Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) The Forgotten Online Pioneer, Bill von Meister

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

Since it’s a holiday week in the US, I’m going to do what I’ve done once before on Holiday weeks and give you an episode from the Internet History Podcast archives. This is a story about tech history that, if you’ve never heard it, will blow your mind. What if I told you there was a crazy entrepreneur who was the true founder of what would become America Online? He was the guy who hired Steve Case back before AOL was AOL. What if I told you that same entrepreneur invented true, networked, online gaming—not in the era of the Xbox 360, or Stadia, but back in the days of the Atari 2600? What if I then told you that same entrepreneur invented a Napster/Pandora/Spotify/Sirius-like music service, all the way back in 1981, before the compact disc was even widely available? That Man Is William von Meister And he is the subject of this episode. This is a crazy story, about a hard drinking, heavy-smoking, women-chasing entrepreneur, seemingly from the Mad Men cloth, who was “a pathological entrepreneur” with a “reality-distortion-field” that would give Steve Jobs a run for his money. It’s a story of about a dozen harebrained businesses, none of which were really successful (excepting of course that some or all of them lent their DNA to the company that would become AOL) but all of which were way ahead of their time, and in many ways, presaged technologies we take for granted today. Sponsors: CloudBees.io Mealime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Black Friday, November 29th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, since it's a holiday week in the U.S., I'm going to do what I've done once before on holiday weeks and give you an episode from the Internet History Podcast Archives. This is a story about tech history that if you've never heard it, will blow your mind. What if I told you, there was a crazy entrepreneur who was the true founder of what would eventually become America online. He was a was the guy who hired Steve Case back before AOL was AOL. What if I told you that same entrepreneur invented true networked online gaming, not in the era of Xbox 360 or Stadia even, but back in

the days of the Atari 2,600? What if I then told you that same entrepreneur invented a Napster or Pandora or Spotify like music service all the way back in 1981, before the compact disc was even widely available. That man is William von Meister, and he is the subject of this episode. This is such a crazy story about a hard drinking, heavy smoking, women-chasing entrepreneur seemingly from the madman cloth who was, quote, a pathological entrepreneur with a reality distortion field that would give Steve Jobs a run for his money. It's a story about a dozen hairbrain businesses, none of which were really successful, accepting, of course, that some of, or or all of them let their DNA to the company that would become AOL,

but all of which were also way ahead of their time and in many ways presaged technologies that we take for granted today. This was the 14th podcast episode I ever produced. Listening back, I sound like such a podcasting baby, but believe me, if you've not ever heard this story before, you will be amazed. Happy holidays to anyone celebrating. I'll be back with a regular episode on Monday. In a way, you could say that William von Meister came from royalty. His great-grandfather, Wilhelm Meister, founded the, oh boy,

Tarfarben Fabric Meister, Lucius and Company, in Germany, which was later to become host, AG, which is now a subsidiary of the the Sanofi Aventis Pharmaceuticals group. His father, F.W. von Meister, was the godson of Kaiser Wilhelm the second of the German Empire. His mother, Eleanor Colorado Manzfeld,

was a countess in the Habsburg monarchy of Austria. Emigrating to the U.S. after World War I, his parents became naturalized U.S. citizens, and his father maintained his ties with the old country, serving as the head of U.S. operations for the Deutsche Zeppelin Rendari Company, which was the company that operated the famous Hindenburg. If you read histories of the Hindenburg disaster, in fact, F.W. von Meister's name comes up because he served as the company's spokesperson at the time of the tragedy. Young William, or Bill von Meister, was born in Far Hills, New Jersey, on

February 21st, 1942. The family estate was a 15-room, six-bath home, built on 28 acres, and called blue chimneys. There were servants. All of the children attended boarding schools. And by all accounts, William von Meister was a precocious kid, a tinkerer. reportedly he got his amateur radio operators license at age 11, license number K2ZRK, and one story has it that he rigged together a radio signaller to alert the household staff when his father's car was approaching so that tea might be ready when he got home. Another story has him rigging a series of pulleys that would tip him off when Santa came in through the front door. Come time for college, Von Meister enrolled in Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

