1 00:00:00,012 --> 00:00:05,358 So again, I think Paul really created for us the first search engine, and showed 2 00:00:05,358 --> 00:00:10,484 that the web could be a mostly consume environment and be extremely useful. 3 00:00:10,484 --> 00:00:15,235 If you think about it, if there was no web and there was no content, how would you 4 00:00:15,235 --> 00:00:18,191 know that the web is a great way to view content? 5 00:00:18,191 --> 00:00:21,229 So Paul Kunz had the advantage that he had a lot of content. 6 00:00:21,229 --> 00:00:25,026 And it was content that at least the physicists found extremely valuable. 7 00:00:25,026 --> 00:00:28,835 And then people go, oh, I can see. Matter of fact, I remember when I first 8 00:00:28,835 --> 00:00:30,997 saw the web. I, I was, like, okay, fine. 9 00:00:30,997 --> 00:00:35,425 It's got pictures, who cares? Because other things like Gopher were just 10 00:00:35,425 --> 00:00:38,042 as good. And then I saw the ability to go to 11 00:00:38,042 --> 00:00:43,231 Federal Express and track a package, and I go like, now that's a cool idea, right? 12 00:00:43,231 --> 00:00:47,967 The goph-, Gopher couldn't do that. In fact, in 1993, sort of three years 13 00:00:47,967 --> 00:00:52,480 after the web was created, the web was actually not all that popular. 14 00:00:52,480 --> 00:00:56,214 1991 was the Paul Kunz, but that was mostly physicists. 15 00:00:56,214 --> 00:01:00,662 And a few nerds, myself included. But, in 1993, Gopher was a much better 16 00:01:00,662 --> 00:01:03,715 product and it was a much more beloved product. 17 00:01:03,715 --> 00:01:08,401 And the problem again went down to, came down to the fact that the network was so 18 00:01:08,401 --> 00:01:13,081 slow that simple tech, text based things worked better than highly graphical 19 00:01:13,081 --> 00:01:16,081 things. As it, there's apocryphal story that 20 00:01:16,081 --> 00:01:21,629 happened in March of 1993 where there was a meeting of the internet engineering task 21 00:01:21,629 --> 00:01:24,686 force that does standards for all these things. 22 00:01:24,686 --> 00:01:28,779 And they have a Bird of a Feather session for Gopher and a bird of a feather session 23 00:01:28,779 --> 00:01:32,111 for the World-Wide Web. And the Gopher session is full of people. 24 00:01:32,111 --> 00:01:36,402 And they couldn't have enough in the room. They were sitting on the floor and peaking 25 00:01:36,402 --> 00:01:39,398 in the door. And then, later, I wasn't at this meeting, 26 00:01:39,398 --> 00:01:42,132 by the way. Rich Wiggins, my co-host on the television 27 00:01:42,132 --> 00:01:45,537 show was at this meeting. And, what he tells me is at the Birds of a 28 00:01:45,537 --> 00:01:48,326 Feathers meeting, there was almost nobody there. 29 00:01:48,326 --> 00:01:52,412 And Tim Berners-Lee was like, I've been working on this thing for three years, and 30 00:01:52,412 --> 00:01:55,089 it's better than Gopher, but nobody wants to use it. 31 00:01:55,089 --> 00:01:59,237 And then people in the room at that point told him, they said it's just too complex, 32 00:01:59,237 --> 00:02:04,357 it's too hard to get working. And so, this is a long time ago and the 33 00:02:04,357 --> 00:02:09,169 web was not assured to be a success at that point. 34 00:02:09,169 --> 00:02:15,254 It just wasn't really clear. So, 1993 was kind of like, it was a real, 35 00:02:15,254 --> 00:02:21,344 there's a lot of things that could have been very different in 1993. 36 00:02:21,344 --> 00:02:26,696 And I want to show you a commercial, and there's a couple of these out there, from 37 00:02:26,696 --> 00:02:31,394 1993 that one of the large telecommunications vendors put out as a 38 00:02:31,394 --> 00:02:35,650 national ad campaign. And this is what the telecommunications 39 00:02:35,650 --> 00:02:39,290 industry was thinking about, they saw it all happening. 40 00:02:39,290 --> 00:02:43,265 They saw this all happening, they knew it was going to be big. 41 00:02:43,265 --> 00:02:47,021 They knew it was going to allow interactions in many ways. 42 00:02:47,021 --> 00:02:51,622 They knew it, they weren't dumb, it's wasn't like, oh what's going on? 43 00:02:51,622 --> 00:02:56,592 No, not at all, they absolutely knew. So this, this really wonderful series of 44 00:02:56,592 --> 00:02:59,860 commercials is [laugh] it's just quite amazing. 45 00:02:59,860 --> 00:03:03,657 So take a look. At the end you'll see, actually, what the 46 00:03:03,657 --> 00:03:06,845 large telecommunications company's name is. 47 00:03:06,845 --> 00:03:10,918 So take a quick look. I hope you got to see a couple of those. 48 00:03:10,918 --> 00:03:15,602 I just, I just love watching them. Over and over and over again and like 49 00:03:15,602 --> 00:03:18,707 whoa, what a vision, what a beautiful vision. 