Marc Andreessen on Building Netscape & the Birth of the Browser

20:56And then in the back office they had a bank of VCRs. They were on videotape players and they had a videotape player for each house. And then they had a wall of videocassettes with all the movies that were optioned and then they had a guy on roller skates. Yeah, roller skates to get to the roller skates quickly get there quick enough because the user expectation was you clicked the button you watched the movie. And so the guy on roller skates had to like shoot over to the wall of videotapes, pull down the right tape and then shoot down the hall to the right VCR and get the tape in the VCR and press play before the couch potato was like giving up because the stream business started.

21:28Oh my God. And so yeah, that idea was a bit early. But on the University of Illinois campus, like broadband existed, like I said, email existed. You asked how do people use the internet in those days? So sort of pre -web. It was mostly, well, there was leading apps at that point. There was an app called Telnet that you would use to basically log into another computer on the network. And that was actually very important because that's how the scientists would use the super computers. And actually the group I was in at Illinois actually built one of the main Telnet apps. There was an app called FTP that was a file downloading app and so you could upload and download files.

21:57There was early email, so that worked. There was early what we're called news groups, which is like basically forums, kind of early social networking. Then I think at the time those were probably the four main things that people did. And it was all scientists and computer science majors on the internet, if I recall. I mean, there was real nobody else. Yeah, so this is at the time 89. I'm in a guest. There were somewhere between 500 ,000 to 2 million people total online. And yeah, it was basically the, it was basically the faculty, staff, and students at these four super computing centers. It was the remote users and then it was like the defense contractors got wired up early and then there were branches of the government that got wired up early And then there was like the national labs and you know They were and then a handful of hobbyists would we figured out a way to get online and so yeah, so so basically it was you know I mean first of all it was like a hundred percent people in the West, you know overwhelmingly the US in Europe It was you know very heavily obviously English dominated from the very beginning It was extremely technical scientific oriented.

22:53Almost everybody had a scientific or technical degree. It was also very, as a consequence of all that, the, you know, it's this incredible, you know, brilliant, you know, this is like a million of the smartest people on the planet. So the caliber of the people and the quality of the discussions was like sky high. Oh, yeah, remember being the old news groups were unbelievable. I remember like, there was like a bug in a compiler, or like you could find out about it. And you know, there would be workarounds and like the level of expertise on those things was absolutely astounding. And look, many of the smartest people in the scientific and technical world at that point were in there and they would talk to you.

23:31If you had something interesting to say and so if you posted on a news group, they would respond. And so it was like this distributed community of like, you know, the smartest scientific technical minds on the planet, it was really special. And then also because there was no money, you know, there were no ads, you know, there were no scams, There was no fraud, there was no spam. I remember there was actually a scandal that there was a guy who figured out that this was like a right for, you know, basically scam, you know, kind of thing. And he started, did the first spam emails and news group messages.

23:57And it was like a big scandal at the time that somebody, that somebody would actually do that because like a guy just literally started to do that, right? And, but, you know, it had run for years, that anybody even tried that. Yeah, that's a, what a community. That's a true meaning of community, right? Like you have all people of the same culture in one place, that scale, that's, that's That's amazing. Yeah, so people who were on that at the time kind of always look back at that and they miss it because that has never been reconstituted. You know, a lot of those people in their equivalence today are like on X or they're on the other social platforms but they're a minority population and much larger context everywhere now.

24:32Whereas at the time they were the entire population. Yeah, so that was a super magical thing. But yeah, I mean, look, the actual functional use cases were quite limited. And yeah, so yeah, that's sort of what I saw when I got there. Maybe be helpful just because I think it's really relevant both to the what followed, but also the AI discussion. Maybe if I could maybe I could go back in history now to kind of where the internet came from. Yeah, yeah. Go back to like the late 60s. Yeah. So the idea of the internet was sort of famously this idea of what was called a packet switch network, right? So the reason the internet works is because it's this peer -to -peer system in which computer, you know, anybody can kind of plug a computer into the internet and then you kind of have messages that are able to go around and route.

25:10And so, you know, famously, Obviously this is an idea that actually was developed originally by the Defense Department in the 1960s called Packet Switching. And in particular, there's a guy Paul Buran, who's kind of the original true founding father, Godfather of this idea. And actually, he's a great story on this going back to your Silver Spoon thing. So he was born, he was a Jewish Polish immigrant to the US. And so his parents brought him as a small child of the US in the 1920s. So, classic American immigrant success story. his father opened a grocery store and then was able to make enough money to send his kid to college.

25:44Brand, you know, was a super genius. He got an engineering degree and then he actually went to Uralma, he went to UCLA for a master's degree, which he got in 1959 in computer science. By the way, his master's degree in 1959 in computer science was on character recognition. Oh, amazing. Yeah. And so I remember it. Yeah, so like he was actually, so he was like, he tried to do AI first and, you know, he was early on that. Yeah, you know, he got part way there, but you know, he was already at that point trying to do AI. And then he went to work for the RAN corporation, which did a lot of work for the Defense Department on military, you know, kind of strategy topics.

26:18And there was a huge, this is the height of the Cold War. So this is in the early 60s, Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, where there was a real feeling that, you know, there might be nuclear war at any moment. And one of the big concerns that the Defense Department had was in a nuclear strike, the way telecom systems worked at that point is if you took out the central office, you took out an entire telecom network. work. And so the fear of the defense department was the Soviets presumably knew where the central switching offices were for like the AT &T network. And so they would bomb those, you know, in a nuclear strike.

26:44And then basically what would happen is the US would lose command and control of its nuclear weapons. And so basically it was a way, the fear was it was a way for the Soviets to do a decap, what they called a decapitation strike. They take out the central switching office from AT &T and then the US can't retaliate. Literally the US would not be able to fight, you know, to fire its nukes because they couldn't and send the commands to actually fire the nukes. And so it was this existential kind of thing at the moment. And so this guy Paul Baran said, well, what if we build a network that basically is designed for packet switch instead of being circuit switch or everything's going through a central place, the packet switch where the packets can flow around.

27:15And a part of the network gets bombed or destroyed or taken offline or power cut or whatever. The network kind of reallocates. And the significance of this idea is not just that it led to the internet. The other significance is AT &T thought it was the craziest idea they'd ever heard. Yeah, yeah, right. Because you need control. You need control. Control. There's a central control. Yeah, yeah. And I was reading just before this, I was refreshing myself and I read Paul Berenc at Bichouerry in the New York Times and Vince Durf is quoted in the obituary saying that, you know, Paul Beren was basically laughed out of AT &T when he proposed this idea, right, because it was such a heretical idea.

27:48So anyway, so the point being is the internet was a heretical idea for the very beginning. And I thought in both in that it would never work because there'd be like entirely too slow and the packet reassembly and all that would never work. And then also that it was a dumb idea because of course you went on central controls. So like they derided him in every direction possible. Yeah, yeah. Well, as late so that was 1964, 20 years later. Our idea that would never work. Herb idea that will never work exactly right. So that was 1964 when he proposed this as late 20 years later in 1984, a federal judge went to break up AT &T, which at that time was the National Telecom monopoly, they owned and controlled everything.

28:30And AT &T actually got the Secretary Defense in 1984, 20 years later to testify that if the federal judge broke up AT &T, it would permanently cripple the U .S. command and control capability for nuclear weapons. Right, and so even 20 years later, people didn't believe it. It was still a heretical idea. And by the way, 84 is significant because of course the very next year in 85 is when the NSF net was funded, right? And so it was like a 20, it was a 20 year journey to get from that original heretical idea with resistance all the way through to ultimately get to the point where Al Gore and his colleagues figured out that actually, no, it was, it was actually a good idea and they should actually put money in it.

29:06So what I'd really like to know, and I think a lot of people would, is, so you have this network with some super computers on it and a bunch of scientists and some news groups, like, how did you get to this idea? There's nobody else at the idea. I'd say like first of all, nobody else had the idea. And then secondly, if you had not had the idea when you had it, the internet, as we know it, probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting built, I mean, maybe if it was invented six months later, but four years later, definitely not.

29:50And so what happened? Yeah, so there were serious efforts underway. You alluded to this, but there were serious efforts at times. So let's just itemize the efforts. And so there were three basically consumer online services that came out of the 80s, AOL CompuServe and Prodigy. AOL became famous later, but much larger. CompuServe kind of petered out at one point. Prodigy was actually an IBM joint venture, so that they were actually kind of clued into that part of it early. And then, and that, and they, you know, those systems existed in the early 90s. Those were all these proprietary, sort of proprietary stovepipes, not interconnected, not open, you know, these are closed by definition closed systems.

30:24And for people who don't remember this, if you wanted to like put content up on AOL, you had to go, you had to pay AOL, like you had to like, you had to get, and you had to get their permission, their approval, and they could take it down. And so it was, you know, it's very, any of these stovepiper proprietary things, you know, somebody really isn't charged. And the internet is the opposite of that. And so that, you know, those systems ran like that. And then there were a set of companies that then were going to do, you were looking to, that were going to do the leapfrog on that and kind of do the modern GUI version of that.

30:49And that was specifically Microsoft with MSN. The time was called MSN. And then Apple had something at the time called eWorld. And then who else was running around? A whole bunch of these other companies were running. And then the media companies were doing these proprietary video, you know, interaction TV things that would also be centralized controlled. But yeah, in particular, I think probably at the time it was really that the big ones would have been, you know, it would have been AOL getting really big. It would have been Microsoft establishing its own, you know, kind of permanent proprietary, you know, online service as an alternative to the internet, and then it would have been probably Apple, with its own proprietary system.

