1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  43. “Site-Seeing on the World Wide Web,” New York Times, January 3, 1995.

  44. Laurie Flynn, “Browsers Make Navigating the World Wide Web a Snap,” New York Times, January 29, 1995.

  45. “Fidelity to Offer Services on World Wide Web,” New York Times, February 15, 1995.

  46. Steve Lohr, “His Goal: Keeping the Web Worldwide,” New York Times, December 18, 1995. Lohr’s article noted that “while the World Wide Web is a household name, its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, a 40-year-old Englishman, is certainly not.”

  47. Reid Kanaley, “Internet Bounding Beyond Expectations,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 27, 1995.

  48. Reid Kanaley, “Caught in the World Wide Web: It’s an Exploding Part of the Internet,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 1995.

  49. Levy, “The Year of the Internet,” 27.

  50. See Ken Cottrill, “Internet: Losing Its Backbone,” Guardian (London), March 30, 1995.

  51. Andrew L. Shapiro, “Street Corners in Cyberspace,” Nation, July 3, 1995, 10.

  52. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn,” Time, July 3, 1995, 38.

  53. “Cybersex: Policing Pornography on the Internet,” ABC News Nightline, June 27, 1995, transcript retrieved from LexisNexis database.

  54. Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, in noting the “white-hot intensity” of the online debate about the Time cover story, wrote that “the on-line feedback loop is essentially a healthy development that helps put news organizations and consumers on a more equal footing.” Kurtz, “A Flaming Outage: A ‘Cyberporn’ Critic Gets a Harsh Lesson in ’90s Netiquette,” Washington Post, July 16, 1995.

  55. See Reid, Architects of the Web, 305.

  56. See Peter H. Lewis, “Critics Troubled by Computer Study on Pornography,” New York Times, July 3, 1995. Lewis’s report quoted a sociology professor at Northern Illinois University as saying: “This [study] would never make it through a traditional peer review in even a third-line social science review.”

  57. See ibid.

  58. Quoted in Elizabeth Corcoran, “Cybersensitivity? Did the Media Overreact to Pornography on the Internet?” Washington Post, June 28, 1995.

  59. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon, “Time’s Expose a Cyberdud,” Capital Times (Madison, Wis.), July 24, 1995.

  60. Philip Elmer-DeWitt, “Fire Storm on the Computer Nets,” Time, July 24, 1995, 57.

  61. Such characterizations prompted sneers from international observers. The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur declared at year’s end that “traditional American Puritanism [had] reared up and denounced the Internet as a new weapon for pornographers in their eternal quest to pervert the morals of America’s children. Congress, in its moral superiority, stood poised . . . to make on-line pornography illegal, even though the U.S. government can hardly claim sovereignty over a global computer network.” Dave McIntyre, “U.S. in 1995: The Verge of Change, or More of the Same?” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, December 26, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database.

  62. Quoted in John Schwartz, “Sexually Explicit Story Sparks Debate over On-Line Rights,” Washington Post, February 27, 1995. Exon later wrote that the Internet was “a great boon to mankind. But we should not ignore the dark roads of pornography, indecency and obscenity it makes possible.” Jim Exon, “Letters to the Editor: My Bill Does Not ‘Censor’ the Internet,” Washington Post, December 2, 1995.

  63. Quoted in Paul Goodsell, “Exon ‘Blue Book’ Bolsters Case for Internet Porn Bill,” Omaha World Herald, June 14, 1995. The New York Times pointed out in an editorial that everyone who inspected Exon’s “blue book” “deplored the graphic spectacle, but since it already was illegal and subject to prosecution it had no bearing on the bill’s ban on indecency.” See “Censorship on the Internet,” New York Times, June 22, 1995.

  64. See Robert Cannon, “The Legislative History of Senator Exon’s Communications Decency Act: Regulating Barbarians on the Information Superhighway,” Federal Communications Law Journal 49, no. 1 (1996): 72. Exon’s unfamiliarity with the Internet, Cannon wrote, begged “the question of how a senator with no technical knowledge of the medium can draft language which regulates it” (72–73).

  65. Dan Glaister, “Tap of the Devil,” Guardian (London), July 3, 1995.

  66. See Mike Mills, “House, Senate Agree on Cable TV Rates; Negotiators Still Divided on Issue of Obscenity on the Internet,” Washington Post, December 13, 1995. The Internet protest mainly addressed members of a congressional conference committee assigned to resolve differences between the telecommunications bills approved by the Senate and the House.