But school generally bored him, and so he had a casual matriculation, alternating with a sideline of trading and racing exotic automobiles. This was financed by his father, of course, and his father eventually had to give him an ultimatum to finish his studies, which he did in 1973, earning an MBA from American University. But von Meister had no intention of working for someone else. He always wanted to be his own boss. Dovetailing with another passion of his,

he started a liquor distribution company called Spirits of America. But he only stuck with that for a year. And as it turns out, that was a pattern of Bill von Meisters, as we'll soon see. He loved dreaming. up new ideas and new companies, running companies, or at least growing them into mature, stable enterprises, not so much. The average length of time that he spent at any given company was only one to two years. As Jack Taub, a future backer of Von Meister's business

schemes, and another godfather of what would one day become AOL put it, quote, Von Meister is a terrific entrepreneur, but he doesn't know when to stop entrepreneur, end quote. Von Meister's next move was to print up business cards that touted himself as a business consultant. This somehow succeeded in landing him a consulting position with Lytton Bionetics, where he oversaw the computerization of cancer research record systems.

In 1974, von Meister parlayed that job. into a consulting position with Western Union, where initially he oversaw the development of a computerized billing system. One quick story, by the way, from the Western Union time that sort of sums up von Meister's entrepreneurial spirit. He learned one day that Western Union was regularly scrapping large quantities of tube-based electronics, cathode ray tubes and the like. They were just throwing them out. So Von Meister bid $750 for the unwanted waste, contacted a scrap metal dealer who knew what to look for, salvaged the solid gold contacts and other materials in the electronics, and resold what was salvaged.

According to Michael A. Banks, von Meister netted $250,000 in the deal, and that's in 1970s money. Anyway, while at Western Union, he also had a brainstorm. He envisioned a system that would speed up business mail delivery. In von Meister's scheme, a letter would be transmitted by Telex to the city nearest its destination, where it would be printed out and mailed for next day delivery. Western Union wasn't interested in backing the scheme, so von Meister lined up financial backing and left Western Union after about a year.

The concept was eventually launched. as a service called Telepost, which proved to be successful. So successful, in fact, that Western Union eventually came back and bought the company a few years later, turning it into the service that would be known as Western Union's mailgram. By the time of the buyout, of course, Bill von Meister wasn't there. He had already been forced out by the company's backers who complained that von Meister had spent their startup money too lavishly, and that Von Meister Weisser had lost interest in the company and was not devoting enough time to it. Von Meister was no doubt guilty as charged, but he nonetheless pocketed $1.2 million for his share of the buyout.

The reason that von Meister hadn't been giving telepost enough attention was because he was busy founding another venture, this time named TDX Systems in 1975. The initials TDX didn't stand for anything, but you'll see von Meister seem to have an affinity for three-letter company names. TDX was another clever idea. Using specially designed switches, a central computer system would better manage a large company's long-distance calls. The least expensive routes would always be chosen, and the company would be guaranteed a long-distance cost savings of 20%. This was Manor from heaven for major corporations like Marriott Hotels and Montgomery Ward. Through a series of investments and buyouts, TDX would eventually boast revenues of a billion dollars a year and become

the U.S. arm of the British conglomerate Cable and Wireless, which is now a part of Vodafone, and was the basis of cable and wireless's entry into the U.S. market. But Von Meister wasn't around to see the success. because again, by 1978, he was already incubating another new business idea. Although this time he happened to be using TDX's overflow investment money to do it. Again, this was the sort of wild, unauthorized spending that over and over tended to drive Bill Von Meister's investors nuts. How is Von Meister always able to find new investors, you'll wonder? We're five companies into this now, and every time he's got a new idea, he seems to

to have no trouble finding people to line up to invest in it. In all the accounts of von Meister, the one thing they agree on is that raising money for a new venture was really Bill von Meister's ultimate genius. It seems like he had a Steve Jobs-like reality distortion field on steroids. A man who would later work with him through several of his projects, the brilliant engineer Mark Serif, put it this way. Quote, this was one of the things Bill von Meister was better at than any other human being I've met, which was taking money from venture capitalists, burning it all up,

and then getting more money from the same venture capitalists, and they all felt good about it, end quote. In his book Stealing Time, Alec Klein described a typical method that von Meister liked to use to woo moneymen, Or perhaps Wu is not quite the right word. Maybe wore them down is better. And the passage is so good, I'm just going to quote from it directly from the book. The whole group would head to Von Meister's home in McLean, Virginia, where the liquor flowed freely. This would be followed by dinner at a swank place like The Palm, a celebrity hangout in downtown Washington, D.C., where the potential investors would be massaged with more spirits.