31:23Probably would have been the big three. And look, those companies would have loved for that to happen. Like all three of those companies would have been much better off had that happen. It's probably a big one. You'd get a big on every transaction. Yeah, this was actually the famous subend just used the word VIG. So there was a famous interview with Microsoft's HTO at the time, that they were trying to make MSN work. Nathan, their proprietary system. And an interesting guy, and he said, yeah, he said, and he actually, to his credit, he kind of set it out loud. He said, yeah, the goal is program is to get a VIG of every online transaction, but you know VIG being the mafia term for You know your slice of the pie Yeah, vigorous Vigorous Exactly so So and you know, yeah, they would have had you know, they would have had total control And so if you think about the level of control that Big Tech has Today like it would have been like that times 10 and that that really was where the industry was headed and and those companies had a big advantage At the time because if not one is they just had tremendous resources like they they they were funded to do this and then And the other thing is that you know, you at the time, you know, look, to just get this stuff to work was hard and they could marshal thousands of engineers and they could design everything to work in a completely integrated manner.

32:23And they had, you know, all these graphic designers to make it beautiful and they had all these performance engineers to make it fast. And, you know, they could run big advertising campaigns and do consumers, you know, do consumer support. And I'll tell the story later of how I became the consumer support. I became the user support desk for the entire internet for about a year and a half myself. It's an amazing, you know, amazing job. They would have had, you know, they would have had the ability to, you know, they had a a lot of natural advantages to be able to do it in the proprietary way that they wanted.

32:49And so this was a critical period for that. Yeah, the internet, as we know it today, didn't have to happen. Yeah, so basically, I think in retrospect, what just happened was a couple of things. So one is just the generation of super geniuses, like Paul Baran and you're friend Len Kleinrock and Vitt Serf and these all these really bright guys who had created the internet as kind of the network side of it. You know, they just, they were networking people and they just didn't, they didn't, their natural, you know, kind of world was not user interfaces and consumer services and contents and media and, you know, gaming and, you know, all these, all these application level things, you know, they just, they, the way these systems are built is they just assume somebody else is going to do all that and that hadn't really happened yet.

33:29And so, yeah, so there's, part of it was people, they hadn't tried. Part of it was, it wasn't a business and so there was no business motivation to try to do it. And then also part of it was, there was another coincidental thing that happened, which was the arrival of the graphical PC. And so the rivals, the rivals specifically of the Macintosh and then followed by that, the arrival of Windows version three and the first graphical PCs. And so before about 1992 or so, you weren't going to have a graphical user interface to anything because you didn't have graphical user interfaces at all. And so there was also a moment in time thing that happened there.

34:01So there was all that. Yeah. So then my part of the story was I had a bunch of jobs in college and was getting my computer science degree and then I ended up working for was called NCSA, which was the National Center for Supercomputers. And were you a freshman at the time or a sophomore when you got that job? No, so I actually didn't get that. I actually just started working there. I was a junior. So I worked when I was a freshman. I worked in a physics lab called the Materials Research Lab there, which was actually a great entry point for me because that was one of the main labs using the big supercomputers.

34:32Yeah. And so I kind of got plugged into that world very early. And then my sophomore year, I spent nine months actually as a co -op student working for IBM in Austin. And I worked on the workstations at the time, which was again very, very helpful for this, because these were kind of the leading edge user interface. You know, so I worked on graphics. And then at TCPIP, right? The works. Yeah. Which built in. And then I, I, I, I, be in Austin at the time, you know, since when IBM was on top of the world, it was, you know, by far the most important tech company still at that, at that point. And that, you know, We had this, we had a 6 ,000 person division in Austin working on these Unix workstations at the time graphical workstations.

35:06And again, they had the resources. Everybody there was also wired, everybody was on the internet. These workstations were designed to be used on the internet. Right. And I was at the time did not have any internet capability. You know, there was no in the early 90s. There was no TCPIP. There was never none. Yeah, a couple of computers. You recall this. Yeah, computers, PCs and Macs up until 93 .94. or didn't even come with TCP, I P built into the computer, built into the operating system. We had to actually, you had actually had to buy it. What was called the TCP, I P stack is a separate thing.

35:36Windsor, and these things. And so yeah, but the Unix workstations of that era, the problem with the Unix workstations is they cost like $50 ,000. And so these were not consumer products. But if you had one, you had internet networking built into it. And then if you were at IBM, like I was or at Illinois, like I was, you were also on the internet. And so I kind of got to see, I kind of saw the bricks being put in place for what followed. And then I knew how it all worked because my job was to do engineering on all these things. And then basically, there was this moment in, basically, I think it was 92, 91, 92.

36:08There was this moment where there were basically three online efforts to kind of do a friend ends, new kinds of sort of user interfaces, interaction models for the internet at that point. And so, and it was famously, it was three of them. There was one called Gofer. There was one called Ways. and then there was the World Wide Web. Dimmer and his Lee. And these were, in the very beginning, these were actually in a real back off with each other. There were a lot of people who had different opinions about which of these were gonna win. Gofer was actually based on the user interfaces of the BBS system in the 80s.

36:37And so it was a menuying system. And so you could go down all these different menus and download content and so forth. And then WAs, WAS, I think it was called Wide Area Internet Search. WAs was like a pre -Google search engine. And so it was sort of the idea that you would have, you know, type in search keywords and get back results. And then this guy Tim Berners -Lee in Switzerland, in English guy working at at Stern in Switzerland, had this kind of really at the time radical idea, which was to take an old idea called hypertext and bring it onto the internet and basically be able to have documents that can link to the point to other documents.

37:11And this is an idea that goes back to the 50s, a guy named Doug Engelbart and another guy Ted Nelson, and had kind of conceived of this idea decades earlier, but the computer systems in the 50s, 60s were not quite capable of doing it yet. So Tim basically said he was sitting at CERN, kind of doing related kinds of work. He was working in kind of support of the physicist CERN in the same way that I was working in support of the physicist at Illinois. So kind of a similar universe. And he had this idea basically, okay, we're gonna put hypertext on the internet in the form of the web. But I would describe this at the time as all three of these were like very, I was saying nascent experimental efforts.

37:46And then really, critically, all three were text -based. And again, the assumption here was the internet, basically, as the assumption was the internet slow, which for most people at that time, it was. And so the assumption was the internet slow, your computer slow, your network connection is slow. And so GoFur was literally text -based menus. Waves was type in a text keyword and then get back text results. And then the web was hypertext. And it was, there's the text document. And then it contains links to other documents. But like, just as an example, the web, And when it was originally conceived, didn't have images.

38:15It's just because the idea that the network would have the capacity to be able to do images was just still too much of a reach. And then basically, people started, a bunch of people online started to play with this. And then I was, we talked about what I was doing at the time, but I was working on a semi -related project and then figured out with a bunch of my colleagues there at the time that we had the ultimate idea that led to Mosaic. So what was your other job? Yeah, so what I got so what I got hired to do at NCSA what I got hired to do is I got hired in their group called the software development group Which was the group that was basically supposed to make it was again funded by the National Science Foundation Supposed to make tools specifically open source tools that would make it easy for scientists to use the NSF net and to use the supercomputers Right, and so those tools I mentioned earlier this thing called telnet so we made this we made NCSA telnet Which was the main way you would log into remote computers?

39:05But we had, I think at the time, I think we had an FTP client server. We had a variety of these kinds of tools that you would use for these things. By the way, we also were doing early work in VR at the time. There was this whole focus. Oh, there was this whole focus. What was at the time called scientific visualization. This is sort of what later became like special effects in movies. But this was actually pre -jurassic park and pre -terminator too. So this been the idea was to like, the super computers would do these black hole simulations or whether simulations or something. And then you could actually use these graphical workstations to actually render movies, and you could actually show scientific results in visual form.

39:41And so the group did a lot of that. Actually, those guys, actually, a lot of those guys actually went on and actually ultimately then created the computer graphics industry in both the computer industry and then also in the in the film and television. So that was also a thing that was happening then. And then actually the VR idea was actually already present at the time. And so there were attempts to do VR. And our sister campus at University of Illinois, And Chicago actually had something called the cave, which was, it was an alternate vision of VR. So the main VR idea, of course, was a headset strap your face, which is what people have today.

40:11At Chicago, they had the idea of the cave, which was, no, you're actually in a physical space and you have giant monitors around you. Right. And so you're actually in a, like, you're in Las Vegas. Like the, like, the Sierra Las Vegas, like the Sierra Las Vegas. And also like the, the way that a lot of these new movies and TV shows are filmed now in something they call the volume, which are sound stages that are literally made up of walls and ceilings that are giant display panels showing graphic rendered scenes and imagery. And so my race, that's become the most practical idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

40:42That works really well. So the first TV show that used that technique was called the Star Wars Show, The Mandalorian, which is a huge success. And if you watch The Mandalorian, it's actually really, they did a great job on it. If you watch it, it seems like they're outside all the time and they're not. Most of that, most of that series was filmed when it seems like they're outside. That was filmed in a very small sound stage in an environment with giant LCD displays on all sides And then with all this software is the control software they have where they could literally shift the perspective of the Of the like the background scenes to match like the motions of the actors and they they'd have like they have overhead lights So they can like replicate the sun or like sunset and so actually so anyway So that cave idea in 1992 actually is now state of the art and Hollywood.

41:22Yeah, you know, you know It was too early. We didn't you know We didn't have the quality of the screens back then or quality of the graphics So it wasn't ready yet, but like now it is ready. So it's another one of these back to the future things. Yeah, so anyway, so that's what the group at Illinois was doing. And then the specific project I was on was a project called Collage. And the idea for Collage today, you would describe it as sort of a forerunner to zoom or to maybe Skype or something like that. And it did have the idea of doing audio and maybe hopefully doing video conferencing, but the main thing was like shared whiteboard and then shared documents.