50 00:03:18,708 --> 00:03:23,658 One of them has to do with like personal assistant in the shape of a dog. 51 00:03:23,658 --> 00:03:28,680 So, again, sort of looking back at this and looking at things that might not have 52 00:03:28,680 --> 00:03:34,228 been there's nobody that really makes the connection that Steve Jobs might have had 53 00:03:34,228 --> 00:03:39,264 some impact on the world wide web. But in a way, he was actually quite 54 00:03:39,264 --> 00:03:43,853 influential. Steve Jobs, of course, founded Apple and 55 00:03:43,853 --> 00:03:50,981 then was kicked out of Apple at, after the Macintosh and he started a new company 56 00:03:50,981 --> 00:03:54,342 called NeXT. And if you listen closely to Robert 57 00:03:54,342 --> 00:03:59,172 Cailliau says, and you listen closely to what Paul Kunz says, and the computer that 58 00:03:59,172 --> 00:04:03,302 was on my desk during this entire period of the 1990s to the 93, were NeXT 59 00:04:03,302 --> 00:04:05,707 computers. Next was a bold, Unix-based, 60 00:04:05,707 --> 00:04:11,011 highly-networked, high-definition display, high-performance computer, that Steve Jobs 61 00:04:11,011 --> 00:04:15,131 built when he formed the company NeXT. After he got fired from Apple. 62 00:04:15,131 --> 00:04:19,255 Of course, he eventually came back to Apple and the NeXT technology is 63 00:04:19,255 --> 00:04:22,413 Macintosh, that's the Macintosh operating system. 64 00:04:22,413 --> 00:04:27,315 So if you make a mistake in MacIntosh, you might see an error message that starts NS 65 00:04:27,315 --> 00:04:30,237 something. That's called NeXT Step, which is the 66 00:04:30,237 --> 00:04:35,096 operating system on these next computers. For the first three years of the web, it 67 00:04:35,096 --> 00:04:39,658 was pretty much only on the NeXT computer. People would, even the server was, you 68 00:04:39,658 --> 00:04:44,214 know, on the NeXT computer and the browser was on the NeXT computer and so it's, the 69 00:04:44,214 --> 00:04:47,598 NeXT computer really kind of did that. I, I wrote an article. 70 00:04:47,599 --> 00:04:53,605 In sort of a couple months after Steve Jobs died for [inaudible] Computer 71 00:04:53,605 --> 00:04:58,709 Magazines, January 2012 issue. That really sort of tried to at least, 72 00:04:58,709 --> 00:05:04,643 from a historical perspective, point out how important Steve Jobs may have been in 73 00:05:04,643 --> 00:05:09,366 helping the internet get formed. So we started our journey at University of 74 00:05:09,366 --> 00:05:13,214 Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We got the NSF, created the University of 75 00:05:13,214 --> 00:05:16,033 Michigan. We created the Web, we created the first 76 00:05:16,033 --> 00:05:19,520 Web server; and now we're going to come back to where we started. 77 00:05:19,520 --> 00:05:23,240 We're going to go back to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 78 00:05:23,240 --> 00:05:28,036 These are the folks that basically exploded the web. 79 00:05:28,036 --> 00:05:33,106 Moved the web from the academic space to the commercial and end user space. 80 00:05:33,106 --> 00:05:37,166 And there's all kind of things. The network was growing. 81 00:05:37,166 --> 00:05:41,778 Things were getting faster. Personal computers were getting better at 82 00:05:41,778 --> 00:05:46,606 a very rapid phase because the IBM PC is almost ten years old and many computers 83 00:05:46,606 --> 00:05:49,331 have, and we did quite fast in the, in the 90s. 84 00:05:49,331 --> 00:05:55,202 So the 1990s are computing, and their display capabilities were, were getting 85 00:05:55,202 --> 00:05:59,380 better very rapidly. And in this environment, NCSA at 86 00:05:59,380 --> 00:06:05,830 Urbana-Champagne, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champagne, built an open source web 87 00:06:05,830 --> 00:06:09,300 browser that worked on Mac, Windows, and Unix. 88 00:06:09,300 --> 00:06:14,867 It was the first web browser that did this and it, it was the thing that really made 89 00:06:14,867 --> 00:06:19,764 it so average people who had PCs or MACs in their home could get a network 90 00:06:19,764 --> 00:06:25,159 connection and start enjoying all of this new content that was coming up on the 91 00:06:25,159 --> 00:06:28,822 world wide web. After this, the NCSA staff, student 92 00:06:28,822 --> 00:06:34,182 programmers, software developers, all formed the company Netscape in order to 93 00:06:34,182 --> 00:06:38,471 commercialize all this. Joseph Hardin was the supervisor of the 94 00:06:38,471 --> 00:06:42,365 software development group at NCSA that was responsible. 95 00:06:42,365 --> 00:06:49,233 For building and releasing both the Mosaic web browser and the HTTPd web server as 96 00:06:49,233 --> 00:06:52,270 open source and gave them away free.