Stars of the Internet : GET TO KNOW THEM, THEY ARE THE FUTURE
In slightly more than a decade, the Internet has evolved from a funky little government-owned message-swapping system to a virtual community of 25 million users worldwide. Hundreds of computer scientists, capitalists, academics, and lawmakers have played a part in this astonishing transformation. Who are the key players? Here are six whose effects are tangible. As Netizens like to say, “YMMV”--or, Your Mileage May Vary. Meaning that there’s no consensus about who matters most in cyberspace. Clearly, though, these seven Netfolk have had a profound impact--and some of them will have a still bigger impact in months to come.
Marc Andreessen
Occupation: software designer; Age: 24; Achievement: leader of Netscape design team; Computers: Compaq, IBM, Mac and a Unix workstation; First time on the Net: 1984; Internet address: marca@netscape.com; Favorite Web site: Wall Street Journal; Guiding principle: “In a fight between a bear and an alligator, what determines the winner is the terrain.”
In 1992, there was this new thing called the World Wide Web, and no easy way to find your way around it. A 21-year-old University of Illinois undergrad named Marc Andreessen had an idea: a tool that would allow users to navigate the Web by pointing and clicking with a mouse. He put together a loose-knit team of programmers, and they wrote Mosaic, the first true Web browser.
Meanwhile, Jim Clark, founder and chairman of Silicon Graphics, a high-end computer manufacturer with annual revenues of $1.5 billion, quit his job, made a deal with Andreessen and co-founded Netscape in April, 1994. By October they were distributing a beta-test version. A year later, Netscape had become one of the most sensationally successful products ever launched. Last August, 5 million shares of stock were issued in the first public offering--Andreessen took a million of those shares, putting his current net worth at well over $100 million.
Already Netscape is being touted as a threat to Microsoft, but Andreessen says it simply filled a need that other people weren’t addressing. “Eighteen months ago, there weren’t any tools that ordinary people could use to view, create and access content [on the Internet], Andreessen says from a car phone somewhere in Silicon Valley. “We gave them the ability to do that.”
Now Netscape is catalyzing what could be a fundamental shift in emphasis from programs that sit in your personal computer to resources scattered across thousands of remote sites. Netscape can now operate in conjunction with “applets,” small applications that zip down the wire into your system and run themselves. This means that Netscape is starting to look more like an operating system such as Microsoft’s omnipresent Windows. “Yes,” Andreessen agrees. “We’re building a platform so other people can build as many other things onto it as possible.”
Some complain that it isn’t quite so simple. Bruce Fancher, president of Phantom Access Technologies, a software development company that also operates a Web service provider named Mindvox, charges that Netscape ignores existing standards and invents its own, forcing Web-page designers to do things Netscape’s way or risk incompatibility. “The growing dominance of Netscape increasingly casts a dark shadow over the future of the Internet as a level playing field,” Fancher says. This is exactly the complaint that has been leveled many times against Microsoft--giving the comparison of the two companies an interesting twist.
Andreessen, in any event, remains bouyant about Netscape’s possibilities. “There’s no end of things we can do,” he declares. “ We can keep adding capabilities and functionality, multimedia and 3-D graphics. As far as we’re concerned, we’ve only just gotten started.”
David Lawrence
Age: 28; Occupation: overseer of usenet news groups Computer: Micron P-133; First time on the Net: 1985; Internet address: tale@uunet.uu.net; Favorite Web site: www.unitedmedia.com (for its free syndicated comic strips); Favorite news groups: rec.sport.unicycling; alt.boomerang; Guiding principle: “Those who find they have nothing to go out of their way for soon find that they have nothing at all.”
Ask hard-core ‘netters who has the most influence online and David Lawrence’s name crops up more than any other. Not because of what he builds or designs--he works as an administrator at UUNET Corp. in Fairfax, Va., where he maintains Internet-related hardware and software--but because of what he does in his spare time.
Since January, 1991, Lawrence has been an unpaid volunteer helping to run usenet--the Internet’s sprawling news exchange that carries more than a million messages a day. On usenet you can get medical advice, swap opinions on recent movies or discuss philosophy. As Nebraska Sen. James J. Exon never tires of informing Congress, you can also find a supply of pornography, if you know where to look.