41:54And so specifically, the idea was real -time collaboration. And so, you and I are scientists in two different locations. We're writing a paper together. We want to be able to look at the paper at the same time and be able to make edits such that we can see each other's edits like the way Google Docs works today. Or to have a whiteboard where you could look at imagery or you could look at draw diagrams. And you could share them and work on it together and annotate them like you had a shared whiteboard. And I think that was a good idea. And all of that stuff has happened. And it's very important today.

42:23I think it was in retrospect. it was just before it's time, which is, you just like the internet, what's that? Out of order and what you should build first. Of course. Yeah, well, there were two problems, which is one is, it was just hard to get it to work, because you just, you needed a certain speed of, you know, you need a certain speed of network performance and graphics capability on the computer is to make it work and it was kind of, it was kind of choppy. And then the other problem was to get a real time collaborative system to work, people have to be online at the same time. Yeah. Right, and so you and I are collaborating, we have to be online at the same time and we might be in totally different time zones and it's just, so it's hard to get critical mass for a network effect.

42:57If you have to be online at the same time, whereas things like email worked if regardless of when you're online, so -called asynchronous. And so yeah, collage was a good idea. It just wasn't quite clicking. And then it just, it kind of became clear to me and a few of the other folks that I worked with there at the time that it's just like, okay, something else is gonna pop here and it's gonna pop hard. And it's gonna be something involving like this, the web, go for a waste, like this confluence of basically new thinking of user interfaces is going to take place. And then, by the way, it's basically two big things, the two big things that sort of we insisted on.

43:29The two big leafs was one is, we're just going to assume that everybody has a graphical computer. We're just going to assume that everybody has windows or a Mac or a Unix workstation. We're not going to support not DOS, right? And all systems up until that point, including, by the way, the first web browser was a text -based browser. Tim Berners -Lee browser, it was a browser So that actually was a text -based browser that ran on the next cube, of which there were maybe 5 ,000 of the world at that point. So that was like one of the most graphical machines ever. But he had this problem. He had this problem.

44:00So first of all, the problem of just like there was no graphical content, there was no graphical, you know, you just like, the assumption was it was going to be text -based. And then the other problem was, we just assumed that the internet was going to be fast. And that was a, again, a theoretical assumption. That was a theoretical assumption at the time, because at the time the internet was really slow. And most people were very slow connections. And so, you know, the experience a lot of people had the first time they use Mosaic even even on a broadband connection The first time I had it is you would literally watch the page load line by line And then you would watch the images load line by line, right?

44:31And so it was a heretical idea at that point to say no We're just gonna assume everybody's on a graphical interface and we're gonna assume that everybody's on a broadband FAS broadband connection and we're just not gonna compromise We're gonna build the correct user interface for that new world on those dear fronts And we're not going to compromise to try to be backer compatible with the old text -based UIs or with the old narrow band connections. And in a way that you were at university with no company, no need to sell anything in the beginning. So it was like fair enough. Yeah, and my computer, because I worked at IBM and then I worked at NCSA and we had all this money for the government at that point, my computer was an SGI Silicon graphics at the time company leading a new computer company at the time.

45:12I'm an amazing company, but they made these workstations. And the workstations cost $50 ,000 in 1992. It's like 100 and some thousand today. But my computer was one of those. And so, and on a fast connection. And so I'm just like, look, I'm just gonna build it for that. And then my colleagues built it, versions for Windows and Mac. But we're just not gonna compromise for the old hardware that everybody else is on. We're just gonna assume that in the future everybody gets something like this. And then yeah, at your point, we were running on federal research money, so we had no commercial incentive.

45:40and if we had no reason to go for large numbers of users or try to make money or whatever at the time. So we just basically, again, and the heresy, we just designed for the future. And then there was a little bit, I had a little bit of a glimmer, I wouldn't say I was confident on this, but I had a little bit of a glimmer at the time that was like, look, if we designed for broadband, like if it's compelling enough user interface, it will actually cause broadband to happen. Is that what the Grezzo? Right, this is my favorite philosopher, Nicolane, has this term called hyperstition, which is the idea of sort of, you know, sort of willing an idea into existence just by proposing it, sort of like pulling the future forward.

46:16And it's basically, and the idea basically was if people could just see what was possible with a modern, you know, UNIX workstation on a modern broadband network with, you know, with what we then built with, if they could just see that with Mosaic, they would be like, wow, I need that. And then they would price it and they would be like, oh my god, I can't afford that. But then they would say, well, I need a version of that that I can afford. And then that would be a motivation for the phone companies to start to offer broadband and for the PC for the PCs to start to get built in, internet connectivity and for people to upgrade from DAWs to Windows and all these other things that followed.

46:49And so I, as I said, I wasn't confident about that, but I had a glimmer of it because I was like, look, if you could get through this not -whole and if you could get the world to the other side where everybody has a GUI and everybody has broadband, then all of a sudden, it's just very clear that you have all of these incredibly compelling things that that you can do that are impossible otherwise. And so it was kind of a hard shove in that direction. And then the other, I would say, big breakthrough, or I would not break through the other really important conceptual rule that we had at the time, which was sort of consistent with the internet philosophy of the time was it had to be an open platform.

47:19And specifically, it had to be whatever it was, it had to be where anybody could create servers and anybody could create content. And so it had to be very easy to do that. And so I knew remember in those days, it was sort of famous that you could implement a web server and four lines of PerlScript, right? to do whatever you wanted. And so, and you could create a web page just by writing HTML by hand. And then by the way, people did, and there were failing issues with those four long -hand team with the server. That's how a lot of the big internet companies started out that way. Yes. And then that's one of the reasons why the site's always crashed.

47:48Yes. Exactly. But the point was, the point was to optimize, it was to optimize for the quality experience and then optimize for the openness and the creativity that would follow. Yeah. And again, there was a leap there, right? And we got, you remember, we got a lot of criticism at the time, which was, wow, you know, So a lot of computer sciences that I'm like, wow, these guys are building the most inefficient, computer systems have ever been built. This thing is incredibly inefficient. It's unoptimized. It's wasting network bandwidth. Where is the AC? I'm the where's the AC and when encoding? Like this is strings.

48:16You guys are cranes. Yeah, you're wasteful. Yeah, we were doing wasteful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big environmental arguments. Just wasting with you, man, with you, burning power, causing pollution. Yeah, these are all text -based protocols. So one of the design principles was all protocols have to be text -based. There were no binary protocols. text -based protocols are much less efficient, much, much slower. But the enormous advantage is you can program a text -based protocol by writing text, and you can read it by reading text, whereas if it's in a binary format, you're always dealing with an intermediary system and it's just harder to develop for and harder to understand.

48:46So the... A little counter to the belief of the computer science world at the time. I mean, every... Oh, yeah. Read on S and one and coding, you have to do that. Yeah, any CS professor of that era who looked at this said they're doing it wrong. 100 % they said they're absolutely doing it wrong because it's not optimal. And so much of computer science at that point was about optimizing scarce resources because that was all you had at that time and they had spent decades figuring out how to do that and we just decided, we collectively decided to just break that rule. And again, it was not to break the rule just to break it.

49:17It was because what was on the other side of breaking that rule was openness and creativity and power of match and anybody can do anything. And then inclusivity, right? You didn't have to be a computer scientist networking expert to build a web server. Yeah, that's right. And the experienced people had the killer kind of version of this that ended up working really well was this idea of view source. So there was this feature built in a mosaic and it was built into browsers, which was, I forget exactly when it popped up. But the source, the idea basically was you're looking at a web page. You're looking at the rendered version of a web page, but you could click on view source and it would show you the HTML source code for the page.

49:52And so any time you wanted to see how a web page had been created to accomplish something that you wanted to do You could just look at it and then it made it easy to learn and replicate. Yeah, and again that that was like that was not That was like on pray. There was no there was no view source for like never protocols before that That was like that was a new idea that created so many web design jobs It was crazy. Like which could never have come about you know like that little or seemingly small thing was a massive thing Yeah, look, I mean people, I met people, I met people, I met, I met somebody just the other day who, you know, literally it's like that It's like, you know, they they they first got you know, their first got access to the browser and you know from their you know in high school Or whatever in college and then they literally they literally do the view source thing and they're like oh, I can write HTML And then they got a job as a web designer.

50:36Yeah, and then that paid their way through, you know, whatever to you know get to the career going or start their company And yeah, so that was yeah economic empowerment. Yeah inclusivity. Yeah, maximum. Yeah, it was a maximal inclusivity And look, technical whizzes could do more, but you did not have to be a technical whizz to get started and get going. And then it gave you a very powerful motivation to learn more and a very easy way to learn more. Yeah, and so that worked out really well. And then basically the mosaic idea basically was, okay, pull all this stuff together. So build basically the unified visual interface.

51:05And mosaic out of the gate actually supported all three of the systems that I described. So we supported it out of the gate with the web in its sort of text form at the time. And then gofer and then waste. We actually also support FTP. We supported it. It made a support for internet news groups. And so it was sort of a single graphical user interface, you know, to rule them all. So we had support for all this. And then, you know, the web obviously is the one that took off. And then the other part of it for Mosaic was to then make the web graphical. And so to transition it from a text -based, you know, kind of text prompt, DOS kind of situation to be full graphic web pages.

