This New Internet Thing, Chapter 13

The Future: When, Again?

I wrote a book. The publication date is May 29, 2024 (if you’d rather not deal with Amazon, your bookstore can also order it from the distributor Ingram Spark, or print-on-demand if they have the equipment). You can read it for free here, although it’ll be in serial form. My fond hope is that you’ll find it so compelling that you just buy the book instead of waiting 8 months to see what happens. There will be a chapter each week, 33 in all.

In Chapter 12, Janet’s realizing that managing sucks. She’s facing a career crisis: does she want to keep climbing the greasy pole of management? In Chapter 13 we shift to her dad Len who’s now living up in the Sierras and spending a lot of time online instead of fishing. Len spent his career in finance and now he can see that this new internet thing could be really big! Why doesn’t everyone see it?

Not every handheld computer failed back then! There was one that really took off. Find out (or remember) what it was.

Reading in serial form has a long and honorable history. My cover artist sent me this “Read Like a Victorian” website. Enjoy.

================ The Future: When, Again? ================

All the rest of 1992, Len continued exploring the online world from his cabin up in the Sierras. His visit to Janet and Walt and the fishing trip with her friends had given him a lot to think about.

He kept busy doing bookkeeping and financial work for various businesses up here. They all needed it, and they were more than happy to have someone who actually knew what he was doing. He did the books for his church gratis.

So Cassie wanted him to be a godfather! A single girl wants to adopt a baby and not get married. He couldn’t get over that. The only single mothers he’d ever heard of had either lost their husbands in the war or gotten divorced. Cassie hadn’t written to him since the fishing trip, so maybe she’d dropped that crazy idea.

He kept looking on the online forums for anything at all about investing in the Internet. There was almost nothing. Some people said, “Well, Novell is the leader in PC networking, so if there are going to be a lot of PC’s connected, Novell will benefit! Or Microsoft.” 

But he looked into that, and Novell as an investment made no sense at all. They had the world's most bitter feud with Microsoft, and Janet had already told him that that was a very unwise move for any company. Furthermore, their chairman Ray Noorda was pushing 70 and retiring soon, and there was no very clear succession plan. They were also making a lot of wild acquisitions without any obvious strategy.

He hashed it out with his investing friends online and they all seemed to agree on this as a philosophy:

“If this Internet is going to be as huge as we think it is, then the small players will either get acquired by the big players or driven out of business. The big players may find some way to profit from it, but only if they’re smart. And some startup companies may come along, but there’s no way to bet on that.” 

So they set about trying to figure out two types of investments:

1. Large companies that would benefit from the Internet, rather than being rendered obsolete.

2. Small companies that would get snapped up by the big ones.

Len spent hours and hours, all through the fall and winter nights, looking at the big companies in computers and networking and trying to figure out which ones had the smarts to adapt to a new world. Or maybe there were some who were already doing the right thing, even if they didn’t know it yet!

He picked up on Oracle, not least because Janet’s friends Dan and Matt were working there. Their stock had been steadily rising. It wasn’t meteoric, but still, the direction was clear. Was this anticipating the Internet, somehow, or was it just that everyone needed databases? Whatever, he bought some of their stock.

Then, in the middle of March, Cassie phoned him. It was not about her adopting a child, as he’d expected. She had two pieces of news: first, she’d left 3Com and joined a little company making a handheld device, called Palm Computing

Len thought back to his conversation on the boat with Matt about GO Corp.

“Uh-oh. Haven’t those things already flopped?” But he was too polite to say that. It turned out that Palm already had a product out with Tandy, called the Zoomer, and it was not exactly setting the world on fire. But Cassie explained that it had a female CEO, Donna Dubinsky, and Donna had really impressed her as someone who knew how to run a business, and particularly, this business Their chief architect, Jeff Hawkins, had impressed her as well. Besides being brilliant, he seemed to be practical, and those two qualities didn’t often go together. So she saw it as a bet on people, not on a business plan. Len had no reason to be proud of Cassie since she wasn’t his daughter, but still! She should have been. She was a girl after his own heart.

Cassie was going to be their head of Quality Assurance, which sounded impressive to Len. A guy with that title at Chrysler would be a VP and have his own parking spot at the Headquarters building, and a private bathroom! But this company was a little bit smaller, in a tiny office on El Camino near Chef Chu’s . She said they walked over there for lunch, so he knew they were too small to have their own cafeteria, at least.

Her second piece of news was about some new program for the Internet she’d seen, called Mosaic! Len had heard some rumblings about this on AOL, but he didn’t know what to make of them. Cassie explained that it was a program for looking at the World Wide Web. He asked if he could get it on his computer, and she said, “No, it’s just for Unix so far.”

“So why are you telling me this?” he wondered, but didn’t say. He wrote down the name and figured he’d ask Janet about it the next time he talked to her.

