This New Internet Thing, Chapter 9

The Internet, in Person

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 8, everyone changed places (except Janet). Matt is now at GO, Cassie is in QA and not reporting to Janet, and Dan is at Oracle. We get to relive the experience of being screwed by Microsoft, which was pretty much universal back then. We also got to make fun of Momenta, and just to rub it in, we’ll do it some more now.

The Internet was being built long before the general public ever heard of it. I went to this IETF meeting in November 1991, and actually did go to lunch with a group that included Mitch Kapor.

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

=========== The Internet, in Person =============

It was November, 1991. Janet was attending her first Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The IETF was the group that actually defined how the Internet would work. It wasn’t a big corporate or government bureaucracy, and almost no one wore a tie, except for Vint Cerf, the spiritual father of the Internet, who was in a three-piece suit. Janet shook his hand and he was as gracious to her as if she were a visiting President.

It was freezing in Santa Fe, and she had to stop at an outdoors store and buy a stocking cap. The IETF had a practice of meeting in cities outside tourist season to save on costs, and they were certainly adhering to it now.

Why was she at an Internet conference at all? 3Com wanted to appear hip and with-it without actually doing much, and sending one of their top managers to a meeting like this was an easy way to accomplish that. That was the first reason.

The second reason was that Janet had been making herself a pest about the Internet in top management meetings for the last couple of years. The rest of the management team pooh-pooh’ed “this Internet thing” as just something for the academic types, with their big Unix machines. 3Com was happy to sell them Ethernet adapters and let them play all they wanted.

Normal business people didn’t use that stuff; they used Novell, or IBM, or DEC, or Apple protocols. Someday, they all believed, everyone would move to the global “standard”, OSI. OSI, or “Open Systems Interconnect,” whatever you wanted to call it, was a standard produced by the ponderous CCITT (the French initials. It was “International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee” in English). That was at least run by the telephone companies and by extension, the United Nations, so it was a real standard. Those organizations would rule the networking world, and the Internet would always just be for the pointy heads.

They made fun of “the world-wide web”, which had been announced in August of that year. Janet didn’t even try to get their approval to buy a NeXT machine to host a “web server,” since none of them even knew what that was. She knew they’d never approve it.

But this conference had 350 people in attendance! It was going on all week. There were subgroups meeting on ATM (the new network system that supposedly would be used by the telephone companies and handle voice, video, and everything); AppleTalk; X.25 (the old public data network); routing; SNMP (the management protocol); and many more things she knew nothing about. They certainly seemed to be serious, busy people. Conspicuously missing was Microsoft! As far as anyone could tell, they’d never heard of the Internet.

She walked around the reception looking for people she knew. There was Peter Deutsch, whom she sort of knew from Xerox, although she mostly knew of him.  Chandy, from 3Com. But hello! It was Dan Markunas, her old buddy from Xerox and 3Com. He saw her at almost the same time, and they hugged.

“Dan! How’s Oracle?” Dan had left 3Com earlier this year and gone to work at Oracle in their Network Products Division. They hadn’t seen each other since then. Many people at 3Com thought it was a stupid move, since Oracle had had a big stock drop the year before. She wasn’t one of them, since the people saying that were mostly the same ones who thought the Internet was going nowhere. These were people who spoke about the Microsoft LAN Manager deal as “strategic,” and thought Bridge’s router business was never going to go anywhere, so they let Cisco take over that market. She sat in these big management meetings where they all debated what business 3Com should be in. It didn’t seem to hurt your management career if you were always wrong.

“Oh, it’s great! I’m busy learning Unix. I have a private office again! How are you? Is 3Com getting into the Internet?”

The bit about the private office was rubbing it in. They had both had one at Xerox, but nobody at 3Com did. That had been a big bone of contention when 3Com acquired Bridge back in 1987, since Bridge had them and 3Com had insisted on abolishing them, so they could have a uniform company culture.

She didn’t want to say too much about her struggles at 3Com, so she just said, “I’m trying. It’s hard. How about Oracle — what are you working on?”

“I’m doing this database to help people manage all the text files you need with Unix and the Internet. Learning all about /etc/passwd (he pronounced it “etsy-password”), DNS files, and all that.”

She thought she’d get him back now for that private office jab:

“A database! Naturally, that would be Oracle’s answer to everything.”