51:38And that was, of course, you know, that was then the thing that really, you know, kind of just got, you know, lit on fire. Yeah, you famously invented the image tag if I recall. So there was a big dispute early on. So there was a big dispute. So there was opposition early on within the internet community, and I won't name names, but within the set of people who were in into this kind of thing working on it, there was actually a lot of controversy around the idea of adding images. And there was a big argument, there were actually multiple arguments to not add images. And by the way, to not images, means not make it graphical, right?

52:10not bring it into the GUI world. And one argument was just efficiency. Again, network optimization, use of resources. And by the way, equality argument, not everybody has a graphical workstation. It would be unfair to them if there's web pages that they can't view. So that was part of the argument. There was certainly a speed performance waste argument to it. And then there was also a cultural argument. And this was around the time that the internet was starting to really open up. And that kind of Nirvana I was mentioning where everybody is like, you know, CS degree holder, you know, is starting to become a consumer thing early on and there was a lot of anxiety around that.

52:46And so there was an argument at the time that content and the internet should remain only scientific and technical, right? And if you add features and capabilities like images and graphics, then you are encouraging the creation of sort of mass market content, right? And if you have mass market content, that's going to draw more of the wrong kinds of users. A valid argument. It turns out, it turns out that argument was correct. But, But well, correct. Yes, correct. Well, it was correct. The people who made that argument were correct based on their own presuppositions. Yeah. I was on the other side of that argument.

53:20And I was on the other side of each of those arguments. But specifically on that argument is I just always thought everybody should be able to use this. I was very much on the side of this is amazing. Everybody on the planet should be on the internet. Everybody on the web, everybody on the web should be graphical. Like, yes, there should be content all over the internet that's graphical. There should be, you know, all kinds of pictures and movies, animations and streaming and games and like, yes, you should have all this and everybody should be on it And we should maximize this and that that may and again heretical idea that that was there were a lot of people at the time who were very important at the time who were very anxious about that and then and basically we just there was a big fight argument around that and we weren't making progress on it and then I just did a because I controlled, you know, I controlled mosaic at that point So I just did a fake accompli and I just declared it and I created the image tag.

54:04Yeah, and people put up images. And you just, yeah, so I want that. Let's see. I want the I want the de facto argument, which is through through sheer authoritarian action. Yeah, you were a king of the internet. And then as well, tell us about like, okay, how did it take off? When did the press recognize it? And then how did you become go from king of the internet to customer support for the entire internet. That's the same thing. It's the same thing. Also the main blogger. Maybe the first blogger, depending on how you score it. So I was also the front page for a while. Yeah, so we started basically a group of us at NCSA basically went rogue in 1991 and started working on this idea on nights and weekends.

54:49And in particular, my partner at the time Eric Bina and myself, we were the first two to work on this. And just a full acknowledgement here. Eric and I co -wrote the first version of Mosaic, which was for Unix workstations. And then we had other colleagues who are very famous in the history who developed Windows version and developed the Mac version. And so we did develop for all three of those platforms. But the first version was the Unix version. Eric and I built it. I always credit it as I did the front end and then Eric did all the hard work. Yeah, yeah. I get a great programmer, I guess. He was fantastic.

55:22Absolutely outstanding programmer. is an outstanding programmer. And so I did the UI and Eric did the rendering engine. And so Eric built, and the rendering engine is the core of it. Like the rendering engine is the thing that actually renders the page and has all the user interface elements and makes the links work and displays the images and all this stuff. And that was definitely the harder half of it for a programming standpoint. So I give Eric, I give Eric at least half the credit, if not more for that. And then my role was the front end. So it's kind of everything around the rendering engine.

55:49And so it was the rest of the UI. And then it was the, I did the networking protocols and all the user preferences and all the caching and all the things to make the render engine work. So it was the two of us. And it was really like the core work was sort of a crash renegade project kind of off books. And for me, it was like off books in two ways. It was not what I was supposed to be doing at work, but it was also I was doing this instead of going to class. This is when I almost got kicked out of college also. So yeah, so we sort of crash course over the course of I guess the fourth quarter of 92 and then we kind of worked really hard over the holiday break of 92 to kind of get it working.

56:23And then I forget the exact sequence, but we put out the first kind of acceptable version, which I think was the 0 .9 version and like a round Christmas or a little bit after 92. And then I think got to quote 1 .0 and kind of the spring of 93. And yeah, and basically it went vertical basically out of the gate with the point nine version. So it was basically a. So it's sort of a year of preparatory work in 92 and then it was sort of 93 was the vertical takeoff and 93 was a very important year for me because it was my senior year in college also and so and I was office semester I was off cycle by a semester for reasons and then and so anyway So so January to December 93 where my that was my senior year in college And so this was like my chance to like really do that and then because I just assumed I was gonna graduate and you know Leave and get a job at at the end of the year So I had about a 12 -month run there where the thing really took off.

57:11And then, yeah, look, it was the tiger. Oh, and then we had other colleagues who did the, did the, what was the, not the first web server, but the first kind of widely used, I would say robust, scalable web server. And again, that also, again, gave us a lot of ability to move quickly, because we can, we actually controlled for that period. We controlled both the client and the server. Yeah. And so we can move very fast. Yeah, so that, yeah, so the two of them came out and then, and then people started to figure this out and it started to get, you know, widely used among existing internet users.

57:37And then it was an immediate reason for people to get online at home. And it was really the first reason for a lot of people to try to get online at home. And so it also I think helped catalyze the boom in what we're called at the time consumer ISPs and for people to upgrade their PCs to be graphical and then have network, you know, have the network stack. And so the 93 was like this upward, you know, the straight kind of upward hurricane. But again, it was in this context of we're working for a research institute funded by the federal government. And so, you know, we have no money, we have no revenue, we have no business model.

58:05So if we got a product out there that's taken off. It's taken off like crazy. And then we put it out as open source, but under what's called a hybrid license. We put it under a hybrid license that says, it's all free for academic and individual use and profit use. But if you want to use it for commercial applications, you have to come talk to us. And then I had the mailbox for the incoming commercial queries. And I remember when it hit like 400 of basic companies, like general councils and procurement officers at big companies saying, we want to deploy this throughout our company, who do we pay?

58:37And we had no way to take the money. We didn't even have like a price sheet. We didn't have any of this. And then very critically, we didn't have any support, right? So we didn't have any customer support resources. And so we had the support email address. And I also had that email box. And so in my spare time between coding sessions, I would literally just like answer questions. And but it was literally, it was, you know, it was supposed to be tech support from Ozek, but it turned into tech support for the entire internet. So I helped a lot But you got all the difference between that was the internet for everybody.

59:05And a lot of ways still is. Exactly. So it really started to take, it then sort of became a formal project. It kind of got embraced and became a real project and got more resources. But we were kind of just dying from the overhead and we needed more servers and we needed more people and the whole thing. So we wrote, I remember, we wrote a proposal for a grant, we wanted an incremental grant from the National Science Foundation. and it was to staff a customer support desk so that we could hire like, you know, a lot of people. Just some receipts for it. Yeah, so it's actually my first trip to Washington, DC, as we, we, we, we, it's you, this grant, we sent it to Dan.

59:40And in it, and the National Science Foundation people to their credit, they were fascinated by this whole thing and they were glad that it was working. But we, you know, we sent it as grants. It was the only place we had any sense of already get money and we sent it as grant. Literally, it came back denied. You know, the National Science Foundation is not in the business of, you know, funding customer support. One of the sort of fun twists here is, okay, you idiot. Like this giant commercial opportunity is staring you in the face. Like, you literally have to like inbound sales leads, like coming out of your ears, like why don't you go raise venture capital and start a company?

1:00:10And of course the answer was because I had no idea that there was such a thing as venture capital. Yeah, but venture capital. I literally, yeah, you know what a tractor was? Yeah, exactly. You know, I had no conception whatsoever for, you know, I had just no clue at the time that it was actually a tractable thing that you could do that. And that was something that really rich, famous fancy people did. Or I don't know, some people got lucky or people in Silicon Valley or something, but people in Illinois certainly were not doing that. And so, there was no venture capital in Champaign or Band at that point.

1:00:40And then there was exactly one software startup at that point called SPYGLAAS, which is a name that will come up later in the story. But it was not doing well. And so it was more of a cautionary tale. And so we basically just, yeah, we had the Tiger by the tail, then we just kind of held on, held on for dear life kind of through that year. Incredible. And then when did the kind of, when did the kind of media and the press skip wind of it? So this is a funny story. So there was a Wall Street Journal reporter named Jared Sandberg. Yeah. Yeah, I remember Jared Sandberg. He was a funny guy. He was a great guy.

1:01:12He was a great guy. You know, this is 30 years ago. So we're using the was here for people who are still in perfectly good health. Yeah, he was a great character. Yeah, and it wasn't as a great writer, great reporter. And so he had sort of the tech beat at the Wall Street Journal at the time and he figured this out early and called me up at the blue probably in, I don't know, late 92 or early 93 like super early. And he had the story ready to go and he was intensely frustrated because he could not get his editors to run it. Because it was not an important story. Yeah, of course that, you know, what are you talking about?

1:01:43It's just a bunch of idiot kids with bad grades. Clear writing software. Yeah, on this internet thing that nobody cares about that's never gonna be a thing that's about to get squashed by MSN and AOL and Interactive Television. And like, I tell you, again, you're talking about the heresy aspect of this. Like, this is why I'm so distrustful of experts. Like, this is my origin story for why I don't trust anybody with credentials or anything anymore. So I remember, another one. So I was working on, I remember working, it must have been, it was like December of 92 or January 93, so I'm like working around the clock in my little office at NCSA.

