DOWNLOAD THIS: THE DIRTY SECRET ABOUT THE NET*
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates gazed around the dark, wooden interior of Harvard’s Sanders Theatre and recalled for the standing-room-only crowd the last time he was in that room--for the classics class taught by the legendary professor John Finley. The audience, on hand for an event called the Harvard University Conference on the Internet & Society, roared with laughter. Harvard’s most famous dropout looked momentarily puzzled, not knowing that the day before, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy had made exactly the same observation, boasting that he had spent those early morning lectures snoring in the balcony--and graduated nonetheless. * Gates and McNealy are not exactly sentimentalists, and neither had anything else to say about their tenure at America’s citadel of higher learning. In fact, neither had much to say about the subject at hand, namely the Internet and society. They did, however, have plenty to say about their businesses and about how their software technologies--Windows and Java, respectively--would serve as the crucial building blocks for the great wired world of the future. * And therein lies the first lesson about the Internet: where just a few years ago it was a modest government-funded network connecting universities run by a handful of denizens with a decidedly egalitarian, anti-commercial philosophy, today the Internet is first and foremost a roiling capitalist battlefield, where giant computer and communications companies and cunning entrepreneurs thrust and parry in the hope of controlling the big new markets of tomorrow. Nowadays, the future of the Internet is dependent on a single question: “What will people buy?” * A mind-boggling amount of money and manpower is being devoted to answering this question. Microsoft, to take the most telling example, has during the past year reoriented its entire business strategy around the Internet and plans to spend billions of dollars during the next few years on everything from an Internet TV channel to local Internet-based entertainment and information services. Sun saw its share price triple in 1995 as investors gambled that Java and other technologies will eventually yield big profits. And thousands of smaller companies--many flush with cash, thanks to Wall Street’s enthusiasm for any investment with the word “Internet” attached--are in the hunt as well. “Gold rush” is the metaphor of choice in describing the Internet business today.
Of course, as in all gold rushes, great fortunes will be lost as well as made. Only a few years ago pundits were predicting the great new age of interactive television, or pen computing, or multimedia CD-ROMs, or even--then and always--the picture phone. None of those technologies lived up to their promise. Even people who correctly foresaw the importance of the personal computer didn’t necessarily make much money on it; early investors in Microsoft and Intel and Compaq made fortunes, but those who bet on Commodore or Apple or Ashton-Tate did not.
Without a doubt, though, the Internet is for real. As the daylong crash of America Online this summer made clear, millions already take electronic mail and other Internet services for granted. Among the economic and educational elite, among the ever-shifting subculture of technophiles and across much of the business world, the Internet is a way of life. Whether it will fulfill the semi-utopian visions that marked the Net’s early years of foment, however, is another matter. President Clinton, for one, has proposed a $500-million upgrade of the network with the goal of connecting every home and classroom during the 21st century. For now, here’s what to expect--and what not to--from the Internet as the millennium approaches.
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Despite the hype, the Internet is at least 10 years from becoming a true mass medium -- An estimated 60 million people worldwide have access to the Internet, and that number has nearly doubled just in the past year. The graphical portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, which hardly even existed three years ago, now boasts hundreds of thousands of sites, and hundreds are being added every day. More than 70% of Southern Californians know what the Internet is, according to a Times technology poll. The media are basically on target in heralding the Internet as a development comparable in magnitude to the television or the telephone. The ability to communicate easily with many other people and instantly summon words, numbers, pictures and sounds from millions of locations around the world holds extraordinary promise and has already changed the world in many ways.
Yet the development of the Internet into a mass consumer medium will be far slower than most of those involved in the business like to admit. For starters, there is the simple arithmetic of computer ownership. Even though consumers have been buying personal computers at a remarkable rate during the past two years, only 35% to 45% of all U.S. households currently own one. That’s a lot of PCs, but a little over half of them are equipped with modems, and only half of the modem owners actually subscribe to an online service or Internet provider. That means that only 10% to 15% of U.S. households have an Internet connection, compared with the 98% that have a television set and the 94% that have a telephone.
