicking. And then it just, it kind of became clear to me and a few of the other folks that I worked with there at the time that it's just

like, okay, something else is going to pop here and it's going to pop hard. And it's going to be something involving like this, you know, the web, go for waste, like this confluence of basically new thinking of user interfaces that's going to take place. And then, by the way, it's basically two big things, the two big things that sort of we insisted on, the two big leaps was, one is we're just going to assume that everybody has a graphical computer. We're just going to assume that everybody has like Windows or a Mac or a Unix workstation. We're not going to support not DOS, right? And all systems up until that point, you know, including, by the way, the early, you know, the first web browser,

the first web browser was a text-based, text-based browser. You know, the Tim Bernersley browser. It was a browser that actually was a text-based browser that ran on the next cube of which there were maybe 5,000 of the world at that point. Right, because that was like one of the most graphical machines ever. But he had this problem. He had this problem is he had the problem. So first of all, the problem of just like there was no graphical content. There was no graphical, you know, you just like, the assumption was that it was going to be text-based. And then the other problem was, we just assumed that the internet was going to be fast. And that was, again,

a heretical assumption. That was a heretical assumption at the time because at the time the internet was really slow. And most people were on very slow. connections. And so, you know, the experience a lot of people had the first time they used mosaic on, even on a broadband connection, the first time we had it is you would literally watch the page load line by line. And then you would watch the images load line by line, right? And so, but it was a heretical idea at that point to say, no, we're just going to assume everybody's on a graphical interface and we're going to assume that everybody's on a fast broadband connection. And we're just not going to compromise. We're going to build the correct

user interface for that new world on those two fronts. And we're not going to compromise to try to be backward compatible with the old text-based UIs or with the old narrow-band connections. And in a way that you were a university student with no company, no need to sell anything in the beginning. So it was like fair enough. Yeah, and my computer, because I worked at IBM and then I worked at NCSA and we had all this money for the government at that point, my computer was an SGI Silicon Graphics at the time company leading a Unix computer company at the time, you know, an amazing company.

But they, you know, they made these workstations and the workstations cost $50,000. in 1992, you know, it's like a hundred and some thousand today. And, but that, you know, my computer was one of those. And so, and on a fast connection. And so I'm just like, look, I'm just going to build it for that. And then my colleagues built it versions for Windows and Mac. But, like, we're just not going to compromise for the old hardware that everybody else is on. We're just going to assume that in the future everybody gets something like this.

Yeah. And then, yeah, we, at your point, like, we were running on federal research money. So we had no commercial, we had no commercial incentive. We had no reason to go for, you know, large numbers of users or, you know, try to, you know, make money or whatever at the, the time. So we just basically, again, and the heresy, we just designed for the future. And then there was a little bit, I had a little bit of a glimmer. I wouldn't say I was confident on this, but I had a little bit of a glimmer at the time that was like, look, if we design for, if we designed for broadband, like the, if it's a compelling enough user interface, it will actually

cause broadband to happen. That was aggressive. Right. This is a, my, my favorite philosopher, Nicoland has this term called hyperstition, which is the idea of sort of, you know, sort of willing an idea into existence just by proposing it. It's sort of like pulling the future forward. And it's And the idea basically was if people could just see what was possible with a modern, you know, Unix workstation on a modern broadband network with, you know, with what we then built with, if they could just see that with Mosaic, they would be like, wow, I need that. And then they would price it. And they would be like, oh, my God, I can't afford that. But then they would say, well, I need a version of that that that I can afford. And then that would be a motivation for the phone companies to start to offer broadband and for the PC, for, you know, for the PCs to start to get built in internet connectivity and for people to upgrade from DOS to Windows. and all these other things that followed. And so as I said, I wasn't confident about that, but I had a glimmer of it because I was like, look, like if you could get through this knot hole

and if you could get the world to the other side where everybody has a GUI and everybody has broadband, then all of a sudden, it's just very clear that you have all of these incredibly compelling things that you can do that are impossible otherwise. And so it was kind of a hard shove in that direction. And then the other, I would say, big breakthrough, or I would not break through,

the other really important conceptual rule that we had at the time, which was sort of consistent with the Internet philosophy, of the time was it had to be an open platform. And specifically, it had to be, whatever it was, it had to be where anybody could create servers and anybody could create content. And so, it had to be very easy to do that. And so, and you remember

in those days, it was sort of famous that you could implement a web server in four lines of PerlScript to do whatever you wanted. And so, and you could create a web page just by writing HTML by hand. And then, by the way, people did and there were scaling issues with those four lines team web servers. That's how a lot of the big

internet company started out that way. Yes. And then That's one of the reasons why the site's always crashed is exactly. But the point was to optimize for the quality of experience and then optimize for the openness and the creativity that would follow. And again, there was a leap there, right? And you remember, we got a lot of criticism at the time, which was, wow, you know, a lot of computer sciences at the time were like, wow, these guys are building the most inefficient, you know, computer systems ever been built.

This thing is incredibly inefficient. It's unoptimized. It's, you know, wasting network bandwidth. It's doing all these. Where's the AISN one in coding? Like, this is strings. You guys are crazy. You're wasteful.

Yeah, we were doing wasteful. Yeah, yeah. Big, you know, environmental arguments. You're wasting with. You're burning, you know, power, causing pollution. Yeah, these are all text-based protocols. So one of the design principles was all protocols have to be text-based. There were no binary protocols.

Text-based protocols are much less efficient, much, much slower. But the enormous advantages, you can program a text-based protocol by writing text. And you can read it by reading text. Whereas if it's in a binary format, you're always dealing with an intermediary system, and it's just harder to develop for and harder to understand. And there was a little counter to the belief of the computer science world at the time. I mean, everybody agreed on ASM1 and coding is that you have to do that. Yeah, any CS professor of that era who looked at this said they're doing it wrong, 100%.

They said they're absolutely doing it wrong because it's not optimized. And so much of computer science at that point was about optimizing scarce resources because that was all you had at that time. And they had spent decades figuring out how to do that. And we just decided, we collectively decided to just break that rule. And again, it was not to break the rule just to break it. It was because what was on the other side of breaking that role was openness and creativity and empowerment and anybody can do anything. And then inclusivity, right? You didn't have to be a computer scientist, networking expert to build a web server.

Yeah, that's right. And the experience people had, you know, the killer kind of version of this that ended up working really well was this idea of view source. So there was this feature built it. We built into mosaic and it was built into browsers, which was, I forget exactly when it popped up. But VueSource, the idea basically was you're looking at a web page, you're looking at the rendered version of a web page, but you could click on VueSource, and it would show you the HTML source code for the page.

And so anytime you wanted to see how a web page had been created to accomplish something that you wanted to do, you could just look at it and then it made it easy to learn and replicate. And again, that was like, that was not, that was like on, there was no, there was no ViewSource for, like, network protocols before that. That was like, that was a new idea. That created so many web design jobs, it was crazy. Like, which could never have come about.

It'd be, you know, like that little, or a seemingly small thing was a massive thing. Yeah, no, look, I mean people, I met people, I met, I met somebody just the other day who, you know, literally, it's like that. It's like, you know, they first got, you know, their first got access to the browser and, you know, from their, you know, in high school or whatever, and college. And then they literally, they literally do the view source thing. And they're like, oh, I can write HTML. And then they got a job as a web designer. Yeah. And then that paid their way through, you know, whatever to, you know, get to the career going or start their company.