1:02:16And you know, this is your banish campaign is also, So it's a little further south when I grew up, but it's still frozen. Tundra, most of the year, and the wind comes whipping over the Illinois plains and everything is frozen and you're slipping fall every 10 feet in the middle of winter. And it's just this kind of crazy thing. And I'd be working in the middle of the night. No, the restaurants are open and I get hungry. And so I walked down to the one convenience store that was open 24 hours and I'd buy my whatever, my hot dog or my cookies and something to drink. And I remember walking in one night and there was this new magazine on the newsstand called Wired.

1:02:44And it was Wired Issue number one. Yeah. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. It's a magazine about this. It appears to be a magazine that's about things that I'm interested in, which was a novel concept at the time. And so I bought it and I took it back to my office and I read it, covered a cover. And they did not have the word internet in at once. Yeah. There you go. And I was like, OK, it was like, OK, I guess I don't count. We don't count. This whole thing doesn't count. These are the experts. They have a magazine. They're pro. You know, these, yeah, these are the pros and like, you know, what we're working on is clearly not important enough to merit the magazine.

1:03:20And so I was just like, okay, I guess we're just going to keep working on our thing. But like, you know, it's sort of like this constant message from the media, which is like this is not important. This is not important. This is not important. So anyway, so Jared had this whole story is ready to go and he could not get his editors to run it. And then later in 93, John Markov at the New York Times figured this out and he was a good tech reporter. I mean, John Markov's smart guy. Yeah. And legendary, legendary, you know, tech reporter going back, you know, quite a bit, you know, still very active.

1:03:46But at the time, he was like a veteran and it was very well respected in the industry, wrote a bunch of good books and so forth. And so he wrote a story for the New York Times. And so the good news is he wrote a story. The bad news is it featured my boss and my boss's boss. Who had nothing to do with the project? Who had you work on something entirely else? My boss at the time too, his credit, you know, he was aware and he, you know, he kind of, you know, at a, you know, at a, he, he didn't vigorously oppose us and then he supported us and then in the ultimately sort of adopted as a project. And so he kind of eases way into it, but he ultimately was very supportive.

1:04:15And then, but my boss's boss was the director of NCSA at the time. And look, this is one of those things where I owe these guys a tremendous amount because they created this environment that I was able to do my work in. And I wouldn't be here today if not for them. But I kind of, I kind of, a little bit of an iffy relationship with my boss to start with. And then I had never met my boss's boss. And there was no reason for me to meet my boss's boss because I'm like an undergraduate staff member. like, you know, he's a big, like a huge, he's like a huge important researcher, astrophysicist and, you know, directing this huge, super computing center.

1:04:42So he had no reason to meet me. But, you know, the story shows of the New York Times and smiling photos of the two of them and not, you know, Eric and me. And I'm like, oh, okay, I see how this works. And how did you feel at the time? Because I know how you would feel now if that had happened. But like, how did you feel then? It was just a little bit, I don't know, it was a little bit, I was a little bit annoying, but it was also a little bit of like, look, it's the New York Times, like I don't know, you know, I don't, I guess they write about important people, right? And these are important people because they're running this thing and I'm not an important person because I'm only writing code.

1:05:14Yeah, yeah. And you know, this is like the project is important enough where they can write about the project, but like the people actually writing the code are not important enough to talk about. And so it's like, it's kind of the same reaction I had to wire magazine, which is that case a little bit annoying, but I guess it means I just need to go back to work because there's nothing else to be done. It's not like I can call the, it would never occurred to me to call you out of the editor and your time's a complaint. When I screen her out of the gate? Nor would he have taken my call. And so he certainly didn't know who I was, because it certainly wasn't in the story.

1:05:42So it was just like, it was like whatever. But it's like this weird, it's like the Play -Doh shadows on a cave wall thing. It's just like, OK, there's all these things that people believe, including up to the internet is doomed and is never going to be a thing, and it's going to get swamped and all these things. And then we're just like, OK, no, we just have this stuff in front of us. And it just plainly works. and we believe in it, and I guess we're just gonna keep working on it. And maybe people will figure out maybe they want. Anyway, so Jarrett Sandberg calls me up, I remember the day that story broke in New York Times.

1:06:08Jarrett Sandberg calls me up and he's just absolutely livid and he told me that he got the morning paper. And this is like six months later or something after he would have had the scoop. He would have had the first story on basically all of this stuff. And he literally told me the story. He said he charged into his office that morning and slapped the New York Times down at the desk in one of these dramatic moments and said, you know, see, I told you so, you know, John Markov, front page of the business section. and I told you this was actually a story. And it's bosses like, oh yeah, I guess you were right.

1:06:33Oh my God, that's so crazy. David. So that's how, again, the heresy, like that's how her reticle it was. It was like actually, it was actually hard to get it in print. And I think the only reason it showed up in the New York Times as John Markov was such a legend, he was just a legendary. He was further along in his career at that point. So, 93 was a phenomenal year, because it was the takeoff year for the web, for the browser, for all this stuff, for Mosaic. Yeah, and so it was, And then the other part of it was just the ping pong effect was very interesting, which was, it basically started out with a few people with browsers, and then a few people with web servers putting up these little individual pieces of content.

1:07:09But then you got in this kind of feedback loop back and forth kind of ping pong thing, where basically every time there was a new compelling piece of content put online, there was a reason for people to start using the browser. And then every time more people started using the browser, there was an additional incentive to put more content online, right? And so it was like the writers, you needed writers and readers. And so more writers met more readers, more readers met more writers. And so, and this is what our partner, Andrew Chen, refers to as the cold start problem, right? Is by default, if you have a situation like that where you're going to have a network, at scale, it's going to be great.

1:07:43But to actually get it to scale is actually really hard. And most things that hadn't need to have that kind of network effect, never get past the cold start problem. right? They just they they strangle early because you know there's just not enough not enough writers which means there's not enough readers there's not enough readers there's not enough writers but this is the openness completely was a winner for you yeah. That's right and so what happened from the very beginning was people all over the world started creating web servers and started putting up content and they either they either used NCSA mosaic NCSA web server which actually later became Apache so it's actually still kind of in use today you know it's late you know the derivations much later or you know are they literally could write I throw web servers for the reasons we described earlier.

1:08:21And so there was no content arriving online. Just to give people a sense of this, in the early 93, it was like one new website a day. And by the way, by one new website, I don't mean like one new web, I don't mean like a new eBay a day or something. I mean like a new web page. Yeah, I remember it was a big day, the first restaurant menu came online. It was like an Indian restaurant and like some second -tier city in England. Just decided to somebody put the menu online. And then it was, I remember the first webcam. So the first streaming video, first webcam was a coffee pot. And it was literally a coffee pot because a guy had actually rigged up a camera, an early webcam at the time, camera at the time, with a coffee pot down the hall in some computer science department somewhere so that he could see when the coffee pot was emptied and go refill it.

1:09:01And then he basically just, so just pure utility for him. And then he put the coffee pot online. It was the first webcam. And so we all sat for like a week and just watch the coffee pot. Yeah, yeah. Why I put it on the land when I can put it on the internet. Yeah, exactly. And then you know, you can see it from home, right? And so, you know, we all watched the communal coffee pot. And so, you know, there was that. And anyway, so then one of the features built into mosaic was what was called, we had what was called the what's new page. And that was another something that I had at the time, which was basically it was sort of one of the first blogs or maybe the first one where it was every day it was okay.

1:09:30It was literally here are the new web pages for that day. And it was this period doubling thing where it started out being here's the new web page for today. Right. And then it was and then it was a big deal when it started to be to a day. Right. And then for a day and then six today and then eight a day. And then, you know, by the end of the year, you know, I couldn't keep up anymore. Yeah, the what's cool webpage. Well, then we had the what's cool page. They're right. And the what's cool page was a good stuff. Exactly. The editorial function. So yeah. So that was it. Yeah. That was a key moment.

1:09:58Getting to the windows and the Mac versions were key moment because, you know, they followed and those guys did a great job on those. And that really opened things up. And then, and again, this was leading up to, I guess, AOL formally interconnected into the internet in September 93. So this was leading up to that period and they, I don't remember an AOL release their first built in, I don't remember that when they first built in a web browser into AOL. Yeah, that was right, I think. Yeah. I think it was. Yeah. But you could kind of get a sense, you know, it started to become clear that number one that they were going to interconnect to the internet, that they were going to bring their users out of the internet and then it seemed inevitable that they would build in a web browser so that you started to get momentum from that.

1:10:33And then, oh, and then the NSF basically this coincided with the NSF handing off the NSF net to the commercial telecom companies. So this was this was what happened where so all of this activity like mosaic was driving network bandwidth right on the backbone Crush in the backbone the NSF was not in the business of providing commercial backbone services And so they did a handoff to the big three big telcos at the time and You know did the handoff is part of that the acceptable use policy was revoked And so then Commercial use the internet became legal Immediately after that happened there was a really pivotal pivotal pivotal moment in history which is there was a big computer company at the time you'll remember called deck and they had a research lab in Palo Alto called the deck Westman Research Lab and there was a guy there whose name I'm blanking on but he was bright and read if I remember correctly and he was a computer science guy there and he was into this stuff and there was a cult science fiction book retail store tiny little hole in the wall bookstore on El Camino Real and I think Mountain View called Future Fantasy Books and it was a cult retailer of like obscure science fiction and fantasy novels.

1:11:38And it was, it had, you know, it's local clientele, but it also had a lot of, especially Japanese and German tourists when they were in town, they would go by and they would buy all these science fiction novels that they couldn't get back in their own countries. And so he had this international clientele. And so this guy at DEC, I remember went and talked to the, you know, kind of very hippie, you know, kind of ponytail old school, you know, owner of the future fantasy bookstore and said, oh, you know, let's put your bookstore on the internet. And the guy's like, I have no idea what any of those words meant, could you please explain each of them to me in sequence.

