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Chapters – Internet History Podcast
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Chapter 7, Part 5 – The Story of Craigslist
Oct 13, 2018Tap to summarizeSummary: The history of Craig Newmark, craigslist and other odds and ends that didn’t make the book! Listen: Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link SoundCloud YouTube Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link Download Here SoundCloud YouTube Bibliography: The Perfect Store: Inside eBay The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
Transcribe →The History of Google
Apr 2, 2017Tap to summarizeWhen Larry and Sergey first met, they didn’t like each other much. In the summer of 1995, Larry Page was considering a transfer to Stanford University’s graduate program in Computer Science. Sergey Brin was already two years into the program, and he had signed up to be a tour guide of sorts to potential students. One summer day he showed Page and a group of other potential Stanford students around the Bay Area. “I thought he was pretty obnoxious,” Page said later of his guide. “He had really strong opinions about things and I guess I did, too.” “We both found each other obnoxious,” Brin agrees. And yet, it wasn’t hatred, exactly, as much as it was the coming together of two strong, fiercely proud intellects. They might have stepped on each other’s toes a bit, but at the same time there was a degree of frisson to the encounter. “We spent a lot of time talking to each other,” Brin would recall, “so there was something there. We had a kind of bantering thing going.” On the surface, it might not have seemed like Page and Brin had anything in common. Page was Midwestern, born in East Lansing, Michigan on March 26, 1973. Brin was born in Moscow, in the iron-curtain-era USSR, on August 21, 1973, only emigrating to the United States when he was six years old. Page was reserved, quiet, contemplative. Brin was outgoing, gregarious, loud. Page was a deep thinker, a visionary. Brin, a problem solver, an engineer’s engineer. But the two had more in common than anyone knew that first day. For one thing, they both came from academic families. Page’s father was a pioneering Computer Science professor at Michigan State University, where his mother was also a computer programming instructor. Brin’s father was a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland and his mother a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Larry and Sergey both grew up to respect research, academic study, mathematics and, especially, computers. And it turned out they both had inquisitive minds that believed in the power of knowledge to overcome any obstacle, intellectual or practical. Each had been inculcated into this spirit of intellectual fearlessness at a young age. LarryAndSergey “You can’t understand Google,” early Google employee Marissa Mayer has insisted, “unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. It’s really ingrained in their personalities. To ask their own questions, do their own things. Do something because it makes sense, not because some authority figure told you. In a Montessori school, you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. This is baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking, why should it be like that? It’s the way their brains were programmed early on.” For Larry and Sergey, their intellectual fearlessness overlapped in such a way that their conflicting personalities actually ended up complimenting each other. When Page joined Stanford for the 95/96 academic year, he and Brin became close. Friends took to calling the duo LerryandSergey, suggesting they were somewhat inseparable. The pair would end up debating endlessly on topics ranging from philosophy to computing to films, two equally-matched polymaths thrilling to the intellectual joust. Brin’s hobby project was creating a software program that could provide movie recommendations based on the tastes and viewing habits of other people who had seen similar films (sounds not unlike what Netflix later perfected). Page’s dream obsession was creating a system of networked, autonomous cars to ferry people around (so it’s probably no coincidence that Google is working on driverless cars today). Even though they were the same age, Brin was academically two years ahead of Page because he had completed his undergraduate Computer Science degree at age 19 and had aced all of Stanford’s required doctoral program exams on the first try. But despite this head start, and despite being the recipient of a Nation Science Foundation fellowship which allowed him to do basically anything he wanted, Brin had stalled out in his quest to nail down a dissertation topic. Of course, the newly arrived Page also needed to decide on his dissertation, and so fate pushed the pair even closer together. In January of 1996, LarryandSergey ended up working in the same office, number 360 in the just-completed William Gates Computer Science building on Stanford’s campus. The building was of course named after the founder of Microsoft, who had donated $6 million dollars to the construction. All his career, Gates repeatedly predicted that one day, some