“Mosaic!” he thought after they hung up. “Why would Cassie think this was important enough to tell a Nobody like me?” He called Janet.

“Hi, honey!”

“Hi, Dad. How are you?”

“Good, thanks. Hey, have you ever heard of something called ‘Mosaic’?”

“Mosaic? No. Should I have?”

“Once more, I’m way ahead of her!” he said to himself. “Oh, Cassie just called and told me about it. She said it was some new thing for the Internet, but I can’t get it yet. I figured maybe you could.”

She spelled it out and he confirmed it. “Mosaic. OK, I’ll ask around. Did she tell you she left 3Com?”

They talked about Cassie’s new job and exchanged miscellaneous news. The next day, Janet asked three of her people if they’d ever heard of this ‘Mosaic’ and one of them, Bill, sent her a copy of a newsgroup posting by a guy named Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois. She read over the list of features:

• Friendly Motif user interface.

• Color and monochrome default X resource settings.

• Multiple independent toplevel windows.

• History list per window (both 'where you've been' and 'where you can go').

• Global history with previously visited locations visually distinct; global history is persistent across sessions.

• Hotlist/bookmark capability -- keep list of interesting documents, add/remove items, list is persistent across sessions.

and now she understood why Cassie was excited about it. “Wow. This does look impressive.” It reminded her of when she’d first seen the Xerox Alto and the graphical user interface: it was something the world was waiting for, even if they didn’t know it yet.

“We have to bring this up and show people!” she thought, and asked Bill if he knew how to use a Sun machine, so he could build it. Bill’s face lit up and he said he’d get right on it. She thought of offering to help, but then realized she’d probably just get in his way. “Gotta fix that.” she said to herself.

Shortly after lunch, Bill came to her cube looking pleased with himself.

“OK, do you want to see it?”

She got up and he remembered something:

“Oh, we need you to open up port 80 on the firewall!”

Janet did remember how to do that much, at least. She followed him back to his cube. Margo and Tony gathered around the Sun and brought up the program. Margo said,

“Do you remember the URL for the Bluegrass website?”

Tony said, “I think it’s at Xerox PARC. parcvax.xerox.com maybe?”

Janet perked up at the word Xerox. Margo typed it in, and one window on the screen filled with an index of bluegrass musicians. If you selected one, it opened into a page about that musician. Then you could go back to the index again. Tony motioned her to get up and he sat down at the keyboard and opened another window. He typed in a URL that led back to Andreesen’s website at the University of Illinois. It had images mixed in with the text! Janet said, “Oh my God! After Xerox I didn’t know when I’d ever see this again!” Of course the Xerox Star had that feature over ten years ago, but she didn’t want to bore everyone again with her Good Old Days stories. 

People in nearby cubes overheard the excitement and started gathering around. There were all sorts of questions about it: does it have sound?  Can you email from it? How do you code one of those pages? They spent a good hour talking about it, and everyone wanted to sit down and try it themselves.

Janet thought, “OK, I’m the senior manager here. I bet they’re wondering what I’m going to do about this!” She decided not to pour cold water on it. These people were excited about something! That was worthwhile all by itself. What 3Com would actually do about it, she had no idea yet.

“OK, Tony, can you put this up on the server so everyone doesn’t have to build it themselves?”

“Way ahead of you,” he said. “It’s already up there!”

Several people went back to their cubes to try it out themselves. Patrick, the same marketing Director who’d asked Dan if he was nuts when he left for Oracle, walked by and looked in, curious.

“Hey, what’s this?”

Janet said, “It’s called Mosaic, for viewing the World Wide Web.”

“Ah, I’ve heard about that. What’s special about it?”

She sat down and gave him a brief demo, with Tony and Margo excitedly interjecting features that she forgot to mention. Patrick smiled but didn’t say much. After ten minutes or so, he looked at his watch, and then said,

“So does this let you do anything on the Internet that you couldn’t do before?”

Janet hesitated. He continued,

“I mean, it’s a GUI for the Internet, and that’s great, we need that, but is there more?”

Tony and Margo figured Janet was the one to handle that. She said,

“Well, possibly it opens up the Internet for the non-computer user, just like the Mac and Windows did for computing in general.”

Patrick said, “We’re not really in the business of selling Internet to average people, though.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. He went on,

“Anyhow, if you think the Executive Committee should see a demo of this, why don’t you put it on the calendar for next week?”

Janet said she would, although she thought she’d need to do some strategizing so she didn’t ruin her credibility with more of this Internet stuff.

Everyone looked a little deflated by all that. She wanted to give them back some of that energy.

“So, do we have a website internally, at least?”

They looked at each other. Margo said,

“I can look into that.”

“Great, Margo. Then maybe we can create a demo to show to the executives!”

Then she had another thought: I’ll do it myself! That’ll show everyone.”