He smiled. “Yeah, well, that is what brings in the money. Anyhow, I guess I’ll see you around. Which working groups are you going to?”

She looked through her program, and said, “Oh, I’m not sure. There’s so much here I don’t know. How about you?”

“I’m going to the Internet Message Extensions working group this morning. This afternoon is a talk by Dave Perkins! You remember him!”

She tried to recall who that was. “Oh, yeah. Didn’t he leave?”

“Yeah. He’s at Synoptics now.”

“Well, I’m sure I’ll run into you again.” She continued circulating. She wasn’t the only woman there, but it was mostly men, like most tech gatherings. Everyone looked at her name badge to decide if she was worth talking to. The “3Com” part attracted a lot of attention. They either wanted to ask if 3Com was getting into the Internet, or tell her that they were using 3Com Ethernet adapters. She tried to look polite at the latter group. Some of the guys had other intentions, but she figured her wedding ring ought to handle those.

She ended up going to the Router Requirements meeting, feeling vaguely that routers were something that 3Com sold and her group was responsible for managing them in the corporate network, so they must be important. No one else from 3Com was there, although walking around chatting, it seemed like almost all of their competitors were. She took careful notes for the folks back home.

At lunch, she went to a restaurant with Dan, a bunch of people she didn’t know, and Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor was very down-to-earth and she couldn’t wait to tell the people back home about the famous guy she met!

As they got back to the conference, Dan asked, “Do you want to meet for breakfast tomorrow and catch up? I’m dying to hear what’s up at 3Com?”

Janet said, “Sure. You can tell me what Porter is like as a VP, too!” Porter Berwick was a guy they both knew from Xerox, and he was the VP of Dan’s new division.

Everyone wanted to know what 3Com was doing with the Internet these days, and she was embarrassed to have to say “Not all that much!” They talked about Gopher, which was a new Internet protocol some people were really excited about, and they threw around the names of Usenet groups as if everyone read those things. Once in a while she looked at one of those groups, and she’d even made them available to the company, since there were a few newsgroups that were directly relevant to some of the engineers. It seemed to generate a staggering amount of traffic, and everyone sympathized with her when she told them that.

Someone mentioned a British guy, Tim Berners-Lee, who was pushing something called “the world-wide web.” Now she had heard of that. No one was quite sure where that was going, but they all seemed to think it was worth paying attention to. She made a note to herself to stay on top of that one.

It seemed like everyone wanted to hire her! She was that rare “woman in tech,” and they all figured that 3Com was going nowhere and she must be looking for a job. She was polite to them but didn’t let it go beyond that.

* * *

On Monday afternoon after lunch, as Dan waited for the elevator at his hotel, he saw another guy with a badge for the conference. There was just something about him that said “I’m not a techie!” and Dan was intrigued. If he didn’t have the badge, Dan would have thought he was an entertainer at a local lounge, except he wasn’t quite good-looking enough for that.

The guy stuck out his hand and introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Stan.” Stan had a two-day beard stubble, sunglasses up on his head, and long wavy hair greased back. He was wearing a sport coat over a flowered shirt open at the throat, and several gold chains around his neck. No one in tech dressed like that.

They chatted. Stan had heard of Oracle but didn’t know anything about it, and seemingly didn’t have much interest. Dan said, “So what brings you to the IETF?”

Stan said, “It’s exciting, man. It’s the future!”

“Yeah, maybe so.” Dan agreed.

“Oh, it definitely is. Can you imagine if everyone had this at home?”

Their elevator came and they got in. Dan said as the doors closed,

“Maybe someday. What would they all do with it, though?”

Stan’s face lit up. “I know what the guys will be doing, at least!”

Dan started to get some idea why Stan was here. “Watch porn, you mean?”

“We like to call it ‘adult entertainment’.”

Dan smiled. He was about to ask if that was what Stan did for a living, but they got to their floor and Stan got off.

“It was nice to meet you, Dan.” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

Dan had seen the little room at his local video rental shop with the X-rated videos, not that he ever went in there. He thought of Paul Reubens, or “Pee-Wee Herman,” who’d been arrested for masturbating at a local porn theater and always wondered why Reubens didn’t just rent a video. But he’d never even considered that you could send porn over the Internet! It was barely fast enough for text, for God’s sake. Maybe a photo if you had plenty of time to wait. Almost since the dawn of computing, guys had created adult images and sent them around for their own amusement. Sometimes they did it on a normal line printer, with parentheses placed at strategic points.

