This New Internet Thing, Chapter 14

The Beating Heart of Silicon Valley

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 13, Len was figuring out how to invest in this new Internet thing, Cassie tells him about her new job at Palm, and they all discover Mosaic! Janet’s dipping her toe in the Engineering waters, after deciding that management sucks.

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

======= The Beating Heart of Silicon Valley =====

Everything was a struggle after she managed to get the Mosaic source code on her PC at home. That was the easy part, but the code was for Unix only, so far at least, not Windows, so it didn’t really do her any good. She didn’t have a Unix system at home.

They had them at work, of course, but how was she going to find any time for actual work, given that she only got 30 or so seconds between meetings, phone calls or her staff walking in on her?

“Get out of your cube!” was the only answer.. She walked down to Tony’s cube. He and Margo were talking about Mosaic and the World Wide Web, apparently. Just the topic! She felt a little reticent about exposing her ignorance, but she went ahead and told them about how she’d gotten the source code on her home machine. Mercifully, they were supportive and didn’t make fun of her. They asked her some questions about what equipment she had at home. Tony assumed she must have a whole cluster of machines, all connected by Ethernet, of course, with a leased line to headquarters. Like a boss should have.

She had to admit it was just a regular old 486-based Windows PC with a modem. No Unix, no Ethernet. But they took it as a challenge: Margo asked if she could bring home another machine from work and run SCO Unix on it. Janet wasn’t certain what that was and didn’t know how to install it, but they both said if she brought over the machine, they’d install it for her. Janet said, “Well, if there’s one thing I do know how to do, it’s order a PC! I’ll just say it’s for the lab.”

A few days later, some big cardboard boxes appeared in her cube. Tony came over with some CD-ROM’s and spent a couple hours fiddling. Several times he had to go ask for help, and Janet got to meet a whole bunch of other engineers she’d never talked to. At the end of the day, Tony apologized and said he had to leave, but he’d be back tomorrow. Margo just laughed and said this was par for the course with PC’s. Janet wondered how they ever got any work done, when the obstacles to doing work were so high.

At home, she didn’t feel like telling Walt about this. He would probably wonder why this was her problem and not something she could just assign to one of her people. After all, they worked for her, didn’t they?

They finally got SCO installed the next day and she brought the machine home. Walt helped her carry the stuff in from her car and set it up in the home office.

“Oh, no, those things are multiplying!” he said. “Or do you have to bring the old one back?”

“No, this is additional. I have a project I want to do.”

She told him she was getting bored with this management business and wanted to get her hands dirty on something real.

“Oh, is this like that coffee table I built? Or the house we’re going to build for your dad?” 

“It’s exactly like that, sweetie! Thanks for the help,” she kissed him.

“Anytime. I guess I can’t help you with this project, though!”

“Not unless you have some talents I wasn’t aware of.”

Janet could tell Walt had misgivings about her becoming a techie, but didn’t say much about it the rest of the evening. He thought about that “pool party” she dragged him to once, with all those executive-types. He had to admit that not having to be around people like that anymore would be a big plus. But surely she couldn’t just give up being a manager!

That night she tried some things with her new SCO Unix machine. No matter what it was, there was some obstacle she wasn’t expecting! She needed to get the Mosaic source files on it: how was she going to do that? They were all on her Windows machine, but that wasn’t doing her any good. She’d been working at 3Com almost 8 years, for God’s sake; couldn’t she just use Ethernet and transfer them over? Both the machines had an Ethernet card in them.

She didn’t have any Ethernet cable at home, though. How about just fetching the source from the Internet again? Would SCO recognize her modem? She spent the rest of the evening trying to get that to work. Fortunately Margo and Tony were expecting her to come by tomorrow morning, and she did. They said she needed a “crossover cable” to connect the two machines directly with Ethernet. Neither of them had one, but they asked around and got her one. Then she told them about the trouble she’d had with the modem, and that problem wasn’t quite as easy to solve. Neither of them had ever done that particular thing before, but they looked online, and it turned out she needed to go to Fry’s to buy some cables. “Welcome to Engineering!” said Tony. “Where everything is possible and nothing is easy!” Janet smiled and thanked them.

Tony asked Margo, “How far do you think she’ll get?”

Margo said, “You might be surprised. Janet can be pretty persistent.”

“OK, this is going to be harder than I thought!” Janet said to herself. On Saturday morning, she asked Walt if he wanted to go to Fry’s with her

“Fry’s? Why, what’s there?”