Internet usage is strongly correlated to high levels of income and education and--despite the Net’s global reach--proximity to one of the two coasts of the United States. Such demographics might entice some marketers, but they’re a major barrier to TV-like ubiquity. It’s expensive to surf the Net: $2,000 or so for a PC, $20 a month for a basic subscription and additional monthly charges for many of the most interesting and useful services. Although some elements are getting cheaper, others are getting more expensive, and no one is focused on wiring lower-income consumers.
But the barriers to broad consumer acceptance are not strictly economic. For all the “user-friendly” graphics and icons of today’s ultra-powerful PCs and for all the elegant simplicity of Internet software, computers remain complicated and intimidating machines that many people just won’t touch. Installing Internet software, establishing an account, downloading files, procuring the “plug-in” modules needed for audio and video information--all of these routine operations can stymie even people who are comfortable with technology. A truly consumer friendly machine like the television has one instruction: turn it on. PCs and the Internet have a long, long way to go.
There’s no shortage of efforts aimed at addressing these problems. A service called WebTV (Times Mirror, parent company of The Times, owns a minority stake), features a $300 box that plugs into a TV set and turns it into a computer for surfing the World Wide Web. All that’s needed to operate it is a simple remote-control device or a wireless keyboard, and everything is designed to be easy and foolproof. The main limitation is that the television monitor, which has a far lower resolution than a video screen, isn’t very good for retrieving information and reading text, which is what the Internet is mainly used for today.
What WebTV would be good for is any kind of service--online movie libraries or multi-player video games or multimedia educational programs or sophisticated home shopping malls--that uses a lot of video, graphics and sound. And in that respect, WebTV underscores the other big obstacle preventing the Internet from becoming a mass medium: Many of the entertainment and other services that would have broad appeal are currently possible only in bastardized form or not at all because of technical limitations.
Most consumers access the Internet via a dial-up phone line whose top speed is 28.8 kilobits per second--far too slow for even low-quality video. The entire infrastructure, moreover, is groaning under the weight of the huge traffic increases and is incapable of handling a lot of multimedia information effectively. (The strain is such that several universities may start a so-called Internet II, exclusively for academic purposes.) Even a simple picture can take a minute or longer to materialize on the screen, and that’s unacceptably slow. These problems will be solved but they will not be solved quickly. New high-speed telephone technologies and the use of cable television wires and satellite links to access the Internet will make much faster connections available eventually, but even optimists say only a very small percentage of households will have access to these innovations soon. Improvement of the overall network will be similarly arduous. Until the Internet can zip through video and graphics as easily as it does plain old text, a lot of consumers will stay away.
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Publishing on the Internet will be dominated by giant media companies. And they’ll lose money doing it for a long, long time -- For much of its short life, the Internet has been largely a conduit for noncommercial conversation and information. Even as commercialization overwhelms the Net’s nonprofit culture, electronic mail remains by far the most popular of all online activities. And there are tens of thousands of electronic discussion groups, mailing lists and personal Web pages that exist for reasons other than profit. But as a tidal wave of big-dollar electronic publishing initiatives washes across the network, it will get harder and harder for capital-poor voices to be heard.
It isn’t difficult to see why the publishing world is so interested: Chopping down trees, grinding them into paper, slathering on some ink with a big, expensive printing press and then shipping the finished product by truck is not exactly a paradigm of efficiency. So much cheaper and swifter to send all that information digitally down a phone line--and electronic transmission enables the reader to pick and choose the content, too.
Newspaper publishers and other traditional media companies have, of course, been down this road before. In the mid-1980s there was videotext, a crude type of online service that swallowed many millions of corporate dollars before mercifully being put to sleep. In the early 1990s, before the rise of the Web, publishers launched electronic products in partnership with online services such as Prodigy and America Online, only to be ambushed by the Internet.