1:12:07And Brian basically described, he's like, we're going to put your, we'll create a website for you. We'll put a catalog online and we'll let people, you know, all these people, all these foreign buyers will be able to buy books from, you know, Japan and Germany, they'll be able to see the catalog in the web and they can click and buy, which was a new idea. And then, you know, you can ship to the books and your business will grow so much. And the guys like that's great. He said, the problem is I don't actually own a computer. And Brian's like, well, what do you have? And he said, well, I do have a fax machine.

1:12:32And Brian said, Let me get back to you. And so the deck guys literally created the future fantasy website and they got, they figured out digitized his inventory and they created the first e -commerce site at least for books. It's original Amazon. Amazon. And then they set up a fax gateway where you would order on the web and then it would fire off a fax message to this guy's store. I don't know if he would ship you the book. And then of course in sequence you can imagine what happened next. So step one, his business doubled overnight. Yeah. It's like the best thing that ever happened. And then of course step two is Jeff started Amazon and then destroyed, destroyed, destroyed, destroyed him.

1:13:08And that's like him. But there was like a year there where he had like the best year of his life. Yeah. Shafing books all over the world. And so that was the, that was the, I think that may have been the first e -commerce, like at least the first like formerly commerce thing. And so that was in that period. Wow, wow, wow. Okay, so then you graduate. So what do you do? Yeah, so yeah, so I, and I just, Just, look, this was like a, this was, I was an undergrashed staff member. I was getting paid $6 .25 an hour. Cap, I think, at 30 hours a week. It was fine. I was having a great time. You know, and I just assumed I was graduated with a computer science degree.

1:13:39I'd go get a job. I didn't know where or what, but I figured I'd do it. And again, like, it was weird. It was like, it's a frenetic experience because like all of this stuff was, it was just like, you know, like all day long, I was just dealing with like this just tremendous cascade of incoming, you know, stuff and single activity. But like, there was no money in it. There was no funding. There was no venture, there were no startups, there was no business, there was no nothing. And then the media was telling me it's primarily it's stupid and the magazines, you know, and all this stuff. And it just, and so again, I was sort of still, I was sort of halfway between this, like I'm seeing the future in front of me, but also it was like, the rest of the world is not taking it seriously.

1:14:13And so maybe I'm just like, you know, I just like smoking my own exhaust. And maybe this is just like all gonna get crushed next year by MSN and it's just all gonna be over. And like it's just like somewhere, you know, it's like, like I said, it's just like the assumption was, as you left this stuff behind when you graduated. And so I had like the advanced version of that, of that conundrum. And so I was just like, well, I guess I need to get a job. I talked to the NCAA guys about staying there. They did offer me a job to stay there, but to kind of keep doing what I was doing, but it would have been a staff programming job and staying in Urbana and I kind of wanted to get to, I wanted to get to, those said, I want to get to A Coast.

1:14:47I was somewhat ambivalent as to which coast, but I definitely wanted to get to A Coast. And so I decided I needed a job. And so I one of the things I had control of was the about page for the web browser. And so I added to the about page for the web browser that everybody used the time I added, saying by the way, one of the primary authors of this browser is graduating and is available to be hired. It was a good class of high. Please send job offers to this mailbox. And I got to my credit, I got about a dozen job offers and a bunch of offers in the East Coast, a bunch of offers in the West Coast.

1:15:18And they got an offer from a little software company out in California. I got two, basically two offers in Silicon Valley that I strongly considered. One was a little software company that I joined and then the other was, I got an offer actually from Sun at the time, which had a unit, they had a software unit of Sun at the time called First Person, which was creating what became Java later with James Gosling. It was his project and I almost went there, but they had a Phantom Stock Option program. That doesn't sound good. I didn't know much, but like if you're applying the word phantom to your stock option program, that's not a good sign.

1:15:53Well, they had a classic problem, which is they had a software group that they wanted to give an incentive to and they wanted to have a hardware company where you have small stock options, right? And so they wanted this thing to be like a separate research thing, but they didn't want to spin it off. They wanted to retain control of it. And so they were creating basically a shadow, a shadow stock option program. And I was just like, I don't understand this. This sounds like a scam. So I turned that down and then I went to this little software company called the IT. So yeah, so I literally got a job and then moved out to California in basically January of 1994.

1:16:22Yeah, so basically I went to work for, you know, there's this little software company called the IT and, you know, they were sort of a, they were a little basic contract research organization, very smart, like CS people in LWALTO doing like work for the government for companies, kind of very leading edge stuff. And then they just had, you know, to their credit, they were on the internet idea early. And so they wanted to kind of create, see if they could create internet software products, which was a very kind of new idea at the time. And so they made me an offer and they flew me out and I moved out.

1:16:48And it was great, and I went to work there. And I was like, okay, you know, I'll work on some internet. You see, there's a way to make money on internet software. And then, you know, what happened was just, I just kept having this kind of out -of -body experience, though, which was just like, at that point, the internet started to get like serious media coverage. And if you remember those days, the book started to show up. And so before people had the internet, what happened was there were books about the internet. And this is where the O 'Reilly publishing company became famous at the time and so forth.

1:17:18You'd have, actually, at the peak of this in the 9045, you'd have walls and walls of books about the internet in bookstores. And they'd be like, guys to the internet, how to use the internet, how to write web pages, how to do all these things. And then there would often be like a floppy disk in the back of the book, which would have the software, you know, the TCPIP stack. that your TCP IP stack for Windows, all that. Yeah. And then they'd have Mosaic or they'd have whatever on the disk. And so this started to become a thing. And people started to figure this out. And the press started to take it seriously.

1:17:45And there started to be more interesting content. And so it's like, OK, the thing is going. And I'm like, I left Mosaic behind. And so I didn't have the email addresses anymore and so forth. But I knew how much commercial demand there was. And so they did. But it was this really schizophrenic thing. It was just very unclear. And again, like I said, I had never I've never heard of venture capital, so I didn't really have a sense you could start a company. I didn't really know what to do. And then another great kind of stroke of luck in my life was I got a call from Jim Clark, who's the co -founder of our company, an escape who was this legendary figure.

1:18:15And I won't do the full version of all this because this gets into stuff that has already been, people have talked about a lot in the past. He's already plenty well documented. But he had been a co -founder of the founder of this company, Silicon Graphics, which was one of the leading tech companies of the era. And then he got sideways with the CEO there. He decided to leave and start his second company, But he had a not solicit agreement with you know all the great people that he had you know He couldn't hire the people at SGI. Yes. Yeah, I was an amazing team that he had put together Amazing team, but he had a formal you know He had a formal agreement that he couldn't couldn't hire them So and he and he had stock SGI with every smart person he knew So he you know most of the people who he wanted to work with were he couldn't get and so he he basically was like he was literally like sniffing around for talent And a guy who worked for him billfoss who later joined us gave apparently mentioned a gym one day is like you know one of the guys who made this mosaic browser is like apparently he just like moved to Silicon Valley and he likes you know the about page that browser says he's you know he's available you know should maybe you should go talk to him and so Jim called me up and we had breakfast and which was a very traumatic experience for me because I was not eating breakfast in those days getting up early enough to have breakfast.

1:19:19Yeah I remember those he used to wake up much later. Yeah it's a programmer hours and so I had to be up at seven in the morning to meet Jim for breakfast just at Alfonso and Pellowalto at 7 a .m. on the Sunday. So I had to recalibrate my entire sleeping schedule that week to try to make the meeting. And I was still blurry when I got there, but they had good coffee. And so anyway, so Jim and I, you know, again without belaboring it, Jim and I decided to start a company. But it was still this weird thing where in Jim knew all about the internet, the browser, and I was still watching everything, but it was still this thing of like, it's just not a, it's just the overwhelming assumption in the industry was this is not a serious thing.

1:19:53This is not a real thing. This is a momentary thing. It's going to go away. The big companies are going to take over. This is not going to be the internet is not going to be a commercial medium. It's not going to happen. And so our first two business plans for our company actually were not this. It was we had a business plan. Our first business plan was to do interactive software for interactive television. So the build software to replace the guy on the roll escapes that I told you about. Yeah, Jim had because Silicon, Jim's company had been one of the main companies building those systems. And so he had the insight on that.

1:20:22And so we were going to do that, but then we sort of priced out like what you know, we sort of modeled out Sort of how interacting TV was what it was gonna cost now is gonna work and we actually concluded it wasn't gonna work It was it was it was too expensive and the technology wasn't ready So we gave up a bad idea and then plan number two was Jim had a really good relationship with the CEO of Nintendo because SGI had done this deal to do the first 3D graphics chip for a game console Which is then in 1064 and so he went to visit the guy and in in Japan who ran Nintendo this is Super Genius Guy.

1:20:54Yamato Uchi -san, who ran basically built modern Nintendo as we know it today, and basically struck a handshake deal to basically build the online service for the Nintendo gaming machines. And so to build basically what today we call Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network, but to do that, you know, and then you can't make sure. I love it early for that idea. Well, also too early. Yeah, that was closer though. It was closer, but like again, And it was modems, right? It would have been all dial up. And so you would have been doing interactive gaming on dial up modems with like 14 -kilometre modems and with low latency.

1:21:28And so it, and actually Nintendo actually had had it online service on their earlier devices in Japan. And they actually had an early online, Nintendo online or whatever they called it that had like, it had like early e -commerce and it was a proprietary system but it had like early e -commerce and I think it had a food delivery in the 80s. And so there was like an early version of this but it didn't quite take. And so this idea was to do the modern version of it. But again, we modeled the whole thing out. I built all the spreadsheets and all the modem banks you would need and all this stuff. And we figured out that it couldn't quite work.