“Actually, Margo, I think I’ll work together with you on this, if you don’t mind. It’ll be good for me!”

Margo looked surprised. Janet doing actual programming? Really? But she hid it well and said she’d send Janet the site she was thinking of using.

Now they were excited again. They spent the next fifteen minutes talking about what they’d put in the demo, and Janet gave them some ideas on how to display the projects the execs really cared about.

She left them as they were dividing up the work for the demo. She chuckled to herself,

“Well, if someone asks why we’re doing this and not our actual jobs, I’ll just say the Executive Committee asked for it! It’s even true, more or less.” 

Back at her desk, Margo had already sent her the FTP address of the server at Illinois, and said it was the same place that Mosaic came from. She panicked for a second, “Uh-oh. Now what do I do?”

Of course as a senior manager, she could just “ask” one of her people to teach her, and maybe that’s what she’d end up doing. Still, wouldn’t they all be surprised if she just knew how to build a web server! That would be so cool.

“I’ll call Dan! He’ll know.” she thought. Dan was at Oracle now, but hell, they used to work together on actual Mesa code at Xerox. He wouldn’t judge her. She found his number and dialed it.

“Hello, this is Dan Markunas.”

“Hi, Dan, it’s Janet Saunders. Is this a good time?”

“Janet! Nice to hear from you. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Well, I’m hoping you can give me some technical help. I want to build a web server!”

Dan was flabbergasted and asked her if she couldn’t just direct one of her people to do it for her. She politely gave him to understand that she wanted to do this one herself, and he walked her through the process of ftp’ing the zip file with the source, unzipping it, typing “./configure” and “make,” and so forth. He didn’t mind waiting while she did each of those steps, and once the ‘make’ process seemed to be taking a long time, he said it was looking good and to call him back when it was done.

They had several more calls that afternoon. Dan had seen all the little glitches in the make process and gave her the fixes. This was so fun! On the way home, she stopped at Computer Literacy to get some books. Dan told her to get the Stevens book, UNIX Network Programming, so she got that.

Walt noticed the books under her arm when she came home.

“Hey, gonna do some reading?”

She beamed at him.

“Yeah, I’m going to do some real work for a change!”

“Whoa! They’re sure paying you well for the other kind of work. Are you sure you want to do this?”

This was going to be a long conversation, so she sat down, 

“What part of your job do you like the best? Managing the people and dealing with the clients? Or actually seeing the thing come together?”

Walt didn’t have to think very long on that one.

“Well, you can either earn workingman’s wages, or you can earn like a boss. That’s the way I look at it. The boss’ work kinda sucks, but that’s why it pays.”

She thought about that a while. Without much enthusiasm,

“Yeah, I suppose.”

Walt put his arm around her but didn’t say anything. 

“I can see myself turning into one of those bullet-headed old guys at TRW. The ones who are lifers.”

He ruffled her hair. “Nope. Still got hair up there.”

Walt thought she needed a pep talk.

“Hey, you’re bringing in big bucks for us! Everyone I work with asks why I don’t just retire and let you support me.”

She laughed. “I don’t see you as a househusband, somehow.” He agreed.

Walt was such a good guy, such a better husband than Ken. He wasn’t always telling her, not in so many words, that he was a better engineer than she was. He had his own world, which was completely alien to her. His subcontractors were people he’d learned to trust, usually because he’d gotten rid of the ones he couldn’t. Sometimes the customers were flaming assholes, like Matt’s wife Miriam, and he just had to be polite and keep his cool. At the same time, he had lots of workers who were undependable and who’d desert him in a second if someone offered them more money.  She admired him so much for that.

What would Walt do if she stopped bringing in so much money? She could see her future as an executive where the promotions get harder and harder and the number of people with big egos who could fill a slot was way more than the number of slots. And having that feeling at the end of each day that she wasn’t really anything but a punching bag for the other executives and a mommy for her own people.

And then Dad was always so proud of her, but was that just because he hadn’t gone too far up the ladder in his own career? Maybe he was getting too much vicarious satisfaction out of hers?

She didn’t even want to think about what they’d say at 3Com. “What? You want to be a grunt again? Why would you want that?” She’d never been an engineer there so they had no idea she could even do it.

Finally, did she even want this? Being a manager had always made her feel grown up and trusted. If she gave it up now, would she feel like a failure?

So, It would be tough, and not just the technical part, although that was bad enough. She booted her PC.

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There! That wasn’t so bad, was it? There’s a companion “Notes” doc where I detail what really happened back then, who helped me with it, and answer any other questions you might have.

Yes, there’s no free lunch: you can read this for free, but going deeper into the history will cost you a modest $5 a month. The Paid section will also include all the chapters, whereas they age out of the Free section after a few months. If you like what you read, buy the book.

There will usually be a Notes post on each chapter, where you read the real story if there is one.