And yeah. So that was, yeah, economic and power. Yeah, inclusivity, yeah, maximum, I would say maximum inclusivity, you know, and look, you know, technical whizzes could do more, but like you did not have to be a technical whiz to get started and get going, and then it gave you a very powerful motivation to learn more and a very easy way to learn more. Yeah, and so that worked out really well. And then basically, the mosaic idea basically was, okay, pull all this stuff together. So build basically the unified visual interface. And mosaic out of the gate actually supported all three of the systems that I

described. So we supported out of the gate with, you know, the web in it sort of text form at the time and then gop and then waste we actually also supported fdp we supported actually had native support for internet news groups and so it was sort of a single graphical user interface you know to rule them all so we had support for all this and then you know the web obviously is the one that took off and then and then the other then the other part of it for mosaic was to then make the web graphical and so to transition it from a text based you know kind of text prompt dos kind of kind of situation to be to be full graphic web pages and that was of course you know that that was then the thing that really, you know, kind of just got, you know, lit on fire.

Yeah, you famously invented the image tag, if I recall. So there was a big dispute. There was a big dispute early on. So there was a big dispute. So there was opposition early on within the internet community, and I won't name names, but within the set of people who were into this kind of thing working on it, there was actually a lot of controversy around the idea of adding images. And there was a big argument, there are actually multiple arguments to not add images.

And by the way, to not images means not make it graphical right now. not bring it into the gooey world. And, you know, one argument was just efficiency. Again, network optimization, use of resources. You know, not, you know, and by the way, you know, sort of equality argument, you know, not everybody has a graphical workstation. Right, right. Yeah.

Right. It would be unfair to them if there's webpages that they can't view. So that was part of the argument. You know, there was certainly a speed performance, you know, waste argument to it. And then there was also a cultural argument. And this was around the time that the Internet was starting to really open up. And, you know, that kind of nirvana I was mentioning where everybody is like, a CS degree holder

is starting to become a consumer thing early on and there was a lot of anxiety around that and so there was an argument at the time that content of the internet should remain only scientific and technical and if you add features and capabilities like images and graphics then you are encouraging the creation of

sort of mass market content right and if you have mass market content that's going to draw more of the wrong kinds of users a valid argument which it turns out that argument was correct But, but, well, Correct. Well, it was, it was correct.

The people who made that argument were correct based on their own presuppositions. Yeah. I was, I was on the other side of that argument, and I was on the other side of each of those arguments, but specifically on that argument is I just always thought everybody should be able to use this. I was very much on the side of,

this is amazing. Everybody on the planet should be on the internet. Everybody on the web should be on the web. Everybody on the web should be graphical. Like, yes, there should be content all over the internet that's graphical. there should be, you know, all kinds of pictures and movies, animations and streaming and games. And like, yes, you should have all this and everybody should be on it and we should maximize this.

And again, heretical idea, that was, there were a lot of people at the time who were very important at the time who were very anxious about that. And then basically we just, so there was a big fight argument around that and we weren't making progress on it. And then I just did a, because I controlled, you know, I controlled Mosaic at that point. So I just did a fade accompli and I just declared it and I created the image tag. Yeah. And people put up images. Yeah, so I won the, what's the, I want the de facto argument, which is through sheer authoritarian action.

Yeah, you were a king of the internet, and then, well, tell us about like, okay, how did it take off? When did the press recognize it? And then how did you become, go from king of the internet to customer support for the entire internet? It's the same thing. It's the same thing. Also the main blogger, maybe the first blogger, depending on how you score it. So it was also the sort of, I was the front page for a while. So, yeah, so we started basically, a group of us at NCSA basically kind of went rogue in 1991 and, you know, started kind of working on this idea on nights and weekends.

And in particular, my partner at the time, Eric Bina and myself, you know, we were the first two to kind of work on this. And just a full kind of acknowledgement here. Eric and I co-wrote the first version of Mosaic, which was for Unix workstations. And then we had other colleagues who, you know, who are, you know, very famous in the history. who developed the Windows version and developed the Mac version and so we did develop for all three of those platforms

but the first version was the Unix version Eric and I built it I always credit it as I did the front end and then Eric did all the hard work Yeah yeah He didn't read programmer I guess

Yeah he was fantastic Absolutely outstanding programmer Is an outstanding programmer And so I did the UI And Eric did the rendering engine And so Eric built The rendering engine is the core of it Like the rendering engine

is the thing that actually renders the page And has all the user interface elements And makes the links work and displays the images and all this stuff. And that was definitely the harder half of it from a programming standpoint. So I give Eric, you know, I give Eric like at least half the credit, if not more, for that. And then my role was the front end. So it's kind of everything around the rendering engine.

And so it was the rest of the UI. And then it was the, you know, I did the networking protocols and all the user, everything, user preferences and all the cache, you know, sort of caching and all the things to kind of make the rendering engine work. So it was the two of us. And it was really like the core work was sort of a crash renegade project kind of off books. And for me, it was like off books in two ways. It was not what I was supposed to be doing at work, but it was also I was doing this instead of going to class. This is when I almost got kicked out of college also. Yeah. So we sort of a crash course over the course of, I guess, the fourth quarter of 92. And then we kind of worked really hard over the holiday break of 92 to kind of get it working. And then I forget the exact sequence, but we put out the first kind of acceptable version, which I think was the 0.9 version, like around Christmas or a little bit after 92. And then I think got to quote 1.0 and kind of the spring of 93. And, yeah, and basically it went vertical, basically out of the gate with the 0.9 version.

So it was basically a, yeah, so it's sort of a year of preparatory work in 92, and then it was sort of 93 was the vertical takeoff. And 93 was a very important year for me because it was my senior year in college also. And so, and I was off a semester, I was off cycle by a semester for reasons. And then, and so anyway, so January to December, 93, where my, that was my senior year in college. And so this was like my chance to, like, really do that. and then, because I just assumed I was going to graduate and, you know, leave and get a job at the end of the year.

So I had about a 12-month run there where the thing really took off. And then, yeah, look, it was the tiger. Oh, and then we had other colleagues who did the, did the, what was the, not the first web server, but the first kind of widely used, I would say, robust, scalable web server. And again, that also, again, gave us a lot of ability to move quickly because we actually controlled for that period. We controlled both the client and the server. Yeah.

