Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet

Combination-Combination might have continued to be party organisers, or they might have tried seriously to achieve success as a band or become defiant political artists, had it not been for the intervention in autumn 1994 of Franz Penz, one of Herbert and Hans’s teachers at the Academy. In his thirties, with an ill-cut beard to match his ill-fitting pullovers, Penz had wanted to show the two students something novel and exciting that wasn’t available in the art school. Penz was not, however, a great talker and refused to describe the new phenomenon. The boys had begged him to tell them more, but Penz simply said, ‘This is way too cool; I really can’t explain.’ So they went with him across town, to the Technical University’s computer laboratory.

What Penz showed them was the World Wide Web – an easy-to-use information system with a graphical user-interface. Using a mouse to control a pointer on a computer screen, one could click on various parts of the display and bring up new information. It was simple and freewheeling – and, of course, soon to become known as ‘Web surfing’. Within half an hour, Hans had negotiated his way around the Web, from New York to Tokyo to Madrid. ‘I had stars in my brain, and I knew this was exactly what I wanted for the next couple of years. This was the future.’

The World Wide Web began in Switzerland in 1990. A taciturn, idealistic Englishman, Tim Berners-Lee, was working as a researcher at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in Geneva, where he had decided that he wanted to create a common Standard for sharing information. At the time, outside a small community of academics and publishers, this was not thought to be the most exciting task. Berners-Lee’s idea was to create something new for the common good, agreed upon between many parties, of which he would be a catalyst and consensus-builder. Dale Dougherty, a publisher of computer books, met Tim Berners-Lee during this time and was struck by his fervour. ‘His idealism was his driving force; that appealed to me,’ he recalls. ‘There was the idea that information online could be linked together and used.’

Previously, using the Internet to find a useful document on a remote machine was tricky. Postel’s Standards focused on the network and the transferring of information, not on the organisation of information – which usually ended up in tree-like hierarchical file systems, rather like those of a computer’s hard drive. The casual user would have to send a command requesting a list of the contents of a particular directory. To find anything useful required a trawl through directory after subdirectory until one chanced upon something interesting.

Berners-Lee wanted to replace these old and difficult methods by enhancing the existing network with a new information system. His models were academic papers: generally full of links, with citations, references and footnotes scarring the texts. His hope was that the ability to jump directly to the source of a citation, rather than having to plod to the library and search for it, would be immensely useful to the research community.

There were some precedents for this idea. Vannevar Bush, Franklin Roosevelt’s scientific advisor and for many the father of the military-industrial complex, had written an article about such a system way back in 1945. Ted Nelson, a self-described ‘paradigm creator’, had dreamed up an information system named Xanadu in the early 1960s, in which he called the connections between documents ‘hyperlinks’. But nobody had ever managed to get such a system to work across a network of computers. Nor had any single system been widely adopted by sufficient numbers of people to be of real use. At the time of Berners-Lee’s investigation, a competing system called Gopher – much beloved of librarians because it allowed remote access to large databases such as catalogues – seemed like it might become ubiquitous enough for users to invest the time in getting and installing its software. But Berners-Lee was undaunted, and soon adopted the name Hypertext for his document system.

Just as the Internet relies on the Standards of TCP/IP, Tim Berners-Lee needed a set of Standards which would enable computers using Hypertext to communicate and which would dovetail with the Internet itself. Late in 1990 he finalised those Standards. The idea was that the sharable information would be held on a remote computer, which Berners-Lee called the server, and these would be available and accessible to a global audience across the Internet. Other computers within the network would run a different sort of computer application; these would be known as browsers, and could request information from the server. Once the information had made its way to the browser it would appear in a window; the user could then pull up other information by clicking on any of the hyperlinks that were displayed in the browser window.

This transfer of information was regulated by the Standards. The ‘http’ that is now a prefix to Web addresses stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which is just a way of ensuring that computers are speaking the same language. One of the most important parts of the Standards that Berners-Lee created, and which has underlain every dispute about Web domains, is the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. Just as every computer on the Internet has a unique address, which is akin to the location of a house on a street, so the Web needed a definition for the precise location of individual pieces of information – like that of a book or document within the house. That definition is the URL. With it, every music file, program or document can have a specific and precise place on the Internet.

In defining these Standards, Berners-Lee wrote the rudimentary software, as a sort of test, but not on a widely accepted operating system. While touring conferences and writing papers trying to promote what he now called the World Wide Web, he received a muted response. The truth was that Berners-Lee’s Web was just one of a number of different protocols and applications then competing for critical mass in the information community.

In late 1992, Marc Andreessen, the son of a seed salesman from provincial Wisconsin, was a twenty-one-year-old computer programmer finishing his final year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and working for $7 an hour at the University’s National Center for Super-Computing Applications (NCSA). Ambitious and arrogant, he was searching for something new to do when another researcher suggested that he write a browser for the barely known but potentially interesting World Wide Web.