  67. See Cannon, “The Legislative History of Senator Exon’s Communications Decency Act,” 92.

  68. “Remarks by the President in Signing Ceremony for the Telecommunications Act Conference Report,” February 8, 1996, accessed June 27, 2013, http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OP/telecom/release.html.

  69. Rory J. O’Connor, “Law Stirs Protest on Internet,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 9, 1996.

  70. See Peter H. Lewis, “Judges Turn Back Law to Regulate Internet Decency,” New York Times, June 13, 1996.

  71. “Excerpts from Ruling on Internet,” New York Times, June 27, 1997.

  72. John Schwartz and Joan Biskupic, “High Court Allows Ban on Assisted Suicide, Strikes Down Law Restricting Online Speech,” Washington Post, June 27, 1997.

  73. See Mike Cassidy, “Remembering the Thrilling Ride of Netscape,” San Jose Mercury News, August 9, 2005. Cassidy wrote: “From the beginning, Netscape had all the elements to tell the story of the [Silicon] valley’s Internet era: The young technologist. Explosive growth. A product that really could change the world.”

  74. See Jim Clark with Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Startup That Took On Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 183.

  75. Quoted in Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008, accessed July 18, 2013, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/07/internet200807.

  76. Quoted in Kim S. Nash, “The Vision Guy,” Computerworld, July 8, 1996, 1.

  77. Rick Tetzeli, “What It’s Really Like to Be Marc Andreessen,” Fortune, December 9, 1996, retrieved from Ebsco Host database. Tetzeli also wrote that “Andreessen is incapable of what most people call cooking” and quoted him as saying, “I can do Campbell’s Chunky Soup, SpaghettiOs, Pillsbury cinnamon rolls, and cereal.”

  78. Quoted in Jared Sandberg, “Netscape Has Technical Whiz in Andreessen,” Wall Street Journal, August 11, 1995.

  79. Quoted in Adam Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web,” Fortune, July 25, 2005, accessed May 3, 2012, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/.

  80. David A. Kaplan, “Nothing But Net,” Newsweek, December 25, 1995/January 1, 1996, 32.

  81. Quoted in Chris Anderson, “The Man Who Makes the Future: Wired Icon Marc Andreessen,” Wired, April 24, 2012, accessed June 30, 2012, www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_andreessen/all/1.

  82. Quoted in “Marc Andreessen: Oral History,” Smithsonian Institution (June 1995), accessed June 30, 2012, www.cwhonors.org/archives/histories/Andreessen.pdf.

  83. About the inspiration for Mosaic, Andreessen recalled in 1999 that he and his colleagues “basically just thought that it didn’t make sense that the Internet should be hard to use and require a degree in computer science. . . . That was a radical idea back in 1993, when virtually everyone on the net was a highly trained computer scientist or researcher.” See “Shannon Henry’s The Download—Live: Discussion With Netscape’s Co-Founder Marc Andreessen,” Washington Post online chat, September 16, 1999, accessed February 5, 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/talk/transcripts/henry/henry091699.htm.

  84. Andreessen was later quoted as saying: “Coming from Wisconsin, I thought Champaign was the big city. I was wrong. Champaign is cornfields and pig farms. If Champaign has a positive attribute, it’s that it’s so isolated
and cut off that all you can do is work.” Tetzeli, “What It’s Really Like to Be Marc Andreessen.”

  85. See Reid, Architects of the Web, 36–37.

  86. Quoted in Tetzeli, “What It’s Really Like to Be Marc Andreessen.” The choice of “Netscape” was an inspired one. Steve Silberman, a contributor to Wired magazine, wrote that there was “poetry and audacity in that name—an insistence that the Web wasn’t merely a display, a tool, an application, an e-anything, but a place—a newly discovered, unmapped infinitude. . . . The word ‘Netscape’ announced that the frontier was open for exploration and habitation.” Silberman, “Thanks, Mozilla,” Wired, November 23, 1998, accessed December 23, 2013, archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1998/11/16434.

  87. Quoted in Tetzeli, “What It’s Really Like to Be Marc Andreessen.” The University of Illinois did try to kill Netscape in its early days,” Andreessen said in 1999, calling those efforts “one of the all time big mistakes by any university.” See “Shannon Henry’s The Download—Live.”