But newspapers and magazines have little choice but to invest yet again in electronic services. Newspaper readership has been declining for decades, and the Internet represents an obvious threat to the classified advertising business, which accounts for about one-third of newspaper revenues. Why sift through all that infinitesimal print when you can type “Ford Taurus, ’91 or later, under $8,000, L.A. County” and get the information you need instantly? Thus most newspapers, including this one, have launched Web sites, some of which are among the biggest sites on the Net.
Meanwhile, voracious would-be media companies see changing technology as an opportunity to overthrow the old publishing order. Microsoft is investing about $500 million in MSNBC, a cable television and Internet joint venture with NBC News launched in July. It is rumored to be ready to spend that much again on its new local online service, currently dubbed CityScape, that will provide entertainment listings and community information. It has funded an online political magazine--Slate, edited by ex-New Republic editor Michael Kinsley--and an adventure travel magazine, and turned over an entire new section of its corporate campus to employees involved in “content.”
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is pouring tens of millions of dollars into a company called Starwave, whose Internet services include ESPNET SportsZone, a sports information Web site built in conjunction with the popular cable channel, and Mr. Showbiz, an online entertainment magazine. Pacific Bell just debuted an ambitious service called At Hand, which combines Yellow Pages-type business information with editorial content. Time Warner has spent heavily on its Pathfinder service, developing it into one of the Net’s largest publishing sites.
Then there is the clutch of Internet start-ups that has gotten big cash injections from venture capitalists, corporate partners and the stock market. Pointcast, a Cupertino-based firm, delivers “channels” of news and other information over the Internet to personal computer screen-saver programs. CNET, based in San Francisco, is taking on the lucrative computer trade press with a series of cable TV shows and Web sites that focus on computer product information and industry news. Even companies that started out providing indexing and searching capabilities to help people find things on the Web--notably Yahoo, InfoSeek, Excite and Lycos--now see themselves as publishers too, adding editorial content such as Web site reviews and community information.
In all of this, though, there is a rub: How do you make money? The answer, so far, is that you don’t. As Don Logan, president of Time Inc., declared famously about Pathfinder, online publishing has given new meaning to the term “black hole.” What’s the problem? First, it’s difficult to charge a subscription fee: Web surfers are reluctant to pay for online information, and if you’re going to pay for a publication anyway, then why not get the highly portable, eminently easy-to-use print version? The Wall Street Journal is now charging for its online edition, ESPNET SportsZone charges for some features, and others have indicated that they plan to charge, but the majority of electronic publications are still free. Most online publishers, therefore, hope to make money via advertising--but that, as we will see, has its own problems.
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Internet advertising doesn’t generate anywhere near enough revenue to support all the ventures that claim they’re supported by advertising -- In its most primitive form, advertising on the Internet differs only slightly from print advertising. Offer a little electronic display “banner” on the Web page, which a user can click on to go to the sponsor’s site, and voila: traditional print advertising transferred to the computer screen. You can make the ads blink and flash and dance about, the better to attract attention. In the case of Pointcast, they’re even on quasi-permanent display, turning any equipped computer that isn’t in use into a desktop video billboard.
But the reach of the Internet is still so limited that advertising is a tough sell. A network television commercial will often reach 20 million people; major magazines have circulations of 3 million to 4 million, and big daily newspapers around 1 million. A successful Web site, by contrast, might get 50,000 visitors a day. The Web ads, moreover, are small and ephemeral. While their impact can, in theory, be more accurately monitored, major advertisers have been decidedly cautious.
Jupiter Communications, a New York research firm, estimates that total Internet advertising this year will be worth $300 million--a tiny fraction of the more than $50 billion a year U.S. marketers spend in all media. Even five years from now, Web advertising volume is projected to reach just $5 billion. And Procter & Gamble sent a chill through the Internet industry earlier this year when it suggested paying for ads not according to how many people theoretically see them, but according to how many people actually click on the advertising banner for more information.