Von Meister spent so much time at the palm that the restaurant eventually framed a character of the offbeat entrepreneur. Toward one in the morning, Von Meister would bid the lubricated visitors adieu, and, by the way, see you at 6 a.m. for a tennis match at my place. When morning arrived all too soon, he'd trounce them. A quick shower and a power breakfast later, the visitors would begin to droop, their resistance down, whereupon von Meister would move in for the kill, leaning on them about how much money they should invest in his latest scheme. End passage.

So using fundraising methods such as these, at this point, Von Meester is developing three new businesses all at once, and these businesses would follow the familiar pattern of Von Meister's unique entrepreneurial genius. As Michael A.mister's... Banks put it, Von Meister's gift was for the potential for combining various technologies in novel ways. Quote, when he looked at a piece of equipment, a router, for example, he didn't see the equipment. Instead, he perceived its function in relation to the functions of related equipment, a logic that instantly recognized this sort of relationship. Unit A and Unit B together enable Unit C to perform this action, end quote.

At the risk of bombarding you with new company names and new technologies on top of all those others that we've already discussed, let's list the three companies he incubates at this point and marvel at the fascinating way he's combining different technologies in new and ingenious ways. First, we have data post. It was a similar plan to his mailgram idea. In this instance, the scheme was to collect letters from businesses. and transmit them by the new technology of facsimile to transmit the letters to the U.S. Post Office's Express Mail Center in Chicago so that they could be processed for next day delivery. Second, we have a restaurant which had a unique selling point.

Each table or booth in the restaurant would have a telephone installed tableside, and diners would be entitled to one free telephone call to anywhere in the country, using TDX technology, of course, and so people could call grandma while they were getting lunch. This is at a time when long distance was a hugely expensive thing, and so that would be appealing. Finally, the third business is a service called InfoCast, which was based upon the technology of piggybacking over top of FM radio transmissions. This was how Musak used to be delivered, the Musack service. But Von Meister wanted to deliver data, like news, weather reports, anything, creating essentially an FM radio information network. Von Meister told Businessweek at the time that simply by connecting 50 FM stations, he could create an InfoCast network that would be reachable by 90% of American businesses.

Think of it as a rudimentary cellular data network before cellular technology. And again, big money investors came calling for this idea, pouring millions of dollars into the company, and the service was actually successfully implemented by organizations like chain grocery stores, because it was a efficient way to transmit pricing change data to their thousands of outposts. Once again, of course, the Restless Von Miceyster. didn't wait around to see this come to fruition, he was already onto his next idea. Again, leaving others behind to either clean up his mess or steer his great ideas into successful reality. But the idea that von Meister had next was really his big one. What we've seen in all

these von Meister brainstorms up until now is sort of an entrepreneur feeling his way in the dark towards a larger vision. It's a vision of interconnected systems. and computers and devices delivering interactive services between them. In short, it's online services. And in Bill von Meister's mind, this was a vision that could be made real for home consumers, not just businesses. An online information service that allowed two-way delivery of news, data, information, and communications. And it was in this next venture that Von Meister would try to make it a reality.

He would call it the source. Before I get nitpicking emails here, I know that it was originally called Compucom, but I've already listed so many company names. Let's just stick with the source for simplicity's sake. The source would take all that von Meister had learned about low-cost phone routing, about data network transmissions, and combine it all into one grand service offering. The source was born because von Meister was looking around at the proto-online service. that CompuServe had been developing. But Von Meister didn't have access to large mainframe networks like CompiServe did. He was also looking at the early networking experiments that cable companies like Warner Cable,

not yet Time Warner, were doing. But he didn't have access to cable systems either. And anyway, at that point, cable was only in about 20% of U.S. homes. And at that point, most cable systems weren't capable of handling, two-way transmissions anyway. But there was a system that was in almost 100% of American homes, and it offered two-way interactive capability. This was the phone system. Now, add to this the fact that by 1980, personal computers were beginning to enter American homes in a big way. So von Meister figured he wouldn't need to develop or sell costly terminals for his interactive information system idea.

the personal computers would be the terminals. People just needed to get modems. In order to make the source of reality, von Meister decided to piggyback off of existing technologies. He would piggyback off the phone network, like he had piggybacked off of FM radio. He didn't have a manufacturing background, so he figured he would piggyback off the growth of the personal computer.