And so we can move very fast. Yeah. So the two of them came out and then people started to figure this out and it started to get widely used among existing internet users. And then it was an immediate reason for people to get online at home. And it was really the first reason for a lot of people to try to get online at home. And so it also, I think, helped catalyze the boom and what we're called at the time consumer ISPs and for people to upgrade their PCs to be graphical and then have network, you know, have the network stack. And so 93 was like this upward, you know, this straight kind of upward hurricane. But again, it was in this context of we're working for a research institute,

funded by the federal government. And so, you know, we have no money. We have no revenue. We have no business model. You know, we've got a product out there that's taken off. It's taken off like crazy. And then we put it out as open source, but under what's called a hybrid license. We put it under a hybrid license that says it's free for, it's all free for academic and individual use and nonprofit use. But if you want to use it for commercial applications, you have to come talk to us. And then I had the mailbox for the incoming commercial queries. and I remember when it hit like 400 of basic companies, you know, like general counsels and procurement officers

at big companies saying, you know, we want to deploy this throughout our company, you know, who do we pay? And we had no way to take the money. We didn't even have like a price sheet. We didn't have any of this. And then very critically, we didn't have any support, right? So we didn't have any customer support resources. And so we had the support email address

and I also had that email box. And so in my spare time between coding sessions, I would literally just like answer questions. But it was literally, it was, you know, it was supposed to be tech support for Mosaic, but it turned into tech support for the entire internet. And so I helped a lot of people. You know, the difference between that was the internet for everybody,

you know, and a lot of ways still is. Exactly. And so it really started to take, it then sort of became a formal project. It kind of got embraced and became a real project and got more resources. And then, but we were, you know,

we were kind of just dying from the overhead and, you know, we needed more servers and we needed more people and the whole thing. And so we wrote, I remember we wrote a proposal to, for a grant. We wanted an incremental grant from the National Science Foundation, and it was to staff a customer support desk so that we

could support, as we could hire like, you know, whatever, for people. Customer support. Yeah, yeah. So it's actually my first trip to Washington, D.C. As we issued this grant, we sent it to Dan, and the National Science Foundation, people to their credit, they were fascinated by this whole thing, and they were glad that it was working. But, you know, we sent in this grant. It was the only place we had any sense of where to get money, and we sent in this grant, and literally, it came back denied.

You know, the National Science Foundation is not in the business of, you know, funding customer support. One of the sort of fun twists here is, okay, you idiot, like, this giant commercial opportunity is staring you in the face. Like, you literally have, like, inbound sales leads, like, coming out of your ears. Like, why don't you go raise venture capital and start a company? Yeah.

And, of course, the answer was because I had no idea that there was such a thing as venture capital. Yeah, what venture capital. I literally, you know what a tractor was. Yes, exactly. You know, I had no conception whatsoever for, you know, I had just no clue at the time that it was actually a tractable thing that you could you could do that and that was like something that like you know really you know rich famous fancy people did uh or you know i don't know some people got luckier people in silicon valley or something but like people in alinois certainly were not doing that

and so you know and there was no venture capital and champagne or ban at that point and then there there was exactly there was exactly one software startup at that point called spyglass which which is a name that it will come up later in the story yeah but but but it was not doing well and so it was like it was more of a cautionary tale and so we basically just yeah we had the tiger by the tail and we just kind of held on, held on for dear life kind of through that year. Incredible. And then when did the kind of, when did the kind of media and the press get wind of it? So this is a funny story.

So there was a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jared Sandberg. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah, I remember Jared Sandberg. He was a funny guy. He was a great guy. He was a great guy. You know, this is 30 years ago. So we're using the was here for people who were still in perfectly good health.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a great character. Yeah, yeah. And it wasn't as a great writer, great reporter. And so he had sort of the tech beat at the Wall Street Journal at the time. And he figured this out early and called me up, the blue, probably in, I don't know, late-92, early, 93, like super early. And he had the story ready to go. And he was intensely frustrated because he could not get his editors to run it because it was not an important story.

Yeah, of course that. You know, what are you talking about? It's just a bunch of idiot kids with bad grades. Could you do writing software? Yeah, yeah. On this internet thing that nobody cares about, that's never going to be a thing that's about to get quashed, you know, squashed by MSN and AOL and interactive television. And, like, I'll tell you, again, to talk about the heresy aspect of this.

Like, this is, you know, this is why I'm so distrustful of experts. Like, this is my origin story for why I don't trust anybody with credentials on anything anymore. So I remember, another one, like, so I was working on, I remember working, it must have been, it was like December of 92 or January 93. So I'm, like, working around the clock in my little office at NCSA. And, you know, this is at Urbana Champaign is also, you know, it's a little further south where I grew up, but it's still frozen tundra most of the year.

the wind comes whipping over the Illinois planes and everything is frozen and, you know, you're slip and fall every 10 feet, you know, in the middle of winter and just this kind of crazy thing. And I'd be working in the middle of the night. None of the restaurants are open, you know, I'd get hungry. And so I'd walk down to the one convenience store that was open 24 hours and I'd buy my whatever, my hot dog or my cookies and something to drink. And I remember walking one night and there was this new magazine on the newsstand called Wired. And it was Wired issue number one. Yeah. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. You know, it's a magazine about, It appears to be a magazine that's about things that I'm interested in,

which was a novel, novel concept at the time. And so I bought it and I took it back to my office, and I read it cover to cover, and they did not have the word internet in it once. Yeah. Yeah. And I was like, okay. You know, I was like, okay, like, I guess I don't count.

You know, I guess I don't count. We don't count. This whole thing doesn't count. You know, these are the experts. Like, they have a magazine. Yeah. They're pros. You know, these are the pros.

And like, you know, what we're working on is clearly not important enough to mirror at the magazine. And so I was just like, okay, I guess we're just going to keep working on our thing. But like, you know, it's sort of like this constant message from the media, which is like, this is not important. This is not important. This is not important. So anyway, so Jared had this whole story. He was ready to go. And he could not get his editors to run it. And then later in 93, John Markov at the New York Times figured this out. And he was a good tech reporter. I mean, John Marcos is smart guy. Yeah. A legendary, legendary, you know, tech reporter going back, you know, quite a bit, you know, still very active.

But at the time, he was like a veteran and was very well respected in the industry. and wrote a bunch of good books and so forth. And so he wrote a story for the New York Times. So the good news is he wrote a story. The bad news is it featured my boss and my boss's boss. Who had nothing to do with the project? Who had you work on something entirely else? My boss at the time, to his credit, you know, he was aware.

And he kind of, you know, he kind of, you know, he didn't vigorously oppose us. And then he supported us. And then he ultimately sort of adopted as a project. And so he kind of eased his way into it. But he ultimately was very supportive. And then, but my boss's boss was the director of NCSA at the time. And look, this is one of those things where I like, I owe these guys a tremendous amount because they created this environment that I was able to do my work in,

and I wouldn't be here today if not for them. But, you know, I kind of a little bit of an iffy relationship with my boss to start with. And then I had never met my boss's boss, right? And there was no reason for me to meet my boss's boss because I'm like an undergraduate, like, staff member. Like, you know, he's a big, like a huge important researcher, astrophysicist and, you know, directing this huge supercomputing center. So he had no reason to meet me. But, you know, the story shows of the New York Times. It's smiling photos of the two of them and not, you know, Eric and me.

And I'm like, oh, okay, I see how this works. And how did you feel at the time? Because I know how you would feel now if that had happened. But like, how did you feel then? It was just a little bit. I don't know. It was a little bit annoying. But it was also a little bit of like, look, it's the New York Times.