In the middle of November 1992, Andreessen contacted Tim Berners-Lee and the Web community for the first time, in a note to the www-talk mailing list, the notice board for the tiny population of Web developers, in which he said that he was ‘starting the game late’. Over the following weeks, he did everything he could do to catch up – working feverishly, posting messages at all times of the day and night – behaviour that he would later describe as ‘obsessive-compulsive’. Almost from the beginning he referred to the Web and his browser as a ‘product’.

On 29 January 1993, Andreessen made a historic announcement to the www-talk mailing list. ‘By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version 0.5 of NCSA’s … World Wide Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released.’ Two months after they’d started their task, he and Eric Bina, his colleague and collaborator, had created their first Web browser. It was for the computer-operating system favoured by the computer-science community, Unix. Remarkably easy to install, more importantly, it worked; Andreessen pushed it out with aggressive fervour to email groups and bulletin-board services around the Internet. It was adopted with a genuine excitement, in the belief that it really was going to make the difficult world of the Internet popular and easy to use.

There were already other browser developers at work but none shared Andreessen and Bina’s single minded determination. Nor could they match the speed of their codewriting or focus on creating new features to meet the demands of the users. Mosaic would come to dominate the Internet. In the free-for-all of the Internet, the ability to put out software that worked trumped everything else.

Andreessen wasn’t content just to work within the Standards that Berners-Lee had created – he wanted to extend them. Just a month after releasing his first browser, he proposed that it should be possible to view images in the midst of documents. Berners-Lee suggested that it would be better if the images were a hyperlink that when clicked would open up in a separate window. Two weeks later Andreessen announced his unilateral decision to display images in his forthcoming browser Mosaic. He wrote, ‘I don’t see an alternative [to this other] than to … wait for the perfect solution to come along.’

In March of 1993, Tim Berners-Lee happened to be in Chicago. He thought it would be interesting to meet the new enthusiasts for his Web a couple of hours away in Urbana-Champaign. There, in the Center’s basement meeting room, Andreessen and Berners-Lee and their various allies sat face to face.

The purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to agree further extensions to Berners-Lee’s Standards, but beneath the surface of their discussion bubbled genuine hostility between the protagonists. Tim Berners-Lee later remembered it with discomfort: ‘All my previous meetings with browser developers had been meetings of minds, with a pooling of enthusiasm. But this meeting had a strange tension to it.’ For Berners-Lee the universal system that he had created seemed as if it was about to be taken over by a group determined to claim it as their own. Also at the meeting was Tom Bruce, a researcher from Cornell University, who had travelled to Urbana-Champaign with Berners-Lee. When he surprised the Andreessen team by announcing that he was writing the first browser for the Windows operating system, he sensed that he was now characterised as competition (rather than a fellow collaborator) and as such he was the foe to be beaten.

Joseph Hardin, then Andreessen’s boss, recalled that Berners-Lee was upset. ‘This was one of the first times that he really saw the group that was moving so fast. And the technology was taking on a life of its own. It’s like a parent who sees a child grow up all of a sudden. We were playing with his baby.’ Hardin and his team had no qualms about being competitive; they thought that they could be really successful only if their software was adopted by huge numbers of computer users.

The young hacker and the older researcher had very different personalities. Tim Berners-Lee was idealistic, he wanted to create a common standard for sharing information. As Dale Dougherty describes him, ‘Tim wants to talk about ideas, and get you excited about them, rattling through them so fast, he doesn’t care for nuts if you get them all and he doesn’t necessarily care to sell you on something.’

Andreessen was quite different, he was a champion, a salesman, challenging people, and arguing with them. Forceful, determined, persuasive and desperate to push ideas in exactly the directions that he chose. Even his boss at the time, Joseph Hardin, describes his arrogance, ‘He very much felt that he was the leader of the thing.’

On leaving this first meeting in Illinois, Berners-Lee felt that his Web was in danger of fatally fracturing, because Andreessen’s team was running ‘single-handedly’ towards the goal line. As he recalled: ‘Evidence was mounting that “the Web” could splinter into various factions – some commercial, some academic; some free, some not. This would defeat the very purpose of the Web: to be a single, universal accessible Hypertext medium for sharing information.’

To prevent this, soon afterwards Berners-Lee released the Standards under a ‘public license’ which meant that the World Wide Web could never be controlled by a single institution or corporation. He also established the World Wide Web Consortium, a not-for-profit organisation whose sole purpose is to guard the Standards that make the Web work. This was in order to guarantee that the Standards would not be perverted by corporations seeking to extend them to the exclusion of other users, and as a way of preventing any individual, including Berners-Lee himself, from profiting from his innovation.