Industry estimates at the time were that maybe five, 500,000 PCs were in American homes. Von Meister figured that if he could sign up 5% of those for an online service, a total of 10,000 users, he could make money. Again, we have to sort of pause and take off our hat here to admire von Meisser's hustle and originality. He decided the source needed an email component, so he went out and licensed an existing one from a company called Dialcom, which had created an email system for the U.S. House of Representatives. He decided users of the source needed a bulletin board system, so he licensed the wildly popular party system, already used on mainframe computers since the early 70s. But most importantly, the source needed a data network that users could dial in and connect to.

And he needed a package switching network to do this, or PSN. There were plenty of PSNs in use by businesses at that time, but they charged as much as $15 per hour during peak usage. what consumer was going to pay $15 an hour. Von Meister needed them to charge the source less than a dollar an hour. Essentially, he was asking PSNs to reduce their normal rates by 95%. And incredibly, he got one major PSN, the GTE Telnet service, later Sprintnet, to do just that, negotiating a 25 cent per hour fee. How did he get them to agree to reduce their prices by 95%?

Well, again, PSNs were used largely by businesses during business hours. By agreeing that the source would only operate during the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 a.m., telenet would be able to get some money for the overnight hours when its network was otherwise dormant. And so it was a win-win. Some money coming in was better than nothing for those dormant hours, and the source, source would launch with users being charged a $100 sign-up fee than $2.75 per minute. So it was a win for Von Meister if he indeed got his 10,000 users because he would have a cool $1 million in sign-up fees alone, and his hourly costs, not taking into account,

other costs, of course, were merely the 25 cents per hour that was due to Telnet. fat margins indeed. The source would be the first online service truly targeting consumers, and thus it really is a godfather to AOL. The source was launched with content partners including the New York Times, Dow Jones, United Press International, and Prentice Hall. It offered wine lists, horoscopes, local entertainment guides, stock quotes, news headlines, and even tax preparation help. And it launched with all of this in 1979. 1979. The official launch party was held at New York's Plaza Hotel on July 9, 1979.

The famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was on hand to declare, quote, This is the beginning of the information age, end quote. By the way, Asimov was no stranger to lending his name to new technologies. He was a spokesman for Radio Shack at the time, and if you go look at the website and check for the post of this episode, you'll see some ads I found where he's touting the TRS80 computer. For its part, ads for the source declared by the 21st century, the source will be as vital as electricity, the telephone, and even running water. That certainly turned out to be true, but only so long as it. as you replace the source with the internet. At its peak, the source reached a subscription level of 80,000 users,

much more than the 10,000 von Meester had even dreamed of, and the company would eventually be taken over by Reader's Digest, but was Bill von Meister around for that? Well, if you've been paying attention, then you probably already know that he wasn't. Again, investors in the source charged that von Meister had been a little too aggressive in spending their cash. One investor declared, quote, Von Meister spent money as though he were building general motors. Money was spent like water, end quote.

Von Meister had been pushed out by the time of the source launch by other investors, although by threatening legal action, he was still able to walk away with. another million-dollar golden parachute for his troubles. So once again, Bill von Meister lands on his feet. But at least in terms of direct genealogy, the source was not even the direct forebearer of AOL. To get to the company that eventually birthed the AOL that we know, we need to continue on the Bill Von Meister rollercoaster just a little bit further. Through working with GTE Telnet for the source, Von Meister got acquainted with a young programmer

named Mark Serif. Serif had actually previously worked on ARPANET, a progenitor of the one true internet. Serif left Telnet to join Von Meister on his next venture, a venture that would be called the Home Music Store. So now, get this idea for a service. The Home Music Store would allow users of cable TV to listen to music on demand via their cable connections. A vast music library would be digitized, and this is in the days before compact discs