Like, I don't know, you know, I don't, I guess they write about important people, right? And these are important people because they're running this thing. And I'm not an important person because I'm only writing code. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's like the project is important enough where they can write about the project. but like the people actually writing the code are not important enough to talk about. And so it's like,

it's kind of the same reaction I had to Wired magazine, which is like, it's a little bit annoying, but I guess it means I just need to go back to work because there's nothing else to be, it's not like I can call the, it would never occur to me to call the editor of the New York Times

and complain. Nor would he have taken my call, you know, and so he certainly didn't know who I was because it certainly wasn't in the story. So, so it was, you know, it was just like, it was like whatever,

but it's like this weird, you know, it's like the Plato shadows on a cave wall thing. It's like, okay, there's this there's all these things that people believe right including up to the internet is like doomed and is never going to be a thing and it's going to get swamped and all these things and then we're just like okay no we just have this stuff in front of us and it just plainly works and we believe in it and i guess we're just going to keep working on it and maybe people will figure out maybe they want anyway so jerry sarah sandberg calls me up the i remember the day that story broke in the new york samberg calls me up and he's just absolutely livid and he told me that he he got the morning paper and you know this is like six months later or something after he you know he would have had the scoop he would have had the first story on basically on all of this stuff. And he literally told me the story. He said he charged into his office that morning and slapped the New York Times down on the desk in one of these dramatic

moments and said, you know, see, I told you so. You know, John Markov front page of the business section. I told you this was actually a story. And his boss was like, oh yeah, I guess you were right. Oh my God. That's so crazy. So that's how, again, the heresy, like that's how heretical it was. It was like actually, it was actually hard to get it in print. And I think the only reason it showed up in the New York Times is John Markov was such a legend. He was just a legendary. He was further along his career at that point. So 93 was a phenomenal year because it was the takeoff year for the web, for the browser, for all for all this stuff, for mosaic. Yeah. And so it was, and then, you know, the other part of it was just the ping pong effect was very interesting, which was, it was basically

was, you know, it started out with like a few people with browsers and then a few people with web servers putting up, you know, these little individual pieces of content. But then you got in this kind of feedback loop back and forth kind of ping pong thing where basically every time there was a new compelling piece of content put online, there was a reason for people to start using the browser. And then every time more people started using the browser, there was an additional incentive to put more content online, right? And so it was like the writers, you needed writers and readers. And so more writers meant more readers, more readers meant more writers. And so, and this is what our partner, Andrew Chen, refers to as the cold start problem, right? Is by default, if you have a

situation like that where you're going to have a network, you know, at scale, it's going to be great. but to actually get it to scale is actually really hard and most things that need to have that kind of network effect never get past the cold start problem

right? They just, they strangle early because, you know, there's just not enough writers which means there's not enough readers, there's not enough readers, there's not enough writers.

But this was a winner for you, yeah. That's right. And so what happened from the very beginning was people all over the world started creating web servers and started putting up content. And they either used

NCSA mosaic, the NCSA web server, which actually later became Apache, so it's actually still kind of in use today. You know, it's late, you know, the derivations much later. Or, you know, they literally could write their own web servers for the reasons we described earlier. And so there was new content arriving online.

Just to give people a sense to this, in the early 93, it was like one new website a day. And by the way, by one new website, I don't mean like one new website. I don't mean like a new eBay a day or something. I mean like a new web page. Yeah, well, I remember it was a big day. The first restaurant menu came online. It was like a big, it was like an Indian restaurant in like some second tier city in England, and just decided to, somebody put the menu online.

And then it was, I remember the first webcam. So the first streaming video, first webcam was a coffee pot. And it was literally a coffee pot because the guy had actually rigged up a camera, an early webcam at the time, camera at the time, with a coffee pot down the hall in some computer science department somewhere so that he could see when the coffee pot was empty to go refill it. And then he basically just, so just pure utility for him. And then he put the coffee pot online.

It was the first webcam. And so we all sat for like a week and just watch the coffee pot. Yeah, yeah. Well, I put it on the land when I can put it on the internet. Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, you can see it from home, right? And so, you know, we all watched the communal coffee pot. And so, you know, there was that. And anyway, so then one of the features built into Mosaic was what was called, we had the what's new page. And that was another something that I had at the time, which was basically, it was sort of one of the first blogs, or maybe the first one where it was every day, it was, okay, it was literally, here are the new web pages for that day. And it was this period doubling thing where it started out being, here's the new web page for today. Right? And then it was, and then it was a big deal when it started to be two a day, right, and then four a day, and then six a day, and then eight a day. And then, you know, by the end of the year, you know, I couldn't keep up anymore. Well, I had the what's cool webpage. Well, then we added the what's cool page. And the

what's cool page was the good stuff, exactly, the editorial function. So, yeah, so that was, yeah, that was a key moment. Getting to the Windows and the Mac versions were a key moment because, you know, they followed and those guys did a great job on those. And that really opened things up. And then, and again, this was leading up to, I guess, AOL formally interconnected into the internet in September 93. So this was leading up to that period. And they, I don't remember when AOL released their first built in their, I don't remember when they first built in a web browser into AOL.

Yeah, that was, I think, yeah. I think it was, yeah. But you could kind of, you could kind of get a sense, you know, it started to become clear, number one, that they were going to interconnect to the internet, that they were going to bring their users out of the internet. And then it seemed inevitable that they would build in a web browser, so that you started to get momentum from that.

And then, oh, and then the NSF, basically, this coincided with the NSF handing off the NSF handing off the NSF, NSF net to the commercial telecom companies. So this was what happened. So all of this activity like Mosaic was driving network bandwidth, right, on the backbone, crushing the backbone. The NSF was not in the business of providing commercial backbone services. And so they did a handoff to the big, three big telcos at the time.

And, you know, did the handoff as part of that. The acceptable use policy was revoked. And so then commercial use of the Internet became legal. Immediately after that happened, there was a really pivotal moment in his history, which is there was a big computer company at the time you'll remember called Deck, and they had a research lab in Palo Alto called the Deck Western Research Lab. And there was a guy there whose name I'm blanking on, but he, I think it was Brian Reed, if I remember correctly. And he was a computer science guy there, and he was into this stuff.

And there was a cult science fiction book retail store, tiny little hole in the wall bookstore on El Camino Real in, I think, Mountain View, called Future Fantasy Books. And it was a cult retailer of like obscure science fiction and fantasy novels. And it had, you know, it's local clientele, but it also had a lot of, especially Japanese and German tourists. When they were in town, they would go by and they would buy all these science fiction novels that they couldn't get back in their own countries. And so he had this international clientele. And so this guy at deck, I remember went and talked to the, you know, kind of very hippie, you know, kind of ponytail old school, you know, owner of the future fantasy bookstore and said, oh, you know, let's put your bookstore, you know, on the internet. And the guy's like, I have no idea what any of those words meant.

Could you please explain each of them to me in sequence? and Brian basically described he's like we're going to put your we'll create a website for you we'll put a catalog online and we'll let people you know all these people all these foreign buyers will be able to buy books from you know Japan and Germany they'll be able to see the catalog on the web and they can click and buy which was a new idea and then you know you can shift to the books and your business will grow so much and the guys like that's great he said the problem is I don't I don't actually own a computer and Brian's like well what do you have and he said well I do have a fax machine and Brian said let me get back to you and so the the deck guys

literally created the future fantasy website, and they got, they figured out how digitize his inventory, and they created the first e-commerce site, at least for books. Original Amazon. And then they set up a fax gateway where you would order on the web, and then it would fire off a fax message to this guy's store, and then he would ship you the book. And then, of course, in sequence, you can imagine what happened next. So step one, his business doubled overnight. Yeah.