But ordinary people watching a video? Forget it. Stan was a real visionary, but he was just a little ahead of his time. 

Dan saw a couple other 3Com’ers at the conference and wondered if 3Com was finally, finally getting with it. He’d been in a division at 3Com that was working on part of “the Internet,” namely SNMP, or Simple Network Management Protocol. They were doing a “management station,” which at least two other large companies were doing (Sun and HP), and it had almost zero chance of succeeding in the market, but at least it gave him some credibility in a technology with actual market appeal. Email, he’d discovered, had almost none in the wider market.

The next morning he met Janet at one of those cool little Southwestern cafes that were all over Santa Fe. Dan had always wanted to try huevos rancheros, so he ordered those. Janet just had a bagel.

She wondered how life outside of 3Com was. He knew she was open to other opportunities, since that dinner at her house shortly after the wedding, but he figured all the headhunters must know about her by now. Then she surprised him:

“Hey, do you like fishing?”

“Fishing? I love it. Why, what brought that on?”

“Well, we’re moving my dad out from Detroit to live in Walt’s cabin in the mountains! He’s going to fish every day.”

Dan was amazed. “Your dad? I met him at the wedding, right?  What, is he retired now?”

“Yeah, he retired last year, and we were worried he was going to be bored and start drinking or something. Walt, especially, since he’s lost a few friends that way.”

“Wow. So is he going to like living by himself out in the middle of nowhere? I mean, I’m assuming here.”

Janet laughed. “No, you’re not wrong. Walt’s cabin is pretty isolated. Dad stayed in it while we were on our honeymoon, and he’s been raving about it ever since. Dan and Walt are going to build a new house on the property for Dad to live in. We call it “father-in-law quarters!”

“Like mother-in-law quarters. I like it! And Walt’s a contractor so he knows how to do stuff like that.”

“Yep. I’m going to help, too. It’ll be a nice break from work.”

“Janet’s joining Walt’s business! Don’t hurt your hands, though. You need those to type!”

“Not really. Mostly I just go to meetings and talk on the phone these days. Anyhow, thanks, I’ll be sure to wear gloves.”

Dan took all this in. “Wow, my dad used to go fishing all the time before he got married. We always went on vacations in northern Wisconsin to fish.”

“Same with us, but it was northern Michigan. I bet my dad and yours would get along great!”

“Yeah. Len will have to have me up there to visit and fish with him some time!”

“It’s a deal.”

They talked about their friends at 3Com. She said that Matt had left to join this startup in Foster City, called “GO Corp.” which Dan already knew all about. He’d just had lunch with Matt a month or so ago.

The funniest news was from a guy, Mike, whom Janet knew but Dan didn’t, who’d gone to a startup called Momenta, which was trying to build a handheld computer. They were a bunch of pretentious Apple wannabes, whose motto was “1,000 days to greatness” to appeal to those people who’d missed the original Macintosh effort. She regaled him with stories about their “culture,” like this one:

Mike had just joined the company, and Kamran Eliahan, the president, was asking him to affirm his faith in the Momenta Maxims in front of the rest of the company.

“He asked him, ‘Do you believe in the Maxims? Are you willing to live your life by them?’ Can you believe that?”

Dan snorted. “What are ‘the Momenta Maxims’? Do they carry them around on a little wallet card?”

“I forget, but I remember they all begin with a ‘P’. People, Process… I forget the rest.” 

“Is ‘Pretentiousness’ one of them?”

Now it was Janet’s turn to laugh. “That’s what I said, too. Patronizing?”

“Piety!”

“Or ‘Pointless’ “

Dan said, “How about ‘Psychedelic’?”

She thought about how that was spelled. He had her there! She wiped the tears from her eyes with her napkin, put it on the table, and motioned for the check. They were both leaving tonight, although the conference was going on all week.

As for Santa Fe: it was freezing, but there were lots of great restaurants and tons of art galleries. He spent part of that afternoon just gallery-hopping, observing that, as always, any piece of art in a gallery cost at least three times what he’d be willing to pay. But hey, they have to pay their rent, too. He thought he’d stick to going to the “artists’ open studios” tours, where you could deal directly with the artist, see all their work, and maybe bargain with them.

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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.