There are more than 13,000 usenet news groups worldwide, each covering a distinct topic. Since it’s a typically anarchic Internet phenomenon, you can theoretically start your own group and use it for any purpose you like. In practice, though, it’s not so simple. The text in your news group must be stored on computers at other Internet sites before subscribers at those sites can read it, and those sites won’t accept your group until it has Lawrence’s informal blessing. And the only way to get that is by going through a ballot process under his supervision. Net users must vote to create a new group with a majority of more than 100 before Lawrence advises system administrators--the people who run Internet sites--to carry it. “And 90% of the time,” says Joel Furr, another unpaid usenet volunteer, “sysadmins accept David’s recommendations without question.”
How did Lawrence acquire this strange power in a system that’s not supposed to be run by anyone?
“I took on the job from another volunteer, named Eliot Lear, when he burned out. He had inherited it from Greg Woods. Woods was the one who codified the guidelines for news groups creation, in cooperation with a bunch who called themselves the Backbone Cabal.”
Translation: A bunch of Unix geeks at various colleges made up the rules on a strictly informal, do-it-yourself basis. Some users have accused the cabal of censorship. But Lawrence never nixes a new group because of its content. He just insists on a healthy majority of voters who want to read it.
Talkative in a nerdy style, Lawrence is an odd mixture of pride and modesty. He claims that he doesn’t have any real power. “I just make recommendations,” he says. Press the point that his “recommendations” are almost always obeyed, and Lawrence concedes, “Well, I do have more influence than just about anybody else. But since I have a better understanding of how usenet works than the average user, maybe it’s right that I should.”
These days, Lawrence feels disillusioned by the online community, and his usenet reading time has shrunk from about 20 hours to 10 hours per week. “It used to be that every September, when kids came into college and got Internet accounts, we’d see them online doing lots of stupid things. But now the saying goes, ‘It’s always September on the Net.’ There’s just too much noise”--that is, messages don’t have much content.
But even as Lawrence bemoans the chaos caused by Net riffraff, he keeps the faith.
“[The Internet] is freeing a lot of people from the normal paradigms of communication. The government’s afraid of this kind of freedom, especially when pedophiles come online. But a lot of us feel that evil can’t flourish in the light of day. We want to see people doing despicable things online--so that other people can reply and discredit them.”
This is one reason why Lawrence hangs onto his unpaid job. He’s proud that he has never refused to recommend a news group because he didn’t like its content. And he fears that his successor might be less tolerant.
Ann Beeson
Age: 32; Occupation: : attorney; Achievement: fighting online censorship; Computers: an “ancient, horrible” 386 and an “equally ancient” Radio Shack laptop.; First time on the Net: 1994 Internet address: beeson@aclu.org; Guiding principle: “If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.”--Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall
After less than a year at the ACLU, Ann Beeson is already a central figure in the fight for free speech online. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have longer records as cyberspace lobbyists, but Beeson is making up for lost time.
During 1995 she helped stop college adminstrators from censoring student access to the Net, organized lobbying efforts opposing Sen. Exon’s “decency amendment” that would criminalize some forms of expression online, launched a biweekly online cyber-liberties newsletter and worked with ACLU affiliates to fight several state bills that threatened to impose Net censorship. In New York and Washington states, the bills were stopped.
“Ann has definitely taken the lead in bringing the voice of the ACLU to the Net,” says Mike Godwin, legal counsel at EFF.
A onetime jazz singer who also holds a pilot’s license, Beeson--slim, dark-haired and stylish--looks as if she might be more at home at a Fortune 500 corporation than in the cheaply furnished offices of the ACLU. Surprisingly, she comes from a conservative Republican family in Texas, “where the ACLU is a four-letter word. In fact, I think my dad coined that expression.”
Public-interest issues have always obsessed her. With the prospect of the Exon’s decency amendment becoming law, she vowed to file “a constitutional challenge on behalf of the ACLU, and more than a dozen other plaintiffs--all people who post material [online] that might be deemed criminal under the amendment’s vague decency standard.”