It's like the best thing that ever happened. And then, of course, step two is Jeff started Amazon and then, you know, destroyed, I'd destroyed, you know, destroyed, destroyed, destroyed him. And that's like him. But there was like a year there where he had like the best year of his life. Yeah. Shipping books all over the world. And so that was the, that was the, I think that may have been the first e-commerce,

like at least the first like formerly commerce, e-commerce thing. And so that was in that period. Wow, wow, wow. Okay. So then you graduate. So what do you do? Yeah. So, yeah.

So I, and I just, look, this was like a, this was, I was an undergrad staff member. I was getting paid $6. $0.25 an hour, capped, I think, at 30 hours a week. It was fine. I was having a great time. And I just assumed I was graduating with a computer science degree. I'd go get a job. I didn't know where or what, but I figured I'd do it. And again, it was weird.

It was like a schizophrenic experience because all of this stuff was just like, all day long, I was just dealing with like this just tremendous cascade of incoming stuff and single activity. But like there was no money in it. There was no funding. There was no venture. There was no startups. There was no business. There was no nothing. And then the media was telling me it's, you know, primarily it's stupid and the magazines, you know,

and all this stuff. And so, again, I was sort of still, I was sort of halfway between this, like, I'm seeing the future in front of me, but also it was like, the rest of the world is not taking it seriously. And so maybe I'm just like, you know, I'm just like smoking my own exhaust. And maybe this is just like all going to get crushed next year by MSN and it's just all going to be over. And like, it's just like some weird, you know, it's like, like I said, it's just like the assumption was you left this stuff behind when you graduated. And so I had, I had like the advanced version of that of that conundrum. And so I was just like, well, I, you know, I guess I need to get a job. I talked to the NCSA guys about staying there.

They did offer me a job to stay there, but, you know, to kind of keep doing what I was doing, but it would have been a, you know, would have been a staff programming job and, you know, staying in Urbana, and I kind of wanted to get to, I wanted to get to, those things. I wanted to get to A coast. It was some ambivalent as to which coast,

but I definitely wanted to get to A coast. And so I decided I needed a job. And so I, I, I, I, I, one of the things I had control of was the about page for the web browser. And so I added to the about page for the web browser that everybody used at the time, I added saying, by the way, you know, one of the primary authors of this browser is graduating and is available to be hired.

Wasn't it good, classify. Please send job offers to, you know, this mailbox. Yeah. And I got, you know, to my credit, I got about a dozen job offers and a bunch of offers in the East Coast, a bunch offers in the West Coast. And they got an offer from a little software company out in California. I got two, basically two offers in Silicon Valley that I strongly considered. One was a little software company that I joined. And then the other was I got an offer actually from Sun at the time, which had a, had a unit.

They had a software unit of Sun at the time called First Person, which was creating what became Java later with James Gosling. It was his project. And I almost went there, but they had a phantom stock option program. That doesn't sound good. I didn't know much, but like if you're applying the word phantom to your stock option program, that's not a good sign. Well, they had a classic problem, which is they had a software group that they wanted to give an incentive to.

And they wanted to kind of have a hardware company where you have small stock options, right? And so they wanted this thing to be like a separate research thing, but they didn't want to spin it off. They wanted to retain control of it. And so they were creating basically a shadow, a shadow stock option program. And I was just like, I don't understand this. This sounds like a scam. So I turned that down. And then I went to this little software company called EIT.

So yeah, so I literally got a job. And yeah, and then moved out to California in basically January 94. Yeah. So basically I went to work for, you know, there's this little software company called EIT. And, you know, they were sort of a, they were a little basically contract research organization, very smart. like CS people in Palo Alto doing like work for the government for companies kind of very leading edge stuff and then they just had you know they to their credit they were on the internet idea early and and so you know they they wanted to kind of

create see if they could create like internet software products which was a very kind of new idea at the time and so you know they made me an offer and they flew me out and I moved out and it was great and I went to work there and you know and I was like okay you know I'll work on some internet it's to see their way to make money on internet software and then you know what happened was just I just kept having this kind of out of body experience though which was just like, and at that point, the internet started to get like serious media coverage. And, you know, if you remember those days, the books started to show up. And so, you know, before people had the internet, what happened was there were books about

the internet. And these, this is where the O'Reilly publishing company became famous at the time and so forth is, you'd have actually at the peak of this in 94-95, you'd have walls and walls of books about the internet in bookstores. And they'd be like, guys to the internet, how to use the internet, how to write web pages, how to do all these things. And then there would often be like a floppy disk in the back of the book, which would have the software, you know, the TCPIP stack. Your TCPIP stack for Windows, all that, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then they'd have mosaic or they'd have, you know, whatever on the, on the, on the, on the, on the disc.

And so, you know, this started to become a thing. And people started to figure this out, and the press started to take it seriously. And there started to be more interesting content. And so it's like, okay, the thing is going. And I'm like, you know, I kind of like, I left mosaic behind. And so I, you know, I didn't have the, you know, the email addresses anymore and so forth. But I knew how much commercial demand there was. And so, so they get, but it was this, like, really,

schizophrenic thing. It was just very unclear. And again, like I said, I had never heard of venture capital, so I didn't really have a sense that you can start a company. I didn't really know what to do. And then, you know, another great kind of stroke of luck in my life was I got a call from Jim Clark, who's the, you know, co-founder of our company Netscape, you know, who was this legendary

figure. And I won't do the full version of all this because this gets into stuff that has already been people talked about a lot in the past. It's already plenty well documented. But, you know, he had been a co-founder of the founder of this company, Silicon Graphics, which was one of the leading tech companies of the era. And then he got sideways with the CEO there. He decided to leave and start his second company, but he had a non-solicit

agreement with, you know, all the great people that he had, you know, he couldn't hire the people at SGI. The SGI was an amazing team that he had put together. It's amazing team, but he had a formal, you know, he had a formal agreement that he couldn't hire them. So, and he, and he had stock SGI with every smart person he knew. So he, you know, most of the people who he wanted to work with were he couldn't get. And so he basically was like, he was literally like sniffing around for talent and a guy who worked for him, Bill Foss, who later joined Netscape, apparently mentioned to Jim one day is like, you know, one of the guys who made this mosaic browser is like, apparently he just like moved to Silicon Valley. And he likes, you know, the about page of the

browser says he's available, you know, maybe you should go talk to him. And so Jim called me up and we had breakfast and which was a very traumatic experience for me because I was not eating breakfast in those days because I was not getting up early enough to have breakfast. Yeah, yeah, I remember those. He used to wake up much later. Yeah, I was a programmer hours. And so I had to be up at seven in the morning to meet Jim for breakfast at Elphornio and Palo Alto at 7 a.m. on the Sunday. So I had to recalibrate my entire sleeping schedule that week to try to make the meeting. And I was still bleary-eyed when I got there, but they had good coffee. And so anyway, so Jim and I, you know, again, without belaboring it,

