Internet
United States feared that losing out a telecommunications office with a nuclear strike from Soviets, it would be impossible to coordinate. So they need a decentralized network and funded the DARPA research.
AT&T didn't like decentralized idea. In 1984 they argued to the antitrust committee that by breaking up the company, the government will not be able to retaliate after a nuclear strike.
National Supercomputing Act and NSFNet. Al Gore.
What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You To Know | Al Gore | TED - YouTube
Acceptable Use Policy. NSFNet was federally funded, so commercial use was banned.
Rollerskates and VCR.
Microsoft's MSN and Apple's eWorld.
TCP/IP wasn't built into the OS until Windows 3 and macOS ???.
Gopher vs WAIS vs WorldWideWeb. Tim Berners-Lee borrowed hypertext ideas from Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson.
All text-based, no images.
All protocols are text-based from the start. Arguments about efficiency and performance. ASN.1 protocol. Radical new idea – "View Source".
Mosaic was single GUI for Gopher, WAIS, and WorldWideWeb.
Cern – Geneva.
Adding the image tag encourages the use for entertainment and mass market content and some people wanted internet to be only for scientific use.
Netscape Navigator 2.01 in 1995 - YouTube
Got an offer from Sun. Why did it fail?
Got a call from Jim Clark who founded Silicon Graphics before. Stanford Engineering Hero Lecture - Jim Clark in conversation with John Hennessy - YouTube
At the time of founding Netscape it felt like this temporary and not real thing, so two initial business plans were to build Video-on-Demand service or online services for Nintendo.
Paul Graham starts Viaweb in 1995.
SUN = Stanford University Network.
Spyglass Mosaic later was bought by Microsoft.
Suing University of Illinois. Marc still holds a grudge and does not return the calls from new administrations.
Parallels with AI: unsafe and big companies want to dominate it. Open source?
Follow up questions
- What does Tim Berners-Lee think about Mosaic and Netscape? Is it true that if Netscape didn't push back Microsoft, we were living in a different world?
- Can I buy Netscape t-shirt?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Montulli