Thousands of Web sites are counting on tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars a year in ad revenues to pay the bills; the numbers just don’t add up. A tour of large Web sites reveals plenty of advertisements, certainly, but a lot of them are barter deals involving computer and communications equipment and software, and a lot of them are sold very cheaply.
True, Internet advertising can be targeted much more narrowly. You might see an advertisement for a tennis racquet when you retrieve an article about tennis, or receive a pitch for stereo equipment based on your frequent visits to music-oriented Web sites. This really resembles direct mail more than advertising, and it has great potential for certain kinds of businesses. Many people, though, may not appreciate the invasion of privacy that this kind of advertising implies. And the McDonald’s, Coca-Colas and Procter & Gambles of the world, who, above all, are looking to reach the most people for the least amount of money, will continue to steer the vast bulk of their marketing dollars to traditional media.
The truth about “online” shopping: Few will be buying -- Of all the things that people might want to do on the Internet, online shopping has the most obvious business logic. Selling goods is selling goods, after all, and if you can do it without the expense of a bricks-and-mortar store or a fat, glossy, expensive-to-mail catalog, then so much the better. For many kinds of products, buying on the Net should be more convenient and more efficient. Not only can you stay home, you can also do more extensive comparative shopping. Furthermore, some online shopping services--such as ONSALE, one of the most successful online shopping sites, offering computer products--have developed auction-like markets in which buying is something of a game, and the prices are good, too. Firefly, developed at the MIT Media Lab, assists music shoppers by suggesting CDs that they might like based on matching their previous preferences with other people’s expressed likes and dislikes.
Nevertheless, online shopping remains a very small business, and outside of a few specialized areas--notably computer products--it shows few signs of taking off. The slow start is often blamed on unproven payment systems and somewhat overblown concerns about security. But the real obstacles are more fundamental. For one thing, retail shopping is, in many cases, a form of entertainment that the Internet cannot hope to match. And for the goods that people already buy over the telephone--catalog merchandise, for example, or plane tickets--the Internet faces a huge barrier: buying things over the phone with a credit card is incredibly simple, and it’s hard for the Internet to make that process any easier. The Net might be cheaper for the vendor--no telephone operators, no expensive catalogs--but customers need a reason to change, and so far there isn’t one.
Certainly, the small minority of people who simply prefer to do things online will buy stuff there. Net-savvy bargain-hunters will benefit from sophisticated price-comparison services. The development of “digital cash” systems that would enable people to spend small amounts of money to buy information on the Net--25 cents for this story, say--will dramatically broaden the range of what can be sold online. Many new businesses, like the huge online bookstore Amazon.com, will find a niche. And better technology will make it possible to do things such as take a tour of a virtual store and even put clothes on a three-dimensional model of yourself to see how they look.
Until such wonders arise, though, there isn’t any reason to believe that the Internet will become much more than a minor offshoot of the catalog marketing business when it comes to selling consumer merchandise. The giant retailer Sears, remember, co-founded Prodigy more than a decade ago in the belief that people would want to shop online, but finally sold its stake in the service this year after losing an estimated $500 million. The Web is more powerful than Prodigy ever was, but when it comes right down to it, virtual malls aren’t anywhere near as much fun as the real thing.
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The fortunes that have been made on the Internet have come from building the network itself. And the dominant users of all this new technology have been businesses, not consumers --*To a far greater extent than is realized, the Internet revolution has really been about a major change in the design of large computer and communications systems. The Internet is essentially just an advanced data communications network based on a set of “open” communications protocols known as TCP/IP that enable otherwise incompatible computers to communicate.
The graphical portion of the Internet, the World Wide Web, lays a simple set of page-design protocols on top of that so that text, pictures and graphics on those various types of computers can be seen by anyone. It thus becomes possible for many different types of computers in far-flung locations to talk with one another and share information without special programming.