  88. See Peter H. Lewis, “Will Netscape Be the Next Microsoft, or the Next Victim of Microsoft?” New York Times, October 16, 1995.

  89. Elizabeth Corcoran, “Software’s Surf King,” Washington Post, July 23, 1995.

  90. Quoted in Mayo and Newcomb, “How the Web Was Won.”

  91. See Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995), 95. Gates also wrote that “we stand at the brink of another revolution. This one will involve unprecedentedly inexpensive communication; all the computers will join together to communicate with and for us. Interconnected globally, they will form a network, which is being called the information highway. A direct precursor is the present Internet, which is a group of computers joined and exchanging information using current technology” (3–4).

  92. See, among others, J. C. Herz, “What a Wonderful Web It Could Be,” Rolling Stone, November 30, 1995, SS22.

  93. Cited in Bob Metcalfe, “From the Ether: Without Case of Vapors, Netscape’s Tools Will Give Blackbird Reason to Squawk,” InfoWorld, September 18, 1995, 111. Metcalfe’s column indirectly quoted Andreessen.

  94. See Steve Lohr and John Markoff, “Microsoft’s World: How Software’s Giant Played Hardball Game,” New York Times, October 8, 1998.

  95. See Mayo and Newcomb, “How the Web Was Won.”

  96. Bill Gates, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” confidential memorandum (May 26, 1995). Gates also wrote: “The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules.” The memorandum closed with a short list of related readings, including notes from a speech by Marc Andreessen. Gates misspelled the name “Andresson.”

  97. See Marc Andreessen, untitled internal memorandum [undated notes of Microsoft-Netscape meeting of June 21, 1995], document retrieved from www.justice.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm.

  98. Quoted in John R. Wilke, “Microsoft Subject of New Antitrust Probe,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1998.

  99. See ibid. Wilke’s article quoted a Microsoft spokesman as saying: “Netscape’s description of this meeting gets more distorted and more fictional every day.” However, James Barksdale, Netscape’s chief executive, described the meeting of June 21, 1995, as “something I had not ever seen happen in my more than thirty years of experience with major U.S. corporations.” In direct testimony in the U.S. government’s antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, Barksdale said the Microsoft team “came to Netscape under the guise of attempting to set up some sort of cooperative agreement with Netscape. However, rather than proposing potential productive areas of cooperation, Microsoft apparently came to Netscape with a single focus: to convince Netscape not to compete with its . . . browser product, Internet Explorer. . . . Moreover, Microsoft made clear that if Netscape did not agree to its plan to divide the browser market, Microsoft would crush Netscape.” Barksdale further said that he left the meeting “stunned that Microsoft had made such an explicit proposal.” See “Direct Testimony of Jim Barksdale,” United States v. Microsoft Corporation, October 13, 1998, document retrieved from www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f1900/1999.htm.

  100. Laurence Zuckerman, “With Internet Cachet, Not Profit, a New Stock Is Wall St.’s Darling,” New York Times, August 10, 1995.

  101. Quoted in Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web.”

  102. See Zuckerman, “With Internet Cachet, Not Profit, a New Stock Is Wall St.’s Darling.”

  103. Zuckerman, “With Internet Cachet, Not Profit, a New Stock Is Wall St.’s Darling.” Yet Netscape’s IPO did not receive the largest headlines in the San Jose Mercury News, which covered Silicon Valley quite closely. News about the IPO was displayed on the front page of the Mercury News, but the lead story was about the death of Jerry Garcia, counterculture hero and leader of the Grateful Dead, who died August 9, 1995.

  104. See Molly Baker, “Technology Investors Fall Head over Heels for Their New Love,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1995.

  105. Reid, Architects of the Web, 44.

  106. Tim Berners-Lee described the first version of Internet Explorer as having “very little functionality. I could tell it was put together in a hurry, but it got Microsoft’s toe in the water.” Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 108.

  107. See Reid, Architects of the Web, 46.

  108. Quoted in Peter H. Lewis, “Microsoft Seeks Internet Market; Netscape Slides,” New York Times, December 8, 1995.

  109. See Dan Stets, “Microsoft May Bring a New Era for the Internet,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1995.