1:21:57And so literally, we took a walk. And it was like it was like a discouraging thing because it's like we had these two ideas they didn't pan out. And it's like, should we still, is there still anything to do together? And I remember saying on the walk, it was like, this internet thing keeps going. Like it's going. And think about what we had just experienced there between Jim and I, which is like, okay, with basically what the press was telling everybody and all the experts were telling us was, it was either going to be the big companies we're going to do interactive television or it was going to be these home video game -like services.

1:22:29It was going to be, the assumption was going to be one of those, but those were going to replace the internet when this stuff got serious for consumers. And then we basically concluded that when Daddy's home, the little kids can go play in your room. Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you look at the magazines because at the time, again, this is like, Internet's getting started. And so the way people got their news was literally reading one of the three big news magazines, or reading one of the three big newspapers, like, that's how you learned about things. And that's where all the experts showed up. And if you just go back and look at the magazine covers from that era, it's basically all these big company CEOs just pouring scorn on the Internet and declaring that it's a joke and a toy and the thing that they're going to come out with, their proprietary thing is going to be so much better.

1:23:07And so, and so we literally had this moment where, you know, it was just like, well, If we have proven to ourselves that interactive TV is not going to work and if we proven to ourselves that you can't build this based on these video game boxes Then it by process elimination it kind of has to be the internet It's the only thing that works right and it's like and yes, it has every issue that people complain about it's slow It's inefficient. It's insecure. There's no business on it. There's no this and that and the other and it's hard to get online and you know All this stuff, you know, there's all these reasons to believe it wasn't gonna work But like it was literally we literally knocked out all the other ideas and said okay like this thing It has to be the thing.

1:23:44It's the only thing that works. And Jim is a total whiz on these things and knew all about this stuff. And so we sat down and said, well, what if we did this like incredible, heretical idea? And he had very heretical as late as this is April 94. So still very far into this, but still very heretical, which is like, how about we make a build a software company to make internet software? And that was just like, wow, this seems, that seems like a risky, crazy idea. Now in retrospect, it was like the most obvious idea at that moment. But that's the true story of how we actually got to that idea. So anyway, we ended up basically commercializing, we ended up basically building the commercial version of everything that we had built at Illinois.

1:24:23We got through the hard way. It was not the obvious idea. Counter -programming, conventional wisdom and media advice is still works now. It's amazing. It's incredible. I live in this constant state of out -of -body kind of experience amazement where these people just show up on TV or in the papers or whatever and they're just, they have all these credentials and they've got all these degrees. They've got all these initials after their names and they've got these incredible resumes and they've got all these publication credits and they've got all this stuff and these government grants and like on like every possible credential and Harvard and MIT and like all this stuff and they just, they say shit and I'm just like, like maybe they're right but like if they're wrong and they're wrong like a lot of the time.

1:25:10Like, okay, what consequences do they bear for being wrong? And the answer is none at all. Zero, yeah, and they're just back on tomorrow. On tomorrow with some new, inlineable shit. And there's this great book, I often tell friends, this great book, this guy Phil Tetlock, who's a professor, who studies this exact topic. And it's this great book, it's called, Expert Political Judgment. And he did this comprehensive study of the, he came out through political predictions. So basically, you know, experts showing up in, you know, columns in the newspaper and on TV, be talking about like is there going to be war here or what's going to happen to Israel or whatever, all these predictions.

1:25:42And he goes through, and he basically, the conclusion of it is the average well credentialed expert in the media on any topic involving sort of policy or global affairs is somewhat less than random, likely to be correct. So credentialed experts score at like 40 % and a monkey flinging, you know, shit at a dartboard is like 50%. Right? They're my kid. And the big thing that he points out is there's no repercussions for being wrong. There's no career damage, there's no economic damage, there's no nothing. And then he says the thing, if they were being epistemically honest, the thing that they would do is when a talking has on TV talking about something, there would be a scoreboard.

1:26:21And it would show like their last 20 predictions and then it would have like red or green, where they're right or wrong. It's because it's the only way to ever have a sense of whether you're talking to somebody who knows what they're talking about. And that scoreboard, of course, never appears. Never materialized. You never, ever, ever, ever see it. And he pointed, he wrote this book like 20 years ago and like everybody read it and they're like, yeah, that's right. And then everybody just completely ignored it and kept doing things the same way that they're doing it. And so I just, I had this like, I had this experience where I just feel, I just feel like a complete, like, I mean, you know, it worked out.

1:26:51But like I still feel dumb. It's in the sense of like, I read all this stuff. I believed it all at the time. It caused me to be insecure about the thing that I was actually doing. that I saw was actually working. I knew it was working. And I knew why it was working. And I knew why it would keep working. And even still, it was just this wall of doubt and skepticism that kept eating away at me. So yes. So the good news is we've used that to our advantage. Many times, that's that. I remember when we made the Coinbase investment, I guess Bitcoin, which was the one cryptocurrency at the time, was, I don't know, was some number of hundreds of dollars.

1:27:30And everybody, economists, everybody was writing that it was a complete scam and total bullshit and never be worth anything. And here it is. I don't know what it's worth today, like, 63, 64 ,000 dollars, something like that. And all you have to do is just listen to the experts and do the opposite. And you've made so much money. Yeah, it's amazing. Yep, it's amazing. But it's not yet hard. like, you know, I don't know about you. Like, I feel like I still have this problem. Like, I now have like 30 years of evidence that this is all the case. And even still, it's just like, I still have this problem where I'm like, okay, the experts say, it's still like a real effort of will, you know, basically.

1:28:06Yeah. They don't actually know what they're talking about. They don't actually have any predicting capability. They're in a system where the incentives are absolutely terrible. Well, I always find like, if somebody's super dismissive about something, that's a great thing to study. because it's almost surely not a dead zero, right? Like it may not work, but there's no way it's as bad as they're, you know, saying it. If somebody says something is like a scam or a Ponzi scheme or a bullshit or this, then that's almost always worth licking into. So you started an escape with Jim Clark. It was actually called mosaic, right at the time.

1:28:45Mosaic mosaic. Yeah, so we, so we, you know, again, I had graduated. We, you know, the other people, you know, the other colleagues at Illinois were, you know, working either they were their students or staff members there. Everybody was working under federal research funding on a specifically not commercial project, you know, which was open source, you know, there's, and so, you know, like I said, there was no, you know, there was no, the university didn't have, there was no commercial anything, you know, a value, at least according to what everybody thought at the time. And so we start in escape.

1:29:12We actually go out, Jim and I actually flew back out to Urbana in the middle of the still in your incredible snowstorm. And so, you know, hired, I think base, all but one, I think of the original mosaic team members to join us in ESCAPE. So that was the original thing. Most of them were able to move out to California and we're core members of what followed it in ESCAPE. And so then we booted up the company and then we named it mosaic and that was sort of the first issue that got us in trouble. And it was to say the reason we named it mosaic was not because we planned to literally like offer mosaic as a product.

1:29:40We very specifically decided we were going to leave the source code behind. you wrote it like when you were skipping class. Yes. We knew it was not commercial grade. We knew it had just issues. It had issue performance issues. You create one of these things. You know all the issues. And so we just knew it had all these issues. And so we knew we needed to start from scratch and build kind of the correct commercial product. And we knew what we needed to do to do that. And so we very specifically did not bring the source code with us. But all the HTML and HTTP and all these standards were open standards and they were all free to people on the internet were able to use them and do whatever they wanted.

1:30:18So we're like, okay, we have no copyright issues here, but we're not taking the code. And then on the trademark side, there's a long history and Silicon Valley of companies that are sort of named after the projects that spawned them, often out of a university setting or some other setting. and so there were two famous examples, Sun Micro -Systems at the time, which was a huge, a huge successful company. The name Sun actually came from the project at Stanford, which was Stanford University Network, SUN. And so that was like the name of that company, it was like an homage to the Stanford environment that those guys came out of.

1:30:49And then Oracle was the code name of a project that Larry Ellsson had done for the government in the 1970s. Right, and so there was this like, when I thought at the time, it was like a time -honored tradition of like you can basically use the name as an homage. And Illinois does, they don't have a commercial interest in this and so what we'll just do it. But in retrospect, that was sort of the crack. We sort of introduced a crack in the armor from the very beginning by doing that. And then basically what happened was as I was leaving moving to California, the other people at Illinois started to figure out that there was actually, they got access to the commercial mailbox that had all the commercial inbound licensing requests.

1:31:23So they started to get a sense that there might be money in it. And so the founders of this, that company, Spyglass, I mentioned, which was like the one software company in Champaign Urbana actually approached, without me having any awareness of this, they approached the University of Illinois administration and they basically struck a deal to license the Mosaic, our code, to license the Mosaic software code that we had written for commercial sales. And they started offering a commercial product called Spiglas Mosaic. And, you know, totally within rights of the University to do this and Spiglas to do this and that deal was great and off they went.

1:31:56But then we then announced Netscape and of course we were the team that had written all that code and then this started to become, you know, by now the press has started taking it seriously, so we started to become, you know, famous and well known and Clark was this legend and so we started to get all this press coverage. And so Spyglass started to get really worried that we were going to, you know, snuff them, you know, and we were going to lap them with the products and though, Spyglass enlisted the administration of the University of Illinois to basically try to kill us. And the form of the form, the form of the murder attempt was to, they did, they did, they did sue us.