More than any other technical step, it was the creation of the software program known as the Web browser--by a group of University of Illinois students led by Netscape Communications co-founder Marc Andreessen--that ignited the Internet frenzy. The browser enabled even a technically illiterate PC user to glide easily from any Internet-connected computer, or server, to any other. Each of the servers can contain one or more “sites,” offering an array of text, graphics, audio or video information, transaction services, or even live discussion groups.
It’s an extraordinarily powerful capability--and a number of companies have made fortunes building the hardware and software products that make it all work. Netscape, by establishing its browser and server software as the early standard, has become a household name in less than two years, generating huge profits for its early investors. Cisco Systems, which builds obscure and complicated data communications computers known as routers, has rode the Internet building boom to become an 8,500-employee behemoth with more than $4 billion in annual sales in just 12 years. Netcom and PSI, though struggling of late, grew at a torrid pace by offering the communications services needed to hook up to the Internet.
The biggest consumers of all these technologies, though, are not newly enlightened consumer enthusiasts but large and medium-sized companies that see them as a way to improve their internal operations and better communicate with customers and suppliers. At institutions of all stripes across the country, these internal networks--known as Intranets--are growing like weeds. At Macromedia Inc., a San Francisco software company, the Intranet serves not only as a companywide bulletin board but also as a means for employees to turn in expense reports, for job prospects to submit resumes and for customers to get the latest product support and technical information. No more manuals, no more phone tag, no more cludgy, sealed-off corporate computer systems; the “open” technologies of the Internet make it possible to take a whole new approach.
Zona Research of Redwood City estimates that sales of servers for the public Internet will be worth just under $1 billion this year--but sales of Intranet servers will total nearly $2.7 billion. “Most expectations are that the Internet is going to get big first inside companies,” says Richard Shaffer, principal at Technologic Partners in New York. “They already have networks, they’re already wired.” And a good number of the services now offered over the public Internet are business-to-business services of some form. Whether it’s a newspaper reporter checking facts on a company Web site or a stock trader retrieving research reports or a salesman sending e-mail to his customers, most Internet usage today is business-oriented.
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The easy money has already been made in the Internet business. The most important rule now: “Watch out for Microsoft.” -- Ever since Netscape went public in August 1995, with its stock price more than doubling on the first day of trading, the shares of companies in the Internet business have been the subject of a remarkable speculative frenzy. For a time, Internet start-ups that didn’t have any revenue--let alone profit--were able to reap staggering sums in public offerings; the most notorious example was Yahoo, whose stock nearly tripled on the first day of trading even though the most elementary analysis of the company’s business plan showed that such prices made no sense. Technology stocks as a whole enjoyed a stupendous run-up in 1994 and 1995, and companies that could claim an Internet connection did best of all. Bud Colligan, chairman of Macromedia, calls it an “aura”: His software company gained one with the release of the Shockwave multimedia software--never mind that it was free--and saw its share price more than quadruple over the course of 1995.
The stock market has cooled since, and many Internet stocks--Macromedia included--have fallen dramatically from their highs. But the lesson remains: Investing in these companies is a highly speculative undertaking and, in many cases, it will take years before a company’s business is developed enough to be judged in its own right.
There was a time when upstart entrepreneurs could slip in under the radar of the established computer and communications giants and steal a new market--but that time has passed. Netscape, though well established, is now engaged in a brutal battle with Microsoft for control over Internet software standards, and defeat could mean death. Even though it still commands about 75% of the browser market, Netscape is clearly scared and has complained to the government about Microsoft’s allegedly anti-competitive conduct. Microsoft, which rightly sees Netscape’s inroads as a long-term threat to many of its most lucrative product lines, has been relentlessly aggressive, improving its Internet Explorer Web browser dramatically, spending freely to line up allies and actively exploiting the many advantages it enjoys by virtue of its near-monopoly position in PC software.