Proponents of legislating online censorship especially anger Beeson because, she says, “they claim they want to protect children. But high school students in New York used the Internet to receive and publish testimony from victims of human rights abuses in Sarajevo who had no other way of communicating with the outside world. Teen-agers at high risk of suicide have learned from the Internet that they are not alone. Student activists in China used the Net to express uncensored outrage at their government on the fifth anniversary of the Tian An Men Square massacre. The decency amendment would make these communications a crime in the United States. That is simply outrageous.”
Decency lobbyists such as the Christian Coalition have successfully persuaded legislators to vote for the most restrictive version of the Exon amendment during committee negotiations. Beeson, however, is unwilling to compromise.Asked if there should be any limits at all on online speech, she responds: “Only if it is an immediate incitement to imminent personal violence.”
Lobbyists such as the Christian Coalition successfully persuaded legislators to vote for the most restrictive version of the Exon amendment during committee negotiations. Beeson, however, is unwilling to compromise. Asked if there should be any limits at all on online speech, she responds: “Only if it is an immediate incitement to imminent personal violence.”
No exceptions?
She doesn’t hesitate. “None at all.”
Brian Pinkerton
Age: 31; Occupation: software designer; Achievement: author of Webcrawler; Computers: Pentium PC running NextStep, a Macintosh and a NeXT workstation; First time on the Net: 1983; Internet address: bp@webcrawler.com; Favorite Web site: Digital Lantern, a guide to restaurants in San Francisco, at https://www.sf.net/lantern/welcome.html; Guiding principle: “I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. . . .” --Andrew Carnegie on why he donated to libraries
In February 1994, Brian Pinkerton, a University of Washington graduate student and refugee of Apple co-founder Steven Job’s ill-fate NeXT computer company, got tired of following “links” from one Web site to the next, looking in vain for “the good stuff.” He thought there ought to be a computer program to do his searching for him--so he wrote one. He called it Webcrawler. “I made it available in April 1994. I put it on my own Web site, on my desktop computer, where anyone could use it. I also gave away a few copies.”
Other webcrawling “robots” soon followed, among them Lycos, Open Text, InfoSeek, and Excite. But Pinkerton’s was first. “I perceived the need for it ahead of other people,” he says, “by just a couple of months.”
Still, that was enough time to put him in the class of young entrepreneurs who make a killing by seeing what others haven’t. America Online bought his product last year, and today Webcrawler runs from AOL’s computers--although it’s still a free service to anyone who accesses the site at https://www.webcrawler.com.
Pinkerton received a bunch of AOL shares and a presumably handsome sum of cash--he won’t say how much--and and is now financing the construction of a new home. Webcrawler, meanwhile, is currently used by an estimated 1.5 million people every week and handles more than 2 million queries a day. It maintains an index of 29,000 Internet sites worldwide and adds indexes more than 2,000 new sites monthly.
For the next half-year or so, Pinkerton will be refining his brainchild. “It’s got to get bigger and smarter,” he says, citing the need for ever-better ways to sift through the Net’s blizzard of information. “When you go to a reference librarian, you can say, ‘Give me a high-quality factual source.’ But there’s nowhere you can ask this question online. There’s a terrible need for people who can make good subjective evaluations and tell the rest of us what’s out there.”
Bill Joy
Age: 41; Occupation: software and hardware designer Achievement: wrote software and co-designed hardware that made the Internet possible; Computers: Sun Microstations and Macintosh. First time on the Net: 1975; Internet address: bill.joy@sun.com; Guiding principle: “The important thing is to pursue great things and find the scope to do them. Even if you fail, it’s still better than just sitting there.”
Let’s say you’re an Internet service provider--that is, you offer people a phone number they can dial via a modem as an entry point to the Net. Chances are, you use a Sun microcomputer to route the incoming calls, manage e-mail and store Web pages. Suns aren’t for the faint of heart. They don’t run MS-DOS or Windows, and they aren’t Mac-compatible. But they’re used so widely, in so many Internet sites, no other product has done more to open up cyberspace.
