Выбери любимый жанр

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 106

Перейти на страницу:

Изменить размер шрифта:

106

Particularly popular were the chat rooms, where people with similar interests—computers, sex, soap operas—could gather. They could even go off into “private rooms” to talk by mutual consent or, at the other extreme, visit one of the “auditoriums” that might feature a session with a celebrity. AOL’s users were not called customers or subscribers; they were members. AOL thrived because it helped to create a social network. CompuServe and Prodigy, which began primarily as information and shopping services, did the same with tools such as CompuServe’s CB Simulator, which replicated in text the wacky pleasure of talking on a citizens-band radio.

Kimsey the bar owner could never quite get why healthy people would spend their Saturday nights in chat rooms and on bulletin boards. “Admit it, don’t you think it’s all horseshit?” he would ask Case half jokingly.³⁶ Case would shake his head. He knew that there was a pony in it.

AL GORE AND THE ETERNAL SEPTEMBER

Online services such as AOL developed independently of the Internet. An entanglement of laws, regulations, traditions, and practices made it impossible for commercial companies to offer direct Internet access to ordinary folks who were not connected to an educational or research institution. “It now seems really silly, but up until 1992, it was illegal to connect a commercial service like AOL to the Internet,” Steve Case said.³⁷

But beginning in 1993, the barrier was lowered and the Internet was made accessible to everyone. This disrupted the online services, which until then had been walled gardens where members were coddled in a controlled environment. It also transformed the Internet by producing a flood of new users. But most important was that it began to connect the strands of the Digital Revolution in the way that Bush, Licklider, and Engelbart had envisioned. Computers and communications networks and repositories of digital information were woven together and put at the fingertips of every individual.

It began in earnest when AOL, following the lead of a smaller competitor named Delphi, opened a portal in September 1993 to allow its members access to the newsgroups and bulletin boards of the Internet. In Internet lore, the deluge was called, especially by contemptuous veteran netizens, the Eternal September. The name referred to the fact that every September a new wave of freshmen would enter universities and, from their campus networks, get access to the Internet. Their postings tended to be annoying at first, but within weeks most had acquired enough netiquette to assimilate into the Internet culture. The opened floodgates of 1993, however, produced a never-ending flow of newbies, overwhelming the social norms and clubbiness of the net. “September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended,” an Internet hand named Dave Fischer posted in January 1994.³⁸ A newsgroup sprang up named alt.aol-sucks, where old-timers posted their diatribes. The AOL interlopers, read one, “couldn’t get a clue if they stood in a clue field in clue mating season, dressed as a clue, and drenched with clue pheromones.”³⁹ In fact, the Eternal September’s democratization of the Internet was a good thing, but it took a while for veterans to appreciate this.

This opening up of the Internet, which paved the way for an astonishing era of innovation, did not happen by chance. It was the result of government policies, carefully crafted in a thoughtful and bipartisan atmosphere, that assured America’s lead in building an information-age economy. The most influential person in this process, which may come as a surprise to those who know of his role only as a punch line to jokes, was Senator Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee.

Gore’s father was also a senator. “I remember driving with my dad from Carthage to Nashville listening to him say how we needed better than these two-lane roads,” the younger Gore recalled. “They won’t handle our needs.”⁴⁰ Gore Sr. helped craft the bipartisan legislation for the interstate highway program, and his son took that as an inspiration for helping to promote what he dubbed the “Information Superhighway.”

In 1986 Gore launched a congressional study that looked at a variety of topics, including creating supercomputer centers, interconnecting the various research networks, increasing their bandwidth, and opening them up to more users. It was chaired by the ARPANET pioneer Len Kleinrock. Gore followed up with detailed hearings that led to the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, known as the Gore Act, and the Scientific and Advanced Technology Act of 1992. These allowed commercial networks, such as AOL, to connect with the research network run by the National Science Foundation, and hence to the Internet itself. After he was elected vice president in 1992, Gore pushed the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993, which made the Internet widely available to the general public and moved it into the commercial sphere so that its growth could be funded by private as well as government investment.

When I told people I was writing a book about the people who helped invent computers and the Internet, the most predictable quip I got, especially from those who knew little about Internet history, was “Oh, you mean Al Gore?” Then they would laugh. It’s a mark of our political discourse that one of the significant nonpartisan achievements on behalf of American innovation got turned into a punch line because of something that Gore never quite said—that he “invented” the Internet. When he was asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in March 1999 to list his qualifications to be a candidate for president, he cited, among other things, “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”⁴¹ It was inelegantly phrased, as answers on cable news shows often are, but he never used the word invented.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet’s protocols, spoke up on Gore’s behalf. “No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President,” they wrote.⁴² Even Republican Newt Gingrich defended him, observing, “It’s something Gore had worked on a long time. . . . Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet.”⁴³

The takedown of Gore was the harbinger of a new era of rising partisanship accompanied by a lack of faith in what government could do. That’s why it’s useful to reflect on what led to the Eternal September of 1993. Over the course of more than three decades, the federal government, working with private industry and research universities, had designed and built a massive infrastructure project, like the interstate highway system but vastly more complex, and then threw it open to ordinary citizens and commercial enterprises. It was funded primarily by public dollars, but it paid off thousands of times over by seeding a new economy and an era of economic growth.

I.?An Ethernet or WiFi today can transmit data at a billion bps, which is more than 3million times faster.

II.?Western Union later bought the business and turned it into its Mailgram service.

III.?A reference to the phrase used during the 1980 drama in which Americans were held hostage in Iran.