Microsoft, in fact, aims to control large swaths of the Internet universe by establishing its software as the standard and becoming a major supplier of information and entertainment services. It has the money to do it: more than $7 billion in cash on hand, with profits of $559 million in its most recent quarter and solid 25% to 30% annual revenue growth. Anyone in the Internet business who isn’t hoping to be bought by Gates & Co. is wary of them--or ought to be. The Justice Department is once again investigating the company for possible antitrust violations, but Microsoft’s rivals aren’t counting on anything coming of it.
A similar, if less frightening, evolution is underway on the communications side of the business: The sleeping giants have awakened, and they’re putting tremendous pressure on the upstart companies that provide access to the Internet. It’s almost certain that AT&T;, MCI, Pacific Bell and a few others will dominate the business of connecting people to the Internet; such hook-ups are, after all, just a variation on phone service. Some small players will carve out niches through good customer service and highly targeted marketing, and new technologies like wireless Internet access should also create entrepreneurial opportunities. But more and more every day, the Internet business is a game for deep-pocketed players who can afford to spend heavily now and wait almost indefinitely for their payoff.
This is not all bad. Big investments often mean improved services, and judging by the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into venture capital funds aiming to invest in Internet opportunities, one can hardly argue that the entrepreneur is being snuffed out. Still, many in the business believe that Microsoft has too much power and is too willing to use it; and big, established companies are not likely sources for the novel ideas that will really make the Net interesting and fun.
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There will be no single “killer app” that turns the Internet into a mass phenomenon -- For all its potential as a publishing and marketing medium, many of the most ambitious ideas about how to use the Internet involve new ways of connecting people. One obvious example is Internet phone service. Already it’s relatively easy to make a phone call over the Internet. Though the voice quality leaves something to be desired, it’s improving rapidly. It’s also possible to call from a computer to a regular telephone, and the potential savings of talking via a $20-per-month Internet hook-up rather than a traditional long-distance phone line are compelling--especially for overseas calls.
Another attractive variation on a venerable medium is Internet radio, driven largely by a technology called RealAudio. Anything from a concert to a talk show can now be broadcast over the Internet, and listeners can tune in simply by going to the Web site in question and clicking on a button. As with the Internet phone, the sound quality is lacking but getting better fast. Your computer can act as a radio with thousands of channels or a jukebox with thousands of song titles or even as your own private broadcasting center. As the Internet is gradually upgraded to handle TV-quality video (and it will be decades before such capabilities are available to a majority of households) the Net will become a TV network, too. All of the features that pundits were ascribing to interactive television a few years ago, such as movies-on-demand, video-conferencing and elaborate multi-player games, will eventually be a part of the Internet.
Then there is the raft of variations on the phenomenon known as “chat.” Largely popularized by America Online, which counts on it for an estimated 30% to 50% of its revenues, chat enables friends and strangers alike to engage in a free-form electronic conversation. Oftentimes the discussion revolves around sex, and other times it seems to revolve around nothing whatsoever, but the popularity of chat--and of e-mail and online forums where one can post messages--clearly reflects a yearning for the means of making human contact.
Companies are developing “virtual worlds” in which people can interact not just via text, but with graphic representations of themselves, or “avatars.” OnLive, a Cupertino start-up that counts Intel and AT&T; among its backers, is marrying virtual worlds with the Internet’s ever-improving voice communications capabilities. In the OnLive world, as your “avatar” moves closer to others, you can hear them speak and participate in their conversation. If it’s dull, you can walk off and the voices fade as you move away. As the Net improves to accommodate better graphics and video technology, these kinds of features will be incorporated into many Web sites.
Some of the things the Net has been used for since its infancy will grow in importance as well. The discussion forums on old-style computer bulletin boards and the part of the Internet known as Usenet enable people with like interests--political, professional, or social--to find one another. Simple electronic mailing lists have become a medium for new kinds of storytelling. At colleges and universities and, increasingly, at elementary schools and high schools, the Internet is shaping the educational experience.