were even at all available to consumers, sent to a satellite, and then beam down to user's homes. A black box in each cable subscriber's home would decode the music and make it available to be played on their TV or stereo systems. For all of this, users would pay $6.95 to $9.95 a month for eight different pre-programmed stations. Better yet, there were even channels that would allow you to record a given song, and if you wanted to buy a given song or album, the home music store would sell it to you at a discount. So, stop for a minute and think about that. It's like Sonos or Napster or Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, and it's all dreamed up by

von Meister and announced in 1981. Again, before compact discs are even available to consumers, before the internet, back in the era of record players and vinyl LPs. Von Meister once again thought this was his. his big ticket, and this time he had the technological genius in the person of Mark Seraph to help him make it a reality. And again, big money men were ready to back him, but this time von Meister's dreams were brought to naught for reasons that were entirely beyond his control.

After the announcement of the service was made, the record stores, the retailers, not the record labels, but the record retailers objected. They saw this as a way of cutting off their lifeblood. After all, who would go to a record store and buy a record if you could just order it from home? Music retail chains took out open letters in Billboard magazine, vowing to boycott any record label that did business with the home music store. The first music label to back out was Warner Brothers. Other labels would follow suit.

The idea was simply dead in the water, before it could even launch. And again, think about that. Think about how amazing it is that long before the Internet, long before even digital music was a thing, the very first time that digital media and old world media and retail would clash was at the very suggestion of Bill von Meister's home music store back in 1981. But, and by the way, this is how we're going to eventually.

get to the grandfather of AOL. But it was those very negotiations, the failed negotiations with Warner Brothers, that would bear fruit for one more Bill von Meister brainstorm. The technology that von Meister and Serif had demoed up in anticipation of the home music stores launch, well, it might be usable for other media. At the time, video games were hot. In fact, video games were the biggest thing going. And video games could be delivered digitally just like songs. One Warner Brothers executive suggested to Von Meister, why not use your technology to send video games instead of music?

Warner Brothers happened to have recently purchased Atari, the 800-pound gorilla of the video game industry. The Atari 2,600 video game console, was basically the video game industry, the video game industry in 1981, 1989, the time period we're talking about. Using the technology von Meister and Serif were sitting on, Atari users could dial in via phone lines

to download and play video games without needing to even purchase physical cartridges. In Von Meister's mind, he would use video games as a Trojan horse that was just as useful as music as a Trojan horse, in order to take another run at the Grand Online Services idea that was still burning a hole in his brain. Once users were trained to download games, they could eventually download other things.

News, email, maybe even music after all. Once again, the Grand Showman showed a flair for raising money, because, darn it, this was yet another great idea. even though at this point von Meister's name was a bit mud, tarnished by his serial entrepreneurship and serial failure, I guess. The video game space was so red-hot that even big-named moneymen couldn't resist. Venture capital legend Frank Caulfield was one of those who ponied up to fund the new company that would be called Control Video Corporation, another CVC, a three-letter named company.

Cawfield was later to recall, quote, I was told that every new generation of venture capitalists had to be hoodwinked by Bill von Meister. He was like that cartoon character in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He wasn't bad, he was just drawn that way, end quote. Another VC who invested was given this bit of advice about von Meister. Quote, keep him out of the first-class airport lounges and you should be okay, end quote. So out of the ashes of the source, out of the ashes of the home music store, control video corporation would produce a product called the GameLine Master Module,

which would attach to the Atari 2,600 console, and then to a telephone line, and users could download video games, pay for them by credit card, and play the games for a set number of times before they were erased when the machine was powered off. The product was unveiled to the world at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Ever the showman, Von Meister pulled out all the stops, renting a room in the Tropicana Hotel, hiring showgirls, and even running a raffle to win a bar of solid gold.

A hot air balloon with the Game Line logo was tethered high above the Tropicana to draw convention goers in. To investors, Von Meister trotted out his larger vision. Game line would only be the beginning. Eventually, there would be a sports line, a stock line, a bank line, a news line. one of the new investors sold on Von Meister's vision was a young banker with the investment firm Hamburgton Quist named Daniel Case.