Jim and I decided to start a company, but it was still this weird thing where, and Jim knew all about the internet and the browser and, you know, I was still watching everything, but it was still this thing of like, it's just not a, it's not a, it's just the overwhelming assumption in the industry was this is not a serious thing. This is not a real thing. This is a momentary thing. It's going to go away. The big. companies are going to take over. This is not going to be a, the internet's not going to be a commercial medium. It's not going to happen. And so our first two business plans for our company actually were not this. It was, we had a business plan. Our first business plan was to do

interactive software for interactive television. So to build software to replace the guy on the roller skates that I told you about. Jim had, because Jim's company had been one of the main companies building those systems. And so he had the inside on that. And so we were going to do that. But then we sort of priced out like what, you know, we sort of modeled out. sort of how interactive TV what it was going to cost and I was going to work and we actually concluded

it wasn't going to work it was too expensive and the technology wasn't ready so we gave up on that idea and then plan number two was Jim had a really good relationship with the CEO of Nintendo because SGI had done this deal

to do the first 3D graphics chip for a game console which was the Nintendo 64 and so he went to visit the guy in Japan who ran Nintendo this super genius guy Yamaushi son who ran basically built

modern Nintendo as we know it today and basically struck a handshake deal to basically build, you know, the online service for the Nintendo gaming machines. And so to build basically what today you would call Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network, but to do that you know, in 1994. That's probably a little early for that

idea. Also too early. Yeah, that was closer though. It was closer, but like again, it was modems. It would have been all dial-up. And so you would have been doing interactive gaming on dial-up modems with like 14-kilobit modems and with low latency and so it and actually Nintendo actually had had an online service on

their earlier devices in Japan and they actually had an early online Nintendo online or whatever they called it that had like it had like early e-commerce and it was a proprietary system but it had early e-commerce and I think it had food delivery in the 80s and so there was like an early version of this but it didn't quite take and so this idea was to do the modern version of it but we again we modeled the whole thing out I like built all the spreadsheets and all the modem banks you would need and all this stuff and we just we figured out that it it couldn't quite work and so literally we took a walk and it was like it was like a discouraging thing

because it's like we had these two ideas they didn't pan out and it's like you know should we like you know should we still is there still anything to do together and you know and I remember saying on the walk I was like you know well this this internet thing keeps going right like it's going and think about

what we had just experienced there between Jim and I which is like okay basically what the press was telling everybody and all the experts were telling us was it was either going to be the big companies were going to do interactive television or it was going to be these you know, home, you know, sort of video game-like service.

It was going to be, the assumption is it was going to be one of those. Those were going to replace the Internet when this stuff got serious for consumers. And we basically concluded that when Daddy comes home, you little kids can go play in your room. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you look at the magazines, and I keep bringing up the magazines, because at the time, again, this is like, the Internet's getting started. And so the way people got their news was literally reading one of the three big news magazines or reading one of the three big newspapers. Like, that's how you learned about things. And that's where all the experts showed up.

And if you just go back and look at the magazine covers from that era, it's basically all these big company CEOs just pouring on the internet and declaring that it's a joke and a toy. And the thing that they're going to come out with, their proprietary thing is going to be so much better. And so we literally had this moment where, you know, it was just like, well, if we have proven to ourselves that interactive TV is not going to work,

and if we've proven to ourselves that you can't build this based on these video game boxes, then by process elimination, it kind of has to be the internet. It's the only thing that works, right? And it's like, and yes, it has every issue that people complain about. It's slow. It's inefficient. It's insecure. There's no business on it.

There's no this and that and the other. And it's hard to get online and, you know, all this stuff. You know, there's all these reasons to believe it wasn't going to work. But like, it was literally, we literally knocked out all the other ideas and said, okay, like this thing is actually, it has to be the, it has to be the thing. It's the only thing that works. And then, you know, and Jim is a total, you know, whiz on these things and knew all about this stuff. And so, you know, we sat down and said, well, what if we did this, like, incredible heretical idea? and again very heretical as late as this is April 94

you know so still very very very far into this but still very heretical which is like how about we make it build a software company to make internet software and like and that was just like wow this seems you know you know that seems like a risky crazy idea now in retrospect it was like the most obvious idea of all time at that moment yeah but that's that's the true story of how we actually got to that idea so we we we anyway we ended up basically

commercializing you know we ended up basically building the commercial version of everything that we had built at LLL Illinois, it just, we got through the hard way. Yeah. It was not the obvious idea. Counter-programming conventional wisdom and media advice is still, still works now. It's amazing. It's incredible.

I just, I have this constant, I live in this constant state of out-of-body, you know, kind of experience amazement where these people just show up on TV or in the papers or whatever, and they're just, they have all these credentials. And they've got all these degrees. They've got all these initials after their names. And they've got these incredible resumes. And they've got all these publication credits. and I've got all this stuff and these government grants

and like on, like every possible credential and Harvard and MIT and like all this stuff. And they just, they say shit. And I just, I'm, and I'm just like, like, okay, like maybe they're right, but like if they're wrong and they're wrong like a lot of the time, like,

okay, what consequences do they bear for being wrong? And the answer is none at all. Zero, yeah, and they're just back on tomorrow. On tomorrow with some new line of bullshit. And there's this great book I often tell, friend. This is this great book. This guy, Phil Tetlock, who's a professor who studies this exact topic. And it's this great book. It's called Expert Political Judgment. And he did this comprehensive study of the, he came out of through political predictions. So basically, you know, experts showing up in, you know, columns in the newspaper and on TV talking about, like, is there going to be war here,

you know, what's going to happen at Israel or whatever, all these predictions. And he goes through and he basically, he basically, the conclusion of it is the sort of average well-credential expert in the media on any topic involving sort of politics or global affairs is somewhat less, is somewhat less, than random, likely to be correct. So the credentialed experts score at like 40% and a monkey flinging shit at a dartboard is like 50%. Right? And the big thing that he points out

is there are no repercussions for being wrong. There's no career damage, there's no economic damage, there's no nothing, and then he says the thing if they were being epistemically honest, the thing that they would do is like when a talking heads on TV talking about something, there would be a scoreboard and it would show like their last 20 predictions and then it would have like, you know, red or green, where they write or wrong.

It's because it would be the only way to ever have a sense of whether you're talking to somebody who knows what they're talking about. And that scoreboard, of course, never appears. Never materialized, yeah. You never, ever, ever, ever see it. And he pointed that he wrote this book like 20 years ago and, like, everybody read it. And they're like, yeah, that's right. And then everybody just completely ignored it and kept doing things the same way that they're doing it. And so I just, I had this, like, I had this experience where I just feel, I just feel like a complete, I mean, you know, it worked out.

But, like, I still feel dumb. It's in the sense of, like, I read all this stuff. I believed it all at the time. It caused me to be insecure about the thing that I was actually doing that I saw was actually working. I knew it was working. And I knew why it was working. And I knew why it would keep working.

And even still, it was just this wall of doubt and skepticism that kind of kept eating away at me. So, yes. The good news is we've used that to our advantage, you know, many times since that. I remember when we made the Coinbase investment, I guess Bitcoin, which was the one cryptocurrency at the time, was, I don't know, was some number of hundreds of dollars.