student somewhere would found a company that would challenge Microsoft for dominance of the tech industry. His prediction turned out to be right, and that company would come from two students working in a building with his name on it. The web had been a watershed for computer scientists, data scientists, information scientists, mathematicians—the list is endless. For any number of fields, the web was an incredible boon, just from a research perspective. For a wide range of disciplines, the web now presented billions upon billions of datapoints for their research—all available and accessible for free—a corpus of information that was seemingly infinite. Larry Page turned to the web to find a dissertation not because he wanted to build a search engine but because, for a mathematically-inclined computer science graduate student, the web was where it was at in 1996. Page was struck by a fundamental truth about the web that is glaringly obvious when you state it out loud: it is built on links. One page linking to another; one idea linking to another. But what occurred to Larry Page was that, as of yet, no one had bothered to analyze the structure of the link ecosystem in a comprehensive way. For example, it was possible to know that webpage A linked to webpage B because you could see it… you could follow the link. But what about the reverse? What pages had linked webpage A? There was no way to know. You couldn’t follow a link stream backwards, only forwards. It seems a trivial matter to consider, but Page wondered: if you analyzed all of the back links, if you mapped out the link structure of the entire web, what sort of insight might that data give you? Page’s intuition was that this might be more than just an interesting theoretical question. As he mulled over the idea with Brin, their shared upbringing as the children of academics kicked in. LarryandSergey knew the power of the academic citation. Their parents had published academic papers. They, themselves, intended to publish academic papers in order to earn their PHDs. And they knew that any academic paper worth its salt built its argument by citing other academic papers and studies. In the world of academia, those citations, the accumulated number of “votes” from paper to paper served to, over the years, to accrue value to given ideas—to essentially rank them based on the number of citations. The most cited papers were understood to be the most authoritative. “It turns out, people who win the Nobel Prize have citations from 10,000 different papers,” Page would say later. Well, what was a web link but a digital citation? If you analyzed the links, analyzed the citations, you might be able to make inferences about the relative value of a given web page, and possibly even determine which web page was more authoritative by analyzing the back-links in the same way that counting the citations told you which academic paper was the definitive one. Larry Page wanted to map out the value of the web’s connections by going backward through the link chain. Page went to his academic advisor, Terry Winograd, and asked for the money and machines that would allow him to map the web’s links. He dubbed the project BackRub. When asked how much of the web he intended to map, he replied: “the whole web.” BackRub/PageRank “In a sense, the web is this: anyone can annotate anything very easily just by linking to it,” Page would say later. “It seemed kind of cool to gather all the links on the web and reverse them.” So, in March of 1996, Larry Page launched BackRub by sending search bots, known as “spiders,” out into the web to find all the links. He started with a si...
Transcribe →The History of the Dotcom Bubble
Jan 1, 2017Tap to summarizeSummary: The background, root causes and rough outline of the dotcom bubble. How it happened, why it happened and why it’s unlikely to happen again anytime soon. Listen: Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link SoundCloud YouTube Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link Download Here SoundCloud YouTube Bibliography: Normally I list all of my sources after chapter episodes. For this particular episode, I have more than 51 footnotes. All of them will be in the book of course, but the majority of them are magazine articles and more than half of them are for magazine articles that are not online. There was a LOT of library research for this one. So, instead of the full bibliography, I’m going to just list the two books that will really describe the dotcom era for you in greater depth, if you’re interested in learning more: Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004 Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era
Transcribe →Chapter 7, Part 4 – eBay Wins the Auction Wars
Sep 21, 2015Tap to summarizeSummary: Part 2 of eBay’s founding story. How, why and when eBay became the undisputed king of the online auction space. Listen: Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link SoundCloud YouTube Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link Download Here SoundCloud YouTube Bibliography: The Perfect Store: Inside eBay The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute
Transcribe →Chapter 7, Supplemental 1 – Amazon Director, Customer Service Strategy, Jane Slade