When Daniel took a dinner in Las Vegas with Von Meister, he brought along his kid brother, Steve Case. Steve Case had actually been an avid user of the source back in the day, and Case, Steve, Steve, was so, impressed with Von Meister's presentation that he even joined CVC as a consultant. Thus, the man who would eventually be CEO of AOL, was brought on board from the very beginning. Von Meister dubbed the brothers, one the investor and the other the new hire, as uppercase and lowercase. Game line was the hit product of 1983's Consumer Electronics Show, and Control Video Corporation took orders for more than 100,000 game line units, although von Meister would tell the press that they had sold 400,000 pre-orders.

Nonetheless, millions of dollars began pouring in to help Von Meister finance production of the devices, which were slated to ship in July of 1983. Von Meister was so confident that this time he had hit it out of the park that he decided to launch the product nationally, instead of, as was tradition, conducting focus groups or doing a slow test rollout in select cities. Von Meister was quoted in the Washington Post in May of 1983, saying, quote, everybody tells me it's a can't miss proposition, end quote. And so again, he began spending big on his newest brainchild. By the time game line was ready to launch, control video had burned through most of its investment money.

by some estimates $9 million and by other estimates $20 million. Again, however, it would be events that were entirely out of Bill von Meister's control that would conspire to ruin things. If you know the history of the video game industry, then you know that it goes through really severe cycles of boom and bust. Every time a Super Nintendo or a Sony PlayStation comes along to rejuvenate the market, it's only after a period of years where the video game market has been completely cratered. There's a great book about this called The Ultimate History of Video Games by Stephen Kent.

Look it up on Amazon. It'll give you the whole sorry story of the boom and bust cycle. Well, the first great bust of the computer game industry happens to come about at exactly this moment in the summer of 1983, right when Game Line was about to launch. In May of 1983, Atari announced that it had lost $1 billion in the first quarter. Making the first time that any company had lost that much money in that short of time, a dubious honor, this was the signal, however, that the market for video games was collapsing.

Overproduction, over-saturation, and over-hype were responsible, and video games as an industry would fall into a deep depression that would not abate until the rise of Nintendo a few years later. And so even though the GameLine system did end up launching in July of 1983, and you can see a link to several great articles about that system if you go to the post page for this episode on the website. In fact, I even found a YouTube video of some kid who found an old game line system and plugged it in. But even so, as Kara Swisher puts it, despite the fact that Bill von Meister said in a speech that CBC's business would be one of the biggest splashes ever, GameLine was more of a bellyflop. By the end of 1983, GameLine had only about 3,000 customers. Of the 40,000 GameLine modules that were actually shipped to retailers, 37,000 were returned.

A further 30,000 units never even left CBC's warehouses. As the investor, Frank Cofield put it, quote, you'd think they'd have shoplifted more. We could have sold more off the back of a truck on Route 1, end quote. It was impossible to ignore that all the money that tens of millions of dollars worth was gone. And worse, there was no money coming in. GameLine's entire direct production proceeds at that point totaled $25,000, and the company had immediate outstanding debts of about $7 million.

On the plus side, Von Meister had actually managed to resell that hot air balloon he had used in Las Vegas for triple what he had paid for it, so there was an additional $15,000 on the balance sheet, but that was it. And the money man, understandably, panicked. A turnaround artist named James Kimsey was brought in to try to salvage things. Mark Serif remained in place as the technology chief, and the hope was that, again, the modem and networking technology that he had created could be rolled into some other successful product.

Steve Case was promoted to vice president of marketing to help in these efforts, and Bill von Meister, well, he was left merely as a figurehead. As a von Meister associate put it, quote, it was not Bill von Meister's fault that the video game market died. They needed a scapegoat, and they never remembered him as anything except the guy who had spent all the money, end quote. For his part, Von Meister remained supremely confident. He was convinced he could just do what. what he always did and raise money to claw the company out of trouble.

But despite all of these near successes and, well, really chronic failures, von Meister hadn't been humbled in the least bit, and he continued doing business like he always had. And it was here that Bill von Meister's personality finally caught up to him. Alex Klein's book is really the best description of what happened next, so I'm just going to quote at length from stealing time. For Bill von Meister, the end of the line arrived one day in early 1985 when he came gleefully skipping out of his office to greet his spanking new BMW 735 I. How do you like my new car, von Meister chirped, like a child on Christmas morning? Kimsey noticed there was the letter M inblazoned on the car. What the fuck does the M stand for, he asked.

