What happened in that big moment?
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You call it a message and not an e-mail.
E-mail was introduced in 1971. That's when I realized this was about people communicating, because it suddenly dominated the traffic exchange. An e-mail has a protocol behind it that allows you to compose, send, acknowledge and have it recorded. We were just sending data from one machine to another with a meaning. The meaning was to log in.
Did you have any inkling about how broad and indispensable the Internet would become -- not as just an academic tool but a social tool?
You ask the key question. I did foresee that the Internet would be always on, always available, it would allow anybody to connect anyplace, anytime, and it would be invisible. But I did not foresee that my 99-year-old mother would be on the Internet. So the social side I totally missed. I thought this was about computer-to-computer communication or people-to-computer communication, not a mechanism for communities to form and grow and interact.
You weren't alone. You approached AT&T with packet switching and they weren't interested.
Worse than that. They said it wouldn't work. Then they said even if it does work, we want nothing to do with it. At that time, all their revenue was coming from voice communications. They made a long-term mistake big-time, but short term you could understand it.
What has the Internet begotten?
The Internet has constantly surprised us with applications that no one anticipated, so you can say the early Internet was the progenitor of these magnificent applications such as the Web, which is an application, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, peer-to-peer networking, file sharing and some cellphone technology as well.
And spam. Tell me you get spam like everybody else.
You bet I do. I have to train my Mac operating system what's junk and what's not, and it gets to be tiresome after awhile. Spam first appeared in 1994, the first [commercial] spam. [A law firm] sent out an e-mail to the world saying that there was a "green card" lottery, come to us and we'll help you get into the lottery. We looked at it and said, "What the hell is that? They can't advertise on our Internet!" So we sent messages back saying, "You can't do that. Bad. Stop. Horrible." We sent so much e-mail back to them that we took down their server, so by accident we created the first denial of service.
Are you on Facebook? Do you Twitter?
Nope. I don't want to know that you're picking up a cup of coffee right now, and you don't want to know that I'm holding a pen in my hand.
Thousands of people have made billions of dollars from the Internet. Have you been able to profit a bit too?
I've certainly not been in the billionaire class. I've made some nice money in some companies [I helped start] and investing in other companies. Back then, the early pioneers were not at all motivated by money. Our gratification was to share ideas with each other, do good technology and have others use it. There were five phases: The first were the pioneers, then you get the implementers, you get the value-adders, you get the deployers, and finally you get to the billionaires, and the billionaires were the latter phase when the people who developed the applications were able to take advantage of it.
Seven-year-olds can do things on computers that I can't. Do you ever find yourself in that position?
Not "ever" -- often! I formed [a company] with one of my graduate students -- this young man got his first computer at age 6. The machine was part of his DNA. He could just wave his hands over the keyboard and make things come to life. That's not in my DNA. I was building crystal radio sets [at that age]. The 6-year-olds are teaching the 8-year-olds these days.
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