Jan 19, 2015Tap to summarizeSummary: Jane Slade joined Amazon.com’s nascent customer service team when it was a couple of people, some computers, and one phone line. Over the coming years, she helped to build the customer service operations at Amazon into the enormous team it is today. Jane recalls for us what it was like in the early days and why keeping customer experience central to everything Amazon does is probably the key driver for the company’s success. Listen: Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link SoundCloud Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link Download Here SoundCloud
Transcribe →Chapter 6 – A History of Internet Porn
Jan 4, 2015Tap to summarizeThis is the transcript of a podcast episode. To listen to the episode in its entirety, click here: “Without porn and Star Trek, there would be no Internet.” – Star Trek television producer Rick BermanIt’s commonly accepted that with any new medium or technological advance, sex and pornographic material can often be the catalyst that drives early adoption. Among the first things produced after the invention of the printing press were of course bibles; but along side the bibles there was ribald and bawdy poetry and stories. When photography was developed in the 19th century, photographic commerce was mostly about selling people portraits of themselves or their loved ones—at least, initially. What really kicked off an industry for photographs was the marketing of pictures of other people… in the nude. These pictures were largely marketed as artistic model studies for aspiring artists, but that does little to explain why they sold in the tens of millions. The Crimean war in the 1850s and the American Civil war in the 1860s really lit a fuse under this industry. Soldiers on the front lines carried pictures of their sweetheart in their pockets, but also pictures of these “model studies.” Pornography was absolutely a part of the birth of cinema. Remember, early cinema was displayed and exhibited as a sort of carnival sideshow attraction. People were wowed by little more than images of trains coming toward them. So, naturally, films of a more risqué variety tended to sell more tickets. The first adult film was probably the 7-minute Le Coucher de la Mariee in 1896, featuring a bathroom striptease. But even the great George Melies was not above producing a film of his wife undressing and bathing in the 1897 film, Apres le Bal. The development of radio and television were largely immune to pornography due to their being broadcast over public airwaves and thus subject to government censorship. But the widespread practice of staging private stag film parties, utilizing 8mm projectors and the like, went a long way toward developing the fraternity culture on colleges, as well as the fraternal order culture… male centric groups like the Elks and Rotary Club. The great explosion of porno theaters in the late 1960s and early 1970s was partially in response to the dissolution of the classic Hollywood studio model, as well as the divestment by the major studios of their theater chain divisions… as well as increased competition from television. Quite simply, showing pornos allowed struggling theaters to stay in business. The simultaneous rise of the peep-show booths in the 1970s would greatly influence a completely separate new medium. When the video game industry was birthed by Pong and Atari in the 1970’s, the video arcade was developed as well, clearly modeled on the old penny arcades that went back to the 19th century and earlier. But the technology developed by the peep booths was largely co-opted by the video arcades to create the video game terminals that parted teenagers from their quarters. The most famous example of porn leading the way for technological adoption came in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the advent of the VCR. Home video allowed people to consume pornography in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. It’s a well known urban legend that the reason the inferior VHS technology won out in the marketplace over the (superior) BetaMax standard was because VHS allowed more storage space on a single cassette. Legend holds that pornography producers could fit more video on VHS and thus VHS won. But several accounts I read when researching this piece are emphatic that this whole legend is false, and that in fact there was just as much porn produced for Betamax as there was for VHS. VHS simply had a better marketing campaign. Of course, that doesn’t stop the urban legend from persisting. Developers of new technologies are cautioned not to ignore the porn audience, lest they suffer the fate of Betamax. Porn in Ones and Zeros Given the importance and impact on our society that computing has had, it’s surprising then to realize that pornography was basically non-existent on computers until relatively recently. Porn basically played no role in the development of computing. There are very simple reasons for this. For one thing, for a long, long time, computers were just text. They couldn’t handle pictures. And while I’m sure if you dug around, some risqué things were sent between early researchers