“Oh, it’s this electronics store in Sunnyvale. They sell everything, apparently.”

Walt groaned, but said, “OK, I guess I can do that, once.”

The Fry’s parking lot was almost full. The store had a whole section on the right where you could return stuff, and a bunch of security guards. There was someone playing a piano in the middle of the store, and 15 or 20 aisles full of gear that Walt had never heard of. In the back there were tables full of monitors, computers, and laptops, and sales people standing around waiting for questions. She asked one of them where to find the cables she needed, and he didn’t know, but disappeared to look it up. As they were waiting, Dan Markunas walked up!

“Janet! Fancy meeting you here!”

“Hi Dan! How’s Oracle?”

“Oh, it’s oracling along. What are you doing here?”

She reminded him of her quest to work with Mosaic source code and now, her struggles with SCO Unix. He was sympathetic but didn’t know much about that. He thought of something, though:

“Hey, aren’t you coming up on your second sabbatical?”

She thought back to the first one: it was 1989! Oh my God, he was right: every four years.

“Oh, jeez, I didn’t even think of that! Thanks.”

“My pleasure. Hey, one more thing!” She looked expectantly.

“Porter and the gang have a regular lunch at Gordon-Biersch in Palo Alto on Fridays. You should come and catch up with the old Xeroids!”

She told him about the times years ago she’d met them all at the Dutch Goose. He said,

“Yeah, now it’s at G-B. Better beer!” 

Finally the sales person came back and told her which aisle to go to, and they went there.

Dan kept wandering around and saw a guy who looked vaguely familiar. He had a sort of sleazy hairdo and sunglasses that rang a bell. “How do I know this guy?” he asked himself, but the guy recognized Dan first and shook hands with him. It was Stan, the guy he’d met in Santa Fe; the one who wanted to put porn on the Internet!

Stan reminded him of how they’d met, and Dan asked him how things were coming along for him. Stan said, “Oh, super, super! I’ve got my PC on the Internet and I’m trying as hard as I can to drum up interest for my projects!”

Dan didn’t want to know what those projects were. “Great, how’s that going?”

Stan was undaunted. “Well, it’s a struggle, but this thing’s going to be big! I know it is. These PC graphics cards do need some work, though. I’ll be like a pioneer in the Old West! ”

“And to think I knew you when!” Dan said, but the irony went over Stan’s head. They exchanged some pleasantries, Dan wished him good luck and said he had to be somewhere.

“Porn on the Internet! Is that why we’re doing all this?” he chuckled. He made a mental note to tell Matt about this on Monday.

While Janet was looking at the bags on the shelf and reading the packages, Cassie tapped her on the shoulder. Janet, Walt, and Cassie all hugged ecstatically. Janet said,

“So how’s Palm coming along? We miss you!”

Cassie was surprised to see Janet here buying techie gear, and had lots of questions for her about why she needed all this. Walt said,

“So, do all the techies come to Fry’s on Saturday morning?”

Cassie laughed. “Pretty much. Whatever you want, they have it here.”

“I need a box of left-handed 7/16 inch wood screws. Do they have those?”

Cassie said, “Damn, I was just looking for those, but they were out!”

They all laughed. Janet said, “Well, I think we’re out of here. Nice seeing you, Cassie!”

There was a long, long lane you had to pass through, with impulse-purchase items like batteries, Skittles, Snickers, and beef jerky, leading to about 25 cash registers. A staffer was standing there directing customers to the next free register. The cashiers had a light that they turned on when they finished with a customer.

Outside, Walt said, “Well, that was an experience. Now I can say I’ve been to Fry’s.”

“The beating heart of Silicon Valley. Now we’ve been there!” said Janet. 

Then he thought of one more thing:

“What was that Dan said about a ‘sabbatical’?”

Janet told him that after four years at 3Com, you got six weeks off with pay, in addition to your regular vacation. A lot of people stuck around just to get their sabbatical. Now she’d been there eight years, so she was due for another one.

“If I left for six weeks, my business would fall apart!”

She laughed. “We have a few people at 3Com just dying to take my place!”

“So given that I can't go anywhere, what are you going to do?”

She shrugged. When they got back home, she tried her new cables. Getting the machine to work with the modem and getting on the Internet consumed the rest of Saturday. Walt was already asleep when she finally finished, around 11:00 pm.

On Sunday, she thought she’d give Walt a break and not do any computer work today. He was always supportive of her, but she didn’t want to push it.

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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.