A major factor in this success story is that every Sun has been sold with free software that links it directly into the Internet or any networks. And the man who wrote that software is Bill Joy.
In 1982, Joy was a graduate student at UC Berkeley working on a new version of the Unix operating system that would help computers communicate with each other over the fledgling Internet. The system turned out to work almost too well. “We had a success disaster,” he says. “Lots of people wanted our software, but the university was unable to give us more space.”
With three partners and two engineers, Joy started Sun Microsystems in 1982, shortly before he finished his graduate work at Berkeley. The company was soon selling all the computers it could build, succeeding because Joy’s sofware created a standard that ensured compatibility among the Internet’s users. “The reason the Net grew so fast,” says Joy, “is that there was one implementation of the protocols that everyone could get”--in other words, one language that was understood by computers at every Internet site. “And,” notes Joy, “they got it from us.”
Joy has a soft, dreamy, New Age tone when he talks about creativity and innovation, and he says he has a lot of respect for risk-takers such as Steve Jobs--”Microsoft has made more money, but I admire people for doing things that are great.”
At the same time, there’s a tough edge to the gentle vision. Right from the start, Joy chose to give away his Net-compatible version of Unix free of charge--not for altruistic reasons, but to establish a market that the company could exploit. Their competitors didn’t quite understand the strategy, and suffered from it. Or, as Joy points out: “It was a situation where people who didn’t share fell behind.”
Sun now employs more than 14,000, but Joy shows little interest in management. He’s fled the corporate headquarters in California for Colorado, mainly, he says, to get away from meetings. “Right now, I’m working with two other people, planning the architecture for a new processor chip. And I’m also finalizing the specification for Java.”
Java is a new computer language that will make it easier to view images and perform tasks online, regardless of your brand of computer. Joy didn’t invent Java, but he took an active role in refining it. “I commissioned a detailed spec of the language because we felt it was likely to be used by a lot of people and this was a unique opportunity to clean things up.”
Indeed, Joy seems to maintain a genuinely idealistic outlook on the potential of computers. “The Internet,” he says softly, “was designed during the Cold War as a communications network to survive nuclear attack. Now it’s being used for things that are a lot more beneficial.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Those of us who worked on it 20 years ago are really happy to see how it’s worked out.”
Rob Glaser
Age: 34; Occuptions: multimedia developer; Achievement: founder of RealAudio; Computers: Gateway 2000 laptop and desktop; First time on the Net: 1983; Favorite Web site: https://www.hotwired.com. Guiding principle: “Be realistic, demand the impossible.”
When Rob Glaser went to work at Microsoft in 1983, there were only a couple hundred employees. “Then one day, 10 years later,” he says, “I looked up and realized there were 15,000 people around me.”
Glaser, by then vice president of Microsoft’s multimedia and consumer systems, decided he missed the excitement of a start-up company. In high school he’d established his own radio station. Maybe the World Wide Web would allow him to combine his interests.
So it was that Glaser founded RealAudio in 1994 near his home in Seattle. The company, now with 80 employees, has successfully developed software to receive and decode sound via modem. Sound on the Net usually involves a three-step procedure: download an audio file, decompress it, then play it. With RealAudio, everything happens instantly while you’re online.
The RealAudio web site at https://www.realaudio.com offers National Public Radio shows, ABC headline news and more than 350 other sites transmitting audio programming.
For example, says Glaser, “Sports Zone puts up basketball games from https://espnet.sportszone.com. A traveling sports fan can listen to his team’s game from anywhere in the world. Then there’s Cnet--they create their own news and feature programmiong five days a week. And Warner Brothers has samples of Madonna’s new album.”
Real Audio quickly attracted competition. Glaser responded with a new version of the software offering enhanced sound quality. Twenty thousand people, he claims, download the free RealAudio software every day, enabling the company to grab 90% of the market.
Still, no one knows if Net users will become addicted to real-time audio on demand. But Glaser has no regrets about leaving the security of Microsoft.
“I find the entrepreneurial environment much more fun,” he says. “And we’ve only scratched the surface.”