In many of these areas, the lack of a viable “business model” will slow the development. E-mail, after all, is free to anyone with an Internet account, and so are the thousands of Usenet discussion forums. AOL relies on per-hour subscription fees, but those are gradually becoming unsustainable in the age of the Web. Microsoft mainly hopes to use chat and other kinds of communications services to help establish supremacy in Web browsers and other Internet software.
Certainly, chat and virtual worlds and discussion forums are partly a matter of taste. Many of the unique information-finding capabilities of the Internet, moreover, are mainly of interest to the business world. And the Western world is not exactly suffering from a lack of entertainment and shopping alternatives. But taken together, these capabilities will ultimately touch almost everyone.
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Nobody knows exactly how the Internet will reshape our lives -- When Alexander Graham Bell tried to sell his telephone patents to Western Union, the telegraph giant decided that people would rather receive messages in Morse code than speak live. The motion picture camera was initially used to film stage plays. Television was considered a replacement for the radio. Even the personal computer, whose impact is still playing out, was seen by many of its early proponents as a hobby or, oddly, as a tool for political liberation.
There are reasons to be vaguely optimistic that the Internet will make the world better. Unlike television, it’s a medium that requires a certain amount of engagement. It can bring people together. Perhaps it can even bring peoples together. But all of that comes later, much later. For the moment, there is business to be done.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
THE ROAD TO SURF CITY
1969
ARPANET, a Defense Department-sponsored network linking computers at university research facilities, is launched with an exchange of messages between UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park.
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1972
A program that improves sending electronic mail over ARPANET--it includes the now-ubiquitous @ symbol in addresses--is developed by Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge, Mass., computer company that built and operated the early ARPANET. E-mail is born.
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1983-88
ARPANET switches to a communications protocol called TCP/IP, which greatly simplifies sending and receiving data among incompatible computers. The change spawns many new networks, interconnected through ARPANET. Soon these networks are able to bypass ARPANET and communicate directly with one another. The Internet as we know it is born.
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1989
ARPANET, now obsolete, is decommissioned.
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1990
The World Wide Web, the portion of the Internet able to transmit multimedia graphics, is invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN physics lab in Switzerland. Internet usage spreads far beyond universities to include everyday PC owners. Online services such as CompuServe--which routes part of its traffic over the Internet--introduce thousands to e-mail and electronic “chat.”
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1994
University of Illinois students, led by Marc Andreessen, develop Mosaic, the original World Wide Web browser. It allows users to move through Web sites by pointing and clicking with a mouse instead of typing commands.
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1995
Number of Internet users reaches 35 million.
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1996
The Internet is entrenched as a common tool in the business world and with much of the nation’s economic and social elite, but not among the general public. WebTV, @Home and other initiatives are launched to attract nontechnical consumers to the network.
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1998
Microsoft firmly establishes its software as the dominant vehicle for almost all Internet-related activities. Struggling Netscape Communications is acquired by a large computer firm.
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2000
Internet advertising reaches $5 billion a year, but many large marketers and Internet shopping services scale back their investments in the face of disappointing sales. Ambitious Internet companies step up efforts in fast-growing European and Asian markets.
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2020
Ultra high-speed access to the Internet via cable, satellite and telephone lines becomes commonplace, reviving consumer interest by allowing TV-quality video, richer graphics. Delivery of movies, music and information directly into homes via the Internet reshapes motion picture and recorded music industries.
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2050
The Internet is now fully integrated into daily life, yet nearly invisible. No longer an entity unto itself, it has become a multipurpose backbone for every sort of communication. Virtually all interactions that involve the transmission of words, voices, pictures or money now spend part of their journey on the Internet.
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Timeline source: “Where Wizards Stay Up Late,” by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon (Simon & Schuster)