And everybody, economists, everybody was writing that it was a complete scam and total bullshit and never be worth anything. And here it is, I don't know what it's worth today, like $63, $64,000, something like that. And all you have to do is just listen to the experts and do the opposite. And you make so much fun. Yeah, it's amazing. Yep, it's amazing. But I'll tell you, it's hard.

Like, you know, I don't know about you. Like, I feel like I still have this problem. Like, I now have like 30 years of evidence that this is all the case. And even still, it's just like, I still have this problem where I'm like, okay, the experts say, it's still like a real effort of will. Yeah. They don't actually know what they're talking about. They don't actually have any predicting capability. They're in a system where the incentives are absolutely terrible.

Well, I always find, like, if somebody's super dismissive about something, that's a great thing to study, because it's almost surely not a dead zero, right? Like, it may not work, but there's no way it's as bad as they're, you know, saying it. If somebody says something as like a scam or a Ponzi scheme or a bullshit or this, then that's almost always worth licking into. So you start an escape with Jim Clark. It was actually called Mosaic, right, at the time? Mosaic.

Yeah, so we, so we, you know, again, I had. graduated. We, you know, the other people, you know, our other colleagues at Illinois were, you know, working either. They were either students or staff members there. Everybody was working under federal research funding on a specifically non-commercial project, you know, which was open source. You know, there was no, you know, the university didn't have. There was no commercial anything, you know, of value, at least according to what everybody thought at the time. And so we start and escape. We actually go out, Jim and I actually flew back out to Urbana in the middle. It was still an incredible snowstorm. and hired, you know, I think, all but one, I think, of the original Mosaic team members to join us in Nescape. So that was the original, the original thing. Most of them were able to move out to California, and were core members of what followed at Nescape. And so then we booted up the company. And then we named it Mosaic, and that was sort of the first issue that got us in trouble. And I should say, the reason we named it Mosaic was not because we planned to literally, like, offer Mosaic as a product.

We very specifically decided we were going to leave the source code behind. You wrote it like when you were skipping class. Yeah. Yes. We knew it was not a commercial, we knew it was not commercial grade. We knew it had all, you know, just had, it had just issues. It had issue, performance issues. It had, you know, you just, you create one of these things. You know all the issues. And so we just knew it had all these issues. And so we knew we wanted to start from, we wanted to start from scratch and build kind of the correct commercial product. And we knew what we needed to do to do that. And so we very specifically did not bring the source code with us.

But, you know, all the standard, HTML and all these standards were open standards and they were all free to, you know, people on the internet were able to use them and do whatever they wanted. So we're like, okay, we have no copyright issues here, but, you know, we're not taking the code. And then on the trademark side, you know, there's a long history in Silicon Valley of companies that are sort of named after the projects that spawn them, often out of a university setting or some other setting. And so there were two famous examples, Sun Microsystems at the time, which was a huge, a huge successful company. The name Sun actually came from a project at Stanford, which was Stanford University Network, S-U-N. And so that was like the name of that company was like an homage to the Stanford environment that those guys came out of. And then Oracle was the codename of a project that Larry Ellison had done for the government in the 1970s. Right.

And so there was this like what I thought at the time was like a time honored tradition of like you can basically use the name as an homage. And, you know, Illinois does they don't have a commercial interest in this. And so we'll just do it. But in retrospect, that was sort of the crack. You know, we sort of introduced a crack in the armor from the very beginning by doing that. And then basically what happened was as as I was leaving moving to California, the other people at Illinois started to figure out

that they got access to the commercial mailbox that had all the commercial inbound licensing requests and so they started to get a sense that there might be money in it and so the founders of this that company Spyglass I mentioned

which was like the one software company in Champaign Urbana actually approached without me having any awareness of this they approached the University of Illinois administration and they basically struck a deal to license the mosaic our code

to license the mosaic software code that we had written for commercial sales and they started offering a commercial product called SpyGlas Mosaic, you know, and totally within rights of the university to do this, and within SpyGlas to do this, and that deal was great, and off they went. But then we then announced Netscape, and of course, we were the team that had written all that code, and then this started to become, you know, by now the press has started taking seriously, so we started to become, you know, famous and well-known,

and Jim Clark was this legend, and so we started to get all this press coverage. And so Spyglass started to get really worried that we were going to, you know, snuff them, you know, and we were going to lap them with the products. And so, Spyglass enlisted the administration of the University of Illinois to basically try to kill us. And the form of the murder attempt was to, they didn't sue us. And they didn't sue us because they didn't have a good claim because, like, we weren't actually violating copyright. And, you know, the trademark, you could just change the name. So they didn't actually have, like, a good legal case to sue us.

And so instead of suing us, what they did, instead was they called Spyglass, any situation we were in where we were competing with Spyglass for a sale. The University of Illinois administrators would call the customer and tell them that they were going to sue us. Good Lord. That's a hard thing to do to a startup. That's like the dirtiest thing you can do to a startup. It's like a super nefarious, you know,

because like who wants to, you know, any big company doesn't, you know, is already kind of, you know, worried about doing business of the startup to start with. And if the startup's literally about to get sued, like, why take the risk? And so our whole sales pipeline froze up. And, you know, we're running on, you know, we're running a venture capital and like, you know, money's getting, you know, and so

like, like, we don't have. have that, you know, VC wasn't in those days what it is today. We didn't have that long of a runway. And so we needed a revenue. And so this became a big problem. And so we kind of got everybody together and talked about it. And so we then decided, and I'm very proud of this decision, we preemptively sued the University of Illinois on this case.

And we sued them for, you know, certain interference of trade. There's these sort of laws that are not great laws to sue on, but they worked in this case, which is this thing called torturous interference. You can kind of, in theory, it's illegal, like just gratuitously interfere in somebody else's business, try to unhook other people's contracts. It's not great law. It doesn't often get enforced, but like at least it is on the books. And so we sued Illinois. They, furious negotiation followed. We offered them at the time four million dollars worth of stock in the company when the company was worth, I don't know, 20 million or something. And those of you youngsters eventually

sold for 10 billion, so you can do that. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, yeah, it was a billion plus, or, you know, some depending on exactly what, you know, but it would have been, it would have been a lot of money. And they turned that down and instead they demanded cash. And so... One thing you didn't have. We didn't have. Although, you know, we, at that point, it was starting to work. And so we raised money from Kleiner Perkins and we had other investor interest. And so we, we had sales, you know, starting to come in. And so we, we paid them in the cash and did the settlement and got them off our backs. Yeah, that decision on their part, yeah, cost them at least a billion dollars in direct stock, plus all the downstream philanthropy

from me, plus, plus all the downstream philanthropy from Jim Clark, plus all the other founding engineers. They lost a few buildings, I would think, yeah. They lost, I think, a campus. Yeah. I'm just going to speculate. They lost probably $3 billion in, you know, 1990s with that decision. Now, again, this is why I gave the disclaimer up front. Like, you know, look, like the alternate universe, Mark, with a different skill set would have had a very different way of dealing with this. Yeah. But like, Mark has he actually existed on Earth 1. Like, I never met the University of Illinois administrators. Like, I didn't, you know, I didn't know the president of the university.