and scientists on the ARPANET, there simply wasn’t a way to distribute or consume pornography on computers until almost the birth of the world wide web. And yet we know that from the very beginning of the Internet era, pornography was synonymous with the Internet. At least in the public’s imagination, the net and the web have been infamously infested with porn. To what extent this was true, we will soon see, but there is no denying that porn played a major role in the popularization of the web. Several concurrent technological developments in the late 1980s made this possible. First, VGA graphics made it possible for images, and specifically digital photographic images, to be rendered on the average personal computer screen. Second, hard drives made possible the storage of personal files and programs on a user’s personal computer. Up until that time, it wasn’t like the average computer user could go to Radioshack and buy a couple of discs of adult content (the notable case of the video game Leisure Suit Larry excepted). Third, and finally, once computers were networked together in a meaningful way, it was possible to distribute or trade pornographic materials, either as commerce or peer-to-peer. For the first time, pornography could disseminate outside the retail or public realm. For our purposes, the thing that makes pornography interesting as we enter the Internet era is that it became easily digitizeable content. In the days of 300 or 1200 baud modems, you couldn’t distribute music or video, but you could distribute pictures. Assuming you were patient. But also, porn was digitizeable content people were very interested in pursuing. And the interest in porn was so enthusiastic, in fact, that many were willing to pay for it. And so, even before the birth of the web, digital pornography was beginning to make its way onto people’s computers. The Usenet newsgroup protocol was initially set up as a text-only bulletin board system. But after the introduction of 8-bit values in the ASCII text, Usenet could suddenly be used to upload and distribute binary files. The intention was to distribute software, but pornographic images soon followed. Whereas today (whisper it quietly) Usenet is still a major forum for pirating digital movies and the like, in the era of 1200 baud modems, image files were the most popular materials people had the patience to upload or download. By August 1996, 5 of the ten most popular newsgroups on usenet were adult oriented; and one, alt.sex, reportedly served half a million users every day. In a Time Magazine cover story on “Cyberporn” in 1995, Phillip Elmert-Dewitt reported that 83.5% of the images on usenet were pornographic. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs, took off. The vast majority of BBSs were small, local, private affairs. You dialed in to one guy’s computer and browsed around to see what games, files and programs he had to share with you. But Sysops soon found the most popular sorts of files people were looking for were porn files. Serendipitously, this happened to coincide with the appearance of the first digital scanners. Sysops quickly put two and two together and realized that if they simply scanned old collections of Playboy or Penthouse, they could quite quickly build up a library of images that people would clamor for. More to the point, as the 80s turned into the ...
Transcribe →Chapter 5, Part 2 – Wired, CNet, Salon, Slate and Suck – More Early Web Media
Sep 15, 2014Tap to summarize Summary: We continue our survey of early web media plays with some that have lasted the test of time and some that, while not currently extant, were lasting in terms of impact. It’s a big episode. WSJ.com. NYTimes.com. EOnline. The Weather Channel. ZDNet. CNet. Salon. Slate. Wired magazine and HotWired.com. And our long lost, beloved Suck.com. Listen: Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link SoundCloud YouTube Listen Right Here On Web Listen on iTunes Download Link Download Here SoundCloud YouTube By the way, as promised, here are some early NYTimes screenshots, compliments of Rich Meislin. Here is a screenshot of @Times on AOL And here’s an early NYTimes.com homepage Bibliography: The Weather Channel Book http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116087/weather-channel-website-chases-storms-clicks http://thevane.gawker.com/the-new-weather-com-is-a-sad-shell-of-its-former-self-1550958111 Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet 1st edition by Motavalli, John published by Viking Adult Hardcover http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZDNet Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ZIFF-DAVIS+UNIFIES+ITS+ONLINE+SERVICES+UNDER+A+NEW+NAME%3a+ZD+NET-a017072062 http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_30/b3639039.htm http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0780435/ http://www.informationweek.com/cnet-to-buy-ziff-davis/d/d-id/1008822? http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/cnet-networks-inc-history/ http://www.salon.com/2005/11/14/salon_history/ http://www.businessweek.com/stories/1996-10-20/honey-whats-on-microsoft <i class='icon-entypo-info'...
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