In various subsequent meetings, tension continued to be felt between the consensual Tim Berners-Lee and the determined and singular Marc Andreessen. Observers describe the young hacker’s behaviour as childish, with his wisecracking to the sniggers of his team, making sarcastic, deprecating comments about his elders, and ‘we are going to conquer the world’ attitude. Nonetheless, this gung-ho spirit did inspire incredible productivity from the Mosaic team. During 1993 the Mosaic Web browser was released first for Windows and then Macintosh – and it was the Mosaic browser that Hans and Herbert discovered via Franz Penz. The Web phenomenon had begun, and growth in traffic suddenly became exponential as new users flocked to the easy-to-use Internet. In the one year until the end of 1993, the number of Web sites grew from a few hundred to more than 10,000.

The opposing characters of the Web’s main protagonists did much for its ultimate success. While Tim Berners-Lee built the Web, safeguarded the Standards and kept order, the younger Marc Andreessen made a compelling browser and fought aggressively to make the World Wide Web a simple, accessible technology.

Marc Andreessen went on to set up a corporation that made browsers – and in doing so became the first of the boyish Internet millionaires, a role model for a new generation of entrepreneurs using the Internet as a platform for profit. For their cover, Time magazine placed him barefoot on a gold throne – the rebel king.

By contrast, Tim Berners-Lee adopted the role of consummate politician, defending his creation from avaricious colonisation by any commercial interest. Fortune magazine in turn depicted him as Saint Tim. Always the European, he would later write, ‘Many people ask why I didn’t commercialize the Web. It’s a strange question. By asking the question, people are suggesting that they respect people as a function of their net worth. That’s worrying. It’s not an assumption I was brought up with; and it is disturbing, the extent to which it pervades [the USA].’

Without these two notes the Web phenomenon could not have had such explosive resonance. What Berners-Lee and Andreessen achieved was remarkable: despite the anarchistic sensibility of the Internet community, they had built order, a set of common rules that was widely adopted because nobody owned or controlled it. Yet the Web would not have been so massive had a singular individual and the company that he became part of not dominated the process in the first years. This struggle between self-interest and public good, between wilful individualism and determined collectivism, was the defining conflict of the birthing of Web technology. This conflict would set the framework for and determine the path of many others of the coming years.

From Vienna, Hans and Herbert quickly communicated their discovery of the World Wide Web to the other members of the gang. ‘A world opened up to me that I did not know existed. It was like a parallel universe, and it seemed to be incredibly huge,’ says Franco. ‘I had this impression despite the fact that there was almost exclusively university stuff up there.’ Almost immediately, the group came to see the Internet as more than a vehicle for simple communication – they began to realise that it was a medium through which they could define their identity.

Herbert and Hans were so excited about their discovery that they demanded Internet access at their art school, and even set about organising access for the rest of their class (though their efforts were met with derision from the archly hip art students, who thought that the latest cool media was video, not the Internet). In Zürich, the rest of the crew wangled passwords for the computer lab at the university.

One of the first things the friends used the Web for was to search for a new name, because Thomas hated Combination-Combination. He thought it was both too long and too dull ever to be seen as anything cool. Instead, the story goes that Juri created a little computer program called the Term Shooter, a script that was able to generate names. It created four-letter words with a vowel in the middle, like that of their role model Sony, and descenders or ascenders for graphic effect. Supposedly, one night towards the end of 1994, they were huddled around their respective computers in Vienna and Zürich with the Term Shooter spewing out thousands of scrolling names. It was like a transnational shoot-’em-up word game; if a name didn’t stick immediately, it wasn’t worth considering. At first they found nothing. Then one name resonated across the collective. Herbert, Juri and the others danced on their keyboards. It was better than Sony. It looked good and it had comic connotations. They liked it for its whimsy, for its drug reference and its playfulness. The name was etoy.

Later in 1994, Peter was using Mosaic to navigate his way around the Web one day when he chanced upon a Web site, based at a polar-research centre in Ohio, that also hosted Web sites for free. There he created the beginnings of etoy’s first site; it was dreary, with black text on a grey background. It had a Web address and a URL with so many parts that it was impossible to remember: http://www-bprc.mps.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/hppetoy.html. Next to the icon of a little bomb, Peter had written, ‘etoy, here we are now! … etoy is THE new lifestyle for the coming generation. Please visit us when this site will be finished, in mid-January.’

The boys celebrated in the way they knew best: by getting drunk at a party. Elated by their new discovery, they ran round scribbling the ‘@’ symbol on to party-goers’ hands. As Peter remembers, ‘We were so excited that we told everybody how brilliant the future would be.’

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