Yeah. I'm like a random undergrad, right? And so, like, I didn't know the president of the university. I, you know, I could have called him, you know. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Although it's still, like, you know, the calculus that they made, but it's a bureaucracy to harass their own students and side with, like,

somebody who wrote him a check is still a little on the evil side, I would say. Yeah, I thought it was really bad. I get really upset. I was really upset for a long time. To be totally honest, I'm still upset. Every subsequent administration, every subsequent new administration at the university has attempted to reach out and repair the bridge.

I have not returned the calls. Yeah, yeah, no, you're a grudge holder. You and my biggest grudge holders, I know. I greatly value my grudence. They're very important to me. So, yeah, so, yeah, and, you know, the broader point, Ben, that you brought up is really key, which is like, look, there are a small number

of universities in the world that, and you'd certainly Stanford in this category and MIT and a bunch of others. But, you know, there's a certain number of them that really understand. This is maybe Stanford's great genius over the last 50 years as an institution is. You kind of understand that it's actually really good if this kind of thing happens. Like if your students or even your faculty, you know, go off and do something new and are successful in business. And then, you know, the money that you'll get, the money that you'll get back in philanthropy is going to be orders of magnitude higher than whatever technology licensing fee you could extract or whatever threat you could extort people, you know, money you could extort people out of or whatever.

Well, it goes back to the. original mosaics or, you know, like, it seems like you're giving a lot up by being open, but, you know, you're actually opening the whole world to you. It's actually a great metaphor for life, which is, you know, if you live in abundance, you will get abundance. And if you live in scarcity, you'll screw yourself. And good that those universities are abundant. And it's good that you are abundant with the internet. And that's how we live in the world we are in today. So what an amazing, yeah, I often think about the alternate universe if, you know, if you don't write Mosaic, if it doesn't work, if you don't start Netscape, like, it does seem like we would have had it. Like most systems or many systems are proprietary, right? Like the smartphones are, you know, everybody pays a tax to download their app from the app store because Apple owns it. It's not open. And, you know, Google is an extremely powerful.

company because, you know, if you want to search something, that's where you have to go and so forth. And these, you know, it was just such an amazing anomaly in the industry that the internet happened and that anybody could join and anybody could put up a website and anybody could build a great business. And, you know, in fact, including Google, including, you know, some of the big tech today was all created because of the openness of the internet. So thank you for that. And thank you for the conversation. What a good story. Oh, I'm not done yet. Oh, we got one more. Never mind. Pause.

I got more. I got to bring it. I got a great climax to the whole thing. Okay, okay. So let me just start with, you know, Ben, I'm glad you just went through what you just went through. I totally agree. And specifically, look, like this has a lot to do with the debate raging around AI right now. Yeah.

Which is, you know, these big companies, you know, the big companies in those days had every reason, you know, they had all these stories. By the way, a lot of the story the big companies told about the Internet early on was it's unsafe. Unsafe. And it was. And it was true to that. it was, you know, but it was literally going to be. I mean, there was an inhibit, it took a long time for e-commerce to take off. In retrospect, relative to how fast it could have taken off because people literally just

were worried that their credit card was going to get stolen. Like, you had to get over that hump, and there was just this constant fear of, like, cybercrime and this and that, and then spam and, like, all the abuse and, like, all these things. And so the big companies always had, like, all these reasons why they needed to have total control. And, you know, the government needed to protect them and they needed to have all these regulations and they needed to have, you know, the world needed to be a world not of open systems like the internet, it needed to be a world of proprietary systems.

And look, a lot of the way the world works today is proprietary systems. You know, the banking system is not open, right? You know, you're just, if the bank decides to debank you, they debank you, or whatever it is. Or if they don't want to let the money go through, they don't let the money go through. And so, you know, most of the world, most of the economy is with these big companies with total control. And so, yeah, I think it's a, I wanted to go through that because I think it's a, it's a major miracle when you're able to actually get one of these open systems to work. And it's like, and then years later, you're just like, oh, my God, I can't believe we,

almost had the much worse world where the big companies ran everything, but it is amazing how the pattern keeps repeating, and it's specifically repeating again today with AI. Again, ironically, and to your point, ironically, some of the companies that are lobbying hardest for regulatory capture and cartel, you know, kind of government cartel status for AI are companies that exist today because the internet was open. And so they are engaged in a particularly advanced form of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics. I think the founders are gone, so. been taken over by the other people. The other people.

Although I still blame the founders. Anyway, so, okay, so the, just the climax of the story. I just can't resist because I just think this is so amazing, given what happened, what follows. So, okay, so then we settle with Illinois. We get underway. We're shipping our products. We're starting to get revenue. It's starting to work.

This is around, I think, you know, the time you joined us kind of during this period. And so, but we're competing. We're competing with, you know, there's a bunch of other companies that are starting. You know, people figured out that this was actually a, the internet was going to be a thing. and so a bunch of other software companies got funded and started. And then this company, SpyGlass was still out there. And SpyGlass was selling, they were selling, SpyGlas Mosaic, they were selling our own code against us.

Yeah. Right. And, you know, so it was maddening. Yeah, it's a little frustrating. But, you know, again, they have the legal right to do it. But, like, it's a little frustrating. And it was fine. And we're, you know, we're competing with them, whatever. But it's a little bit fine.

And, you know, there's like a price war going on. And, you know, sort of back and forth going on. And then Spyglass gets this call for Microsoft and said, The Microsoft guys call Spyglass, and they're like, yeah, we want to license Spike Glass Mosaic so we can build it into Windows. And the Spike Glass guys say, you know, yeah, that sounds great, you know, basically how much per, you know, how much per copy are you going to, you know, pay us for that. And Microsoft said, you don't understand, we're going to pay you a flat fee, you know, which is the same, you know, which is the same, you know, the same thing that Microsoft did when they originally licensed DOS way back when. And so, but Microsoft said, you know, basically, or at least my understanding was what Microsoft said was, you know, don't worry about it. like, you know, we're going to sell it as an add-on to Windows, and, you know, so we'll have

Microsoft, you know, Mosaic, and then, you'll still have Spyglass Mosaic, and you can sell it on, you know, other operating systems or compete with us or whatever, do whatever you want. And so they struck the deal. I think it was like a million-dollar one-time payment, and the Spyglass guys thought they had struck gold because they had this, like, massive endorsement, you know, they're a big blow to us because we didn't get the Microsoft deal, and then they were going to, you know, sort of, you know, the whole industry is going to benefit from this, and then they're going to sell lots of other versions of Spraglass Mosaic.

And then there was this press, Microsoft had the press conference where they originally announced Internet Explorer, their browser, which was Spike Glass Mosaic. Again, our code, re-labeled. And there's a famous, famous moment where the Microsoft guys are on stage and then they do the one more thing part. And oh, by the way, we're going to make it free. And there's a famous moment, you know,

the Spaglass CEO with his head in his hands in the front row, you know, of the press conference, you know, realizing that his business had just ended. You just, you know, he sold out his entire business for a million dollars. So that was the end of Spyglass So, you know, all as well That ends well Yeah, happy ending

Not that I'm competitive And not that I don't hold crutches Well, that's hilarious Thank you all for listening to the Mark and Ben show We won't tell the Netscape story Which is also a good story But maybe if you reply in the comments You want to hear it

Well, we'll consider that one too But thank you again And we enjoyed it We hope you did too Thank you.