  110. Bill Gates, “Some Thoughts on Netscape” (May 19, 1996), email memorandum retrieved from www.justice.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm. Gates further wrote that Netscape was “moving at full speed. Every day companies are barraged with the message that they need to be doing more about the Internet. Today that means embracing Netscape products and trusting that Netscape will fill any holes that they have.”

  111. Quoted in Paul Andrews, “Netscape’s General Smiles as the Smoke Clears,” Seattle Times, December 14, 1997, accessed July 2, 2013, http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19971214&slug=2578116.

  112. Brad Chase, “FY 97 Planning Memo: Winning the Internet Platform Battle” (April 4, 1996), document retrieved from www.justice.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm. Emphasis in the original.

  113. See Reid, Architects of the Web, 61.

  114. See Laurence Zuckerman, “Browser Moves by Microsoft Make Even Netscape Blink,” New York Times, October 9, 1996.

  115. Email correspondence from “Navisoft” [David Cole] to Steve Case and others (January 21, 1996), document retrieved from www.justice.gov/atr/cases/ms_exhibits.htm.

  116. See Lawrence M. Fisher, “Netscape Reports Losses, and Its Shares Tumble,” New York Times, January 6, 1998.

  117. Quoted in Tom Abate, “Firefox Rises from Ashes of Abandoned Netscape,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 2008, accessed February 15, 2014, www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Firefox-rises-from-ashes-of-abandoned-Netscape-3229083.php.

  118. By the time the merger was completed, AOL stock had appreciated to a point where the deal was worth almost $10 billion. See David Streitfeld, “An Awkward Anniversary: One Year Later, AOL’s Purchase of Netscape Raises Questions about Mergers,” Washington Post, March 17, 2000.

  119. See John Heilemann, “Suit 2.0,” New York, July 3–10, 2006, 28.

  120. See Steve Lohr, “Microsoft’s AOL Deal Intensifies Patent Wars,” New York Times, April 10, 2012.

  121. See Dale Dougherty, “The Frantic Reign of Netscape,” Web Techniques, February 1999, 88. Dougherty wrote: “The browser . . . was the key to the Netscape kingdom. Netscape’s inability to convert the sizable number of browser users into customers is the real story behind its decline and fall.”

  122. See “Netscape Netcenter,” PC World, June 22, 1998, accessed July 2, 2013, www.pcworld.com/article/23254/article.html.

&n
bsp; 123. Quoted in “Roundup: Writing Bytes,” New York Times, October 31, 2013, accessed October 31, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/writing-bytes.html?emc=edit_tnt_20131031&tntemail0=y&_r= 0&pagewanted=all.

  124. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 106. Journalist Haynes Johnson wrote in his book about the 1990s: “America’s fascination with the wonders—and the wealth—being created by the Internet and its new dot-com world can be dated from an August day in 1995. That’s when a Silicon Valley start-up company made what became a legendary initial public stock offering.” Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 20.

  125. See Reid, Architects of the Web, 35. It was “one of the first programs,” Tim Berners-Lee noted, “that allowed electronic commerce (e-commerce) to gain credibility.” Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 97.

  126. Walter S. Mossberg, “The Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews; Yes, the Newton,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2013.

  127. Years later, Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee, said he was startled to realize that the day coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the first atomic weapon test. Amazon’s going live, Kaphan said, was “another kind of atomic explosion.” Kaphan, interview with author (November 18, 2013).

  128. See, for example, Patrick Seitz, “Amazon.com Whiz Jeff Bezos Keeps Kindling Hot Concepts,” Investor’s Business Daily, January 4, 2010.

  129. Helen Jung, “Amazon’s Bezos: Internet’s Ultimate Cult Figure,” Seattle Times, September 19, 1999, accessed July 4, 2013, http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19990919&slug=2984093.

  130. See “Amazon.com Breaks E-commerce Record,” PR Newswire, October 14, 1997, retrieved from LexisNexis database. See also “Amazon.com Launches Online Auction Site,” PR Newswire, March 30, 1999, retrieved from LexisNexis database. The mythic origins in a garage were mentioned in the first lengthy report about Amazon in the U.S. national media. An article in the Wall Street Journal said in May 1996: “Renting a house in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Mr. Bezos, like many a West-Coast entrepreneur before him, began working out of his garage.” G. Bruce Knecht, “Reading the Market: How Wall Street Whiz Found a Niche Selling Books on the Internet,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1996.