More, von Meister said. Kimsey, Cross, and Middlemasts were all agape. The three men had been standing in the parking lot, nervously waiting for the arrival of an entourage of creditors, angry creditors, people who hadn't been paid. Companies that were threatening to sue control video, or worse, force it into bankruptcy. This was a big day, a defining moment for Control Video. If the creditors refused to accept 10 cents on the dollar for what they were owed, and that's all Control Video could

afford, then it was all over. Money had gotten so tight that the company had been forced to tape together cardboard boxes to use as office cubicle dividers. We have a creditors meeting. Are you crazy bringing in that car, Kimsey exclaimed? "'See that tree? They'll hang you from it and burn your furniture in the parking lot.' Von Meister looked around wounded, his eyes wide like saucers. "'What are you getting all upset about?' he asked. "'Don't these people understand I have a personal life?' Cross urged him to get in his new car, go home, and go look after that personal life.

Von Meister finally seemed to get the point. off he drove down the road and for all intents and purposes out of their lives forever. End passage. So here, finally, is how we get to America Online. Control Video Corporation would be saved, and it would be renamed Quantum Computer Services on May 24, 1985. As we detailed in the episode on AOL's birth, the course, the course of the course. core team of Jim Kimsey, Mark Serif, and Steve Case would remake the company into the producer of online services for computer manufacturers. First for Commodore, then for Apple, then for

Tandy, eventually renaming itself AOL and focusing on a core online service product for Windows-based computers. QLink, Apple Link, and PC Link were all versions of the online services that would pave the road for AOL. In a way, you can argue that the true technical godfather of AOL was Mark Serif. It was, after all, his technologies that kept the evolving company alive. And also, most people don't know this, but Jim Kimsey was the CEO of America Online until well into the 90s, and he deserves the credit for the incredible pivots in business plan that allowed the company to survive and eventually thrive.

And of course, Steve Case would go on to become the face of AOL to millions of Americans in the 1990s, the CEO in khaki pants who would grow AOL into such a success that it would eventually swallow Time Warner itself at the end of the dot-com era. What became a Bill von Meister? Well, there were other companies, of course. The first one after he left control video was called Prysline. People would call up a phone number, 1-800 cash pot, and they would play trivia games for prizes, paying by the minute via credit card. This brainstorm was another combination of great ideas that came about because von Meister had noticed the surging popularity of the board game Trivial Pursuit, as well as the 9-16 number sex lines that had sprung up at the time. Von Meister bragged that prize line would eventually have $17 million in revenue in just its first year based off of 136,000 projected users.

Of course, those numbers did not eventually pan out. I was unable to find exactly all the other ventures that there were over the years, but we have to assume that there were many. That was just in von Meister's nature. In 1991, we know that his drinking habits finally caught up with him, and on his family's insistence, Von Meister went into rehab. And in 1995, he ended up dying of cancer. But even at that time, Karas Wisher reports that he was working on a project that would use some combination of fax machines and computers to deliver government documents. So even at the end, the entrepreneurial spirit never really died. Steve Case and Mark Serif both attended von Meister's funeral on May 20th, 1995,

Case even delivering a eulogy. In his obituary in the Washington Post, it was written that von Meister was, quote, founder and chief executive officer of a number of high-tech and consulting firms, end quote. But there was no mention of AOL. And in fact, to this day, as I've said, very few people, know that Bill von Meister is really the person responsible for the behemoth that eventually was AOL. At one point in his life, von Meister was being interviewed by a reporter, and he asked rhetorically, quote, what do people do that is really challenging? They race cars, climb mountains, go scuba diving,

and that's about it. Most really do live the lives of quiet desperation. Well, entrepreneurship can be challenging, too. There are rules, but there aren't many, end quote. According to Kara Swisher, once shortly before his death, his children asked von Meister about his wild and woolly lifestyle, and he replied to them, quote, Would you rather I was a postman? I am what I am, end quote.

What Bill Von Meister was, was an amazing entrepreneur by any measure, although not a successful one by most measures. But his vision was so far ahead of its time, it deserves to be remembered. One colleague put it this way, quote, Bill von Meister was not just a serial entrepreneur, he was a pathological entrepreneur, end quote. So, Bill von Meister, the pathological entrepreneur, and the forgotten pioneer of our online world.

We salute you wherever you are.