Anablog

Jun 25 2008 5:20PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |
Blog This! using:  Blogger.com | LiveJournal |
Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us

Here is a pretty good article in Vanity Fair. No need to click on all the "chapters"-- they are just the 9 pages of the article. My favorites quotes:

I get credit for a lot of things I didn’t do. I just did a little piece on packet switching and I get blamed for the whole g#$%amned Internet, you know? Paul Baran

When I had this idea about building a network—this was in 1966—it was kind of an “Aha” idea, a “Eureka!” idea. I went over to Charlie Herzfeld’s office and told him about it. And he pretty much instantly made a budget change within his agency and took a million dollars away from one of his other offices and gave it to me to get started. It took about 20 minutes. Bob Taylor

The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. Paul Baran

Anyway, we were all engineers of both ilks, the narrow-tie, nine-to-five serious engineers and the stay-up-all-night long-haired hackers who had earned their way into the respect of the engineers. Stewart Brand

And as I’m giving my demo, the damned thing crashed. And I turned around to look at these 10, 12 AT&T suits, and they were all laughing. And it was in that moment that AT&T became my bête noire, because I realized in that moment that these sons of bitches were rooting against me. Bob Metcalfe

At one point CERN was toying with patenting the World Wide Web. I was talking about that with Tim one day, and he looked at me, and I could see that he wasn’t enthusiastic......He convinced me of that, and then I worked for about six months, very hard with the legal service, to make sure that cern put the whole thing in the public domain. Robert Cailliau

One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with the Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo. Jim Clark

From a scientific point of view none of us really respected Microsoft. There was definitely a sense of: They’ve put out of business three or four major companies, and they did it simply by copying what they did and outpricing or outmaneuvering them in the market. This is a general feeling of computer scientists everywhere, that Microsoft doesn’t tend to innovate as much and really just enters the market late, takes it over, and then stays at the top. Lou Montulli

I was the first at Microsoft to know about Netscape. I remember calling down there and saying, Hey, I’m with Microsoft, and I’m looking around at all these people who started Web browsers because I think we’re going to do one inside of Windows and we want to know if we might look at your technology as a source for this, do a license deal, or we buy your technology. And they told me basically to go f$%k off. Thomas Reardon

Microsoft was making it very clear that they were going to kill us. We were trying to negotiate deals where Compaq and Gateway and all these P.C. manufacturers would bundle our Web browser. And Microsoft threatened them. Microsoft threatened them that if they did they would revoke their license to Windows. So, needless to say, everyone backed off. Jim Clark

The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo, or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising. Vinod Khosla