The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 115
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Cunningham was blown away by HyperCard when he first saw it, but he found it cumbersome. So he created a supersimple way of creating new cards and links: a blank box on each card in which you could type a title or word or phrase. If you wanted to make a link to Jane Doe or Harry’s Video Project or anything else, you simply typed those words in the box. “It was fun to do,” he said.80
Then he created an Internet version of his HyperText program, writing it in just a few hundred lines of Perl code. The result was a new content management application that allowed users to edit and contribute to a Web page. Cunningham used the application to build a service, called the Portland Pattern Repository, that allowed software developers to exchange programming ideas and improve on the patterns that others had posted. “The plan is to have interested parties write web pages about the People, Projects and Patterns that have changed the way they program,” he wrote in an announcement posted in May 1995. “The writing style is casual, like email. . . . Think of it as a moderated list where anyone can be moderator and everything is archived. It’s not quite a chat, still, conversation is possible.”81
Now he needed a name. What he had created was a quick Web tool, but QuickWeb sounded lame, as if conjured up by a committee at Microsoft. Fortunately, there was another word for quick that popped from the recesses of his memory. When he was on his honeymoon in Hawaii thirteen years earlier, he remembered, “the airport counter agent directed me to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.” When he asked what it meant, he was told that wiki was the Hawaiian word for quick, and wiki wiki meant superquick. So he named his Web pages and the software that ran them WikiWikiWeb, wiki for short.82
Dan Bricklin (1951– ) and Ev Williams (1972– ) in 2001.
Jimmy Wales (1966– ).
Sergey Brin (1973– ) and Larry Page (1973– ).
In his original version, the syntax Cunningham used for creating links in a text was to smash words together so that there would be two or more capital letters—as in CapitalLetters—in a term. It became known as CamelCase, and its resonance would later be seen in scores of Internet brands such as AltaVista, MySpace, and YouTube.
WardsWiki (as it became known) allowed anyone to edit and contribute, without even needing a password. Previous versions of each page would be stored, in case someone botched one up, and there would be a “Recent Changes” page so that Cunningham and others could keep track of the edits. But there would be no supervisor or gatekeeper preapproving the changes. It would work, he said with cheery midwestern optimism, because “people are generally good.” It was just what Berners-Lee had envisioned, a Web that was read-write rather than read-only. “Wikis were one of the things that allowed collaboration,” Berners-Lee said. “Blogs were another.”83
Like Berners-Lee, Cunningham made his basic software available for anyone to modify and use. Consequently, there were soon scores of wiki sites as well as open-source improvements to his software. But the wiki concept was not widely known beyond software engineers until January 2001, when it was adopted by a struggling Internet entrepreneur who was trying, without much success, to build a free, online encyclopedia.
Jimmy Wales was born in 1966 in Huntsville, Alabama, a town of rednecks and rocket scientists. Six years earlier, in the wake of Sputnik, President Eisenhower had personally gone there to open the Marshall Space Flight Center. “Growing up in Huntsville during the height of the space program kind of gave you an optimistic view of the future,” Wales observed.84 “An early memory was of the windows in our house rattling when they were testing the rockets. The space program was basically our hometown sports team, so it was exciting and you felt it was a town of technology and science.”85
Wales, whose father was a grocery store manager, went to a one-room private school that was started by his mother and grandmother, who taught music. When he was three, his mother bought a World Book Encyclopedia from a door-to-door salesman; as he learned to read, it became an object of veneration. It put at his fingertips a cornucopia of knowledge along with maps and illustrations and even a few cellophane layers of transparencies you could lift to explore such things as the muscles, arteries, and digestive system of a dissected frog. But Wales soon discovered that the World Book had shortcomings: no matter how much was in it, there were many more things that weren’t. And this became more so with time. After a few years, there were all sorts of topics—moon landings and rock festivals and protest marches, Kennedys and kings—that were not included. World Book sent out stickers for owners to paste on the pages in order to update the encyclopedia, and Wales was fastidious about doing so. “I joke that I started as a kid revising the encyclopedia by stickering the one my mother bought.”86
After graduating from Auburn and a halfhearted stab at graduate school, Wales took a job as a research director for a Chicago financial trading firm. But it did not fully engage him. His scholarly attitude was combined with a love for the Internet that had been honed by playing Multi-User Dungeons fantasies, which were essentially crowdsourced games. He founded and moderated an Internet mailing list discussion on Ayn Rand, the Russian-born American writer who espoused an objectivist and libertarian philosophy. He was very open about who could join the discussion forum, frowned on rants and the personal attack known as flaming, and managed comportment with a gentle hand. “I have chosen a ‘middle-ground’ method of moderation, a sort of behind-the-scenes prodding,” he wrote in a posting.87
Before the rise of search engines, among the hottest Internet services were Web directories, which featured human-assembled lists and categories of cool sites, and Web rings, which created through a common navigation bar a circle of related sites that were linked to one another. Jumping on these bandwagons, Wales and two friends in 1996 started a venture that they dubbed BOMIS, for Bitter Old Men in Suits, and began casting around for ideas. They launched a panoply of startups that were typical of the dotcom boom of the late 1990s: a used-car ring and directory with pictures, a food-ordering service, a business directory for Chicago, and a sports ring. After Wales relocated to San Diego, he launched a directory and ring that served as “kind of a guy-oriented search engine,” featuring pictures of scantily clad women.88
The rings showed Wales the value of having users help generate the content, a concept that was reinforced as he watched how the crowds of sports bettors on his site provided a more accurate morning line than any single expert could. He also was impressed by Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explained why an open and crowd-generated bazaar was a better model for a website than the carefully controlled top-down construction of a cathedral.89
Wales next tried an idea that reflected his childhood love of the World Book: an online encyclopedia. He dubbed it Nupedia, and it had two attributes: it would be written by volunteers, and it would be free. It was an idea that had been proposed in 1999 by Richard Stallman, the pioneering advocate of free software.90 Wales hoped eventually to make money by selling ads. To help develop it, he hired a doctoral student in philosophy, Larry Sanger, whom he first met in online discussion groups. “He was specifically interested in finding a philosopher to lead the project,” Sanger recalled.91
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