1:32:28And they didn't sue because they didn't have a good claim, because we weren't actually violating copyright, and the trademark, you could just change the name. So they didn't actually have a good legal case to sue us. And so instead of suing us, what they did, instead was they called, spyglass, any situation we were in where we were competing with spyglass for a sale, the University of Illinois administrators would call the customer and tell them that they were going to sue us. Good Lord. That's a thing to do to a startup. That's like the dirtiest thing you can do to a startup. It's like a super nefarious, because like who wants to, you know, any big company doesn't, you know, is already kind of, you know, worried about doing business at the start to start with.

1:33:03And if the start of is literally about to get sued, like why, why take the risk? And so our whole sales pipeline froze up. And you know, we're running on, you know, we're running a venture capital and like, you know, money's getting, you know, and so we're like, we don't have that, you know, so not, you know, VC wasn't in those days, but it is today, we didn't have that long of a runway. And so we needed revenue. And so this, this became a big problem. And so we, we kind of got everybody together and talked about it. And so we, we that decide, and I'm very proud of this decision, we preemptively sued the University of Illinois on this case.

1:33:29And we sued them for, you know, sort of interference of trade. There's these sort of laws that are not great laws to sue on, but they work in this case, which is this thing called, Torture's Interference. You can kind of, you can, in theory, there is a legal, like just gratuitously interfere in somebody else's business, try to unhook other people's contracts. It's not great law, it doesn't often get enforced, but like at least it is on the books. And so we sued Illinois. They, furious negotiation followed. So we offered them at the time $4 million worth of stock in the company. When the company was worth, I don't know, 20 million or something.

1:34:01And - I'm not as new. Youngster is eventually sold per 10 billion. So you can do that, Matt. Yeah. So it was, yeah, it was a billion plus, or some depending on exactly what, but it would have been a lot of money. And they turned that down and instead they demanded cash. And you didn't have. We didn't have all of that. We, at that point, it was starting to work. And so we raised money from Clienter Perkins and we had other investor interest. And so we, and we had sales, you know, starting to come in. And so we, we, we, we paid the cash and did the settlement and got them off our backs. Yeah, that decision on their part, yeah, costs them at least a billion dollars in direct stock plus all the downstream philanthropy from me plus, plus all the downstream philanthropy from Jim Clark, plus all the other founding engineers.

1:34:43They lost a few buildings, I would thank you. They lost, I think, a campus. Yeah. I'm just going to speculate. They lost probably $3 billion in 1990s dollars with that decision. Now, again, this is why I gave a disclaimer up front. Look, the alternate universe Mark with a different skill set would have had a very different way of dealing with this. But Mark has actually existed on Earth one. I never met the University of Illinois administrators. I didn't know the president of the university. I'm like a random undergrad. right? And so like I didn't know the president of the university, you know, I could have called him, you know, yeah, you're that's true, that's true.

1:35:21Although it's still like, you know, the calculus that they made better to bureaucracy to to harass their own students and side with like somebody who wrote them a check is still a little on the evil side, I would say. Yeah, I thought it was really bad. I get really upset. I was really upset for a long time, to be totally honest. I'm still upset. every, every subsequent administration, every subsequent new administration at the university has attempted to reach out and repair the bridge. I have not returned the calls. Yeah, I know. You're a bread shoulder. You and I are the biggest bread shoulders I know.

1:35:58I greatly value my bread. It's very important to me. So, yeah, so, yeah, and you know, the broader point that you brought up is really key, which is like, look, there are a small number of universities in the world that, and you'd put, certainly, Stanford in this category, and MIT and a bunch of others, But there's a certain number of them that really understand. This is maybe Stanford's great genius over the last 50 years. As an institution is, you kind of understand that it's actually really good. If this kind of thing happens, if your students or even your faculty go off and do something new and are successful in business, and then the money that you'll get back in philanthropy is going to be orders of magnitude higher than whatever technology licensing fee you could extract or whatever threat you could extract people out of or whatever.

1:36:38Well, it goes back to the original mosaic story, you know, like it seems like you're giving a lot up by being open But you know, you're you're actually opening the whole world to you It's actually a great metaphor for life, which is you know if you live in abundance You will get abundance and if you live in scarcity, you'll screw yourself and I think good that those universities are abundant And it's good that you are abundant with the internet and that's how we live in the world we are in today. So So what an amazing, yeah, I often think about the alternate universe. If, you know, if you don't write mosaic, if it doesn't work, if you don't start an escape like, it does seem like we would have had in like most systems or many systems are proprietary, right?

1:37:25Like the smartphones are, you know, everybody pays a tax to download their app from the App Store because Apple owns it. It's not open. and then Google has an extremely powerful company because if you want to search something, that's where you have to go. And so forth. And it was just such an amazing anomaly in the industry that the internet happened. And that anybody could join and anybody could put up a website and anybody could build a great business. And in fact, including Google, including some of the big tech today was all created because of the openness of the internet. So thank you for that.

1:38:00and thank you for the conversation. What a good story. Oh, I'm not done yet. Oh, we got one more. Never mind. Pause. I got more. I got to bring it. I got to bring it. I got a great climax to the whole thing. Okay. So let me just start with, you know, Ben, I'm glad you just went through what you just went through. I totally agree. And specifically look like this has a lot to do with the debate raging around AI right now, which is, you know, these big companies, you know, the big companies in those days had every reason, you know, they had all these stories. By the way, a lot of the story the big companies told about the internet early on was It's unsafe and it was, it was, it was, it was, you know, but it was literally going to be, I mean, there was an inhibit, it took a long time for you to take off in retrospect relative to how fast it could have taken off because people literally just were worried that their credit card was going to get stolen.

1:38:44Like, you had to get over that hump and there was just this constant fear of like cybercrime and this and that and then spam and like all abuse and like all these things. And so, and so the big companies always had like all these reasons why they needed to have total control and, you know, the government needed to protect them and they needed to have all these regulations and they needed to have, you know, they just, the world needed to be a world not of open systems like the internet, it needed to be a world of proprietary systems. And look, a lot of the way the world works today is proprietary systems, you know, the banking system is not open, right?

1:39:11You know, you're, you're, you're just, if the bank decides to debank you, they debank you or whatever it is, or if they don't want to let the money go through, they don't let the money go through. And so, you know, most of the, most of the world, most of the economy is with these big companies with total control. And so, yeah, I think it's, I wanted to go through that because I think it's a, it's a major miracle when you're able to actually get one of these open systems to work. And then years later, you're just like, oh my god, I can't believe we almost had the much worse world where the big companies ran everything.

1:39:36But it is amazing how the pattern keeps repeating and it's specifically repeating again today with AI. Again, ironically, and to your point, ironically, some of the companies that are lobbying hardest for regulatory capture and cartel, you know, kind of government cartel status for AI are companies that exist today because the internet was open. And so they are engaged in a PC, particularly advanced form of hypocrisy and mental gymnastics. I bring the founders are gone. So, and taking over by the other people. The other people, although I still blame the founders. Anyway, so, so okay, so the, the, the, the climax of the story is I just can't resist because I just think this is so amazing given what happened that it follows.

1:40:14So, okay, so then we set it with Illinois, we get underway, we're shipping our products, we're starting to get revenue, it's starting to work. This is around, I think, you know, the time you joined us kind of during this period. And so we're competing. We're competing with a bunch of other companies that are starting. People figured out that this was actually the internet was going to be a thing. And so a bunch of other software companies got funded and started. And then this company's spyglass was still out there. And spyglass was selling. They were selling, but it's spyglass was actually selling our own code against us.

1:40:40Yeah, right. Yeah, you know, you know, you're maddening. Yeah, it's a little frustrating, but you know, again, they have the legal right to do it, but like it's a little frustrating. And it was fine. I know we're competing with them whatever, but it's a little bit fine. And there's price we're going on. And we'll sort of back and forth going on. And then Spiglass gets this call for Microsoft. And the Microsoft guys call Spiglass, and they're like, yeah, we want a license Spiglass Mosaic. So we can build it into Windows. And the Spiglass guys say, yeah, that sounds great. Basically, how much per copy are you gonna pay us for that?

1:41:12And Microsoft says, you don't understand. We're gonna pay you a flat fee, which is the same, which is the same, you know, the same thing that Microsoft did originally licensed us way back when. And so, but Microsoft said, you know, basically, at least my understanding, it was what Microsoft said, was, you know, don't worry about it, like, you know, we're going to sell it as an add -on to Windows. And, you know, so we'll have like Microsoft, you know, Mozaic, and then you'll still have Spyglass Mozaic, and you can sell it on, you know, other operating systems or compete with us or whatever, do it every want.

1:41:39And so they struck the deal. I think it was like a million dollar one -time payment. And the Spyglass guys thought they had struck gold because they had this like massive endorsement, They're big blow to us because we didn't get the Microsoft EL. Then they were going to, you know, the whole industry is going to benefit from this. Then they're going to go out and sell lots of other versions of SpiGlassMosaic. Then there was this, Microsoft had the press conference where they originally announced Internet Explorer, their browser which was SpiGlassMosaic, again, our code, relabeled. There's a famous, famous moment where the Microsoft guys are on stage.

1:42:09Then they do the one more thing part. By the way, we're going to make it free. And there's a famous moment, you know, the Spaglass CEO with his head in his hands in the front row, you know, of the press conference, you know, realizing that his business had just ended. You know, he sold out his entire business for a million dollars. So that was the end of Spaglass. So, you know, all as well that as well. Yeah, happy ending. Not that I'm competitive and not that I don't hold crutches. Well, it's hilarious. Thank you all for listening to the Mark and Ben show. We won't tell the Netscape story, which is also a good story, but maybe if you reply in the comments you want to hear it, well consider that one too.

1:42:46Thank you again and we enjoyed it, we hope you did too.