The History of the Web

I was inspired by Richard MacManus, and his incredible work on Cybercultural, to take another look at 1995, and dig up a draft I had written years ago about the subject. It was quite a long draft, so there will be a couple more of these as well.

1995 is a fascinating year. It’s one of the most turbulent in modern history. 1995 was the web’s single most important inflection point. A fact that becomes most apparent by simply looking at the numbers. At the end of 1994, there were around 2,500 web servers. 12 months later, there were almost 75,000. By the end of 1995, over 700 new servers were being added to the web every single day.

It was a year that, incidentally, acted in the same way across every major industry. There have been books written about it. The web got a mention in The New York Times. The OJ trial was widely reported on, and speculated about, on the web. The White House even got a website even as the now infamous meeting of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky took place and the tragedy of the Oklahoma City bombing hung over the United States. Windows 1995 was launched. The Palm Pilot was released. It was an incredible moment in pop culture, filled with some of the more iconic music, film, and art of the decade.

But to understand 1995 on the web, you have to jump forward a bit first.

The Internet Tidal Wave

In 1998, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging monopolistic corporate maneuvering by the company in an attempt to illegally diminish its competition. At the center of the case was Internet Explorer, a browser that Microsoft had released for free and bundled directly into their operating system, leaving very little room or incentive for competition. The trial lasted years, and its ultimate conclusion that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws and should be subject to a breakup would have been absolutely tectonic if not for the fact that the decisions was reversed less than a year later through an appeal. If you’re looking for a single event that had lasting consequences on the web, it’s not a bad place to start. But that’s not what we are here to talk about (at least, not yet).

During the court proceedings, heaped on mountains of sworn testimony and archived correspondence, a memo surfaced from May of 1995. It was written by Bill Gates himself, subject line The Internet Tidal Wave, and was sent to every Microsoft executive. The 5,000 word manifesto highlighted the acute importance of the web for the future of the tech world, and the failure by Microsoft to make themselves a part of it. It was a strange position for Gates to take, seeing as just a a year earlier, he had directed his team to steer clear of the Internet. In his book released that same year, The Road Ahead, he espoused the weakness of the Internet as untested, uncharted, and in most cases, unusable. This memo, only a year later, was a complete reversal. It could not be more clear. Microsoft needed to embrace the Internet, or face being replaced by it.

Gates spent a good portion of the document dealing with the web, and though his first assessment of the Internet could not have been farther off, the memo comes off as oddly prescient,

The HTTP protocols that define HTML Web browsing are extremely simple and have allowed servers to handle incredible traffic reasonably well. All of the predictions about hypertext – made decades ago by pioneers like Ted Nelson – are coming true on the Web. Although other protocols on the Internet will continue to be used (FTP, Gopher, IRC, Telnet, SMTP, NNTP). HTML with extensions will be the standard that defines how information will be presented

In particular, he feared that Netscape would soon offer an operating system that existed entirely on the web. The only solution, he concluded was to “match and beat their offerings.” A few months after that, Microsoft released their first browser, Internet Explorer which, of course, would eventually lead to the previously mentioned trial proceedings.

At the end of the 1995, the online services provider Prodigy, which had made a killing offering a self-contained experience on a closed network, released their own web browser as well, opening their doors to the wider world of the Internet for the first time since it originally set up shop.

In early 1996, the ink dried on a lucrative deal between America’s largest single online services provider, AOL, and Netscape. As part of the deal, Netscape bundled a version of their browser directly into AOL’s platform. Netscape followed that up with a similar deal with CompuServe. Practically overnight, Netscape had accumulated nearly 10 million new users before the first half of 1996 was over.

So what happened? What made Microsoft, the most dominant force in the technological landscape, suddenly scared of a threat they had barely registered just a year earlier. What made online service providers, major media publications, large government organizations and everyday people sit up, take notice, and open up their web browsers? 1995 is the story of the many people that believed in the web and fought for its future. It was the year it moved outside the huddled spaces of universities and research labs and into the imaginations of everyday people who imbued it with purpose and set it loose on to the world.

As is often the case, the story of 1995 doesn’t start in 1995. It starts a few years earlier, when the seeds of the consumer web first took root. Which is, as you might imagine, where we will begin as well.

Two Schools of Thought

The first time Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen met was at the WWW Wizards Conference, a gathering of a couple dozen web pioneers at the O’Reilly offices in Cambridge, in the summer of 1993. Berners-Lee, you may remember, assembled the protocols that ultimately made up the World Wide Web just a few years earlier. Andreessen was still at NCSA working on the Mosaic browser, a popular choice among the nascent web community and, notably, the first to feature inline images. By the following year, he would co-found Netscape, help launch Netscape Navigator, and see the web soar to new heights. For now, however, he was little more than an avid web enthusiast and programmer. The two would meet several more times over the years as they weaved themselves into the fabric of the web in very different ways.

Over the course of two days the group at the conference debated the diverging futures of the web, breaking out into small working groups from time to time to hammer out the details. If you asked them at the time, I doubt anyone in attendance – a mix of browser makers, publishers, and high-profile “webmasters” – would think to mark the moment as particularly historic. Nothing all that concrete came out of it. It did, however, make one thing perfectly clear. There were two very different approaches to building the web.

Berners-Lee was there to pitch an idea that would eventually become known as the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, founded later in 1993. The W3C’s primary goal was to guide the progress of the web through standards for the foundational technologies of the web, namely HTML, HTTP, and later, CSS. Its membership is made up of browser makers, web standards experts, developers, and representatives from large tech corporations. Since the very beginning, the W3C has acted slowly and deliberately. Their standards are long, written-up recommendations made to browsers, often after years of careful research and testing. This was always Berners-Lee’s vision for the web. A melding of the minds that, over time, made careful progress towards a more advanced future (in recent years, he’s made a call for a return to this ideological baseline, and not entirely without good reason).

Andreessen was among the youngest in the room and a true believer in what was known as the free software movement, that was responsible for the Linux operating system just a few years earlier. He saw the web very, very differently. Andreessen and his peers at NCSA had made Mosaic the most advanced browser on the market by pushing out experimental and iterative code whenever they could. In less than a year, they were giving designers layout options, tweaking server tools, and polishing the actual experience of using the web. Many recall their first time time using Mosaic as a transformative experience, due, in large part, to their ability to push something new to the codebase every single day. There were few other guiding principles other than if it looks cool, ship it. Code was malleable, and ultimately disposable, so why not push the web forward as quickly as you could? In less than a year, the team at NCSA had advanced the web further than many thought possible, and released the first consumer ready browser to the market.

By the time Netscape released its own browser in 1994, Andreessen and his team would have this down to a science. Jim Clark, the other founder of Netscape, called it “Netscape Time,” codifying the ethos in a book and accompanying speaking tour at the crest of his browser’s massive success. Years later, Facebook would shorten the philosophy to a single slogan: Move fast and break things. I often think of the way Joel Spolsky describes Jamie Zawinski, one of the founding engineers at Netscape:

Jamie Zawinski is what I would call a duct-tape programmer. And I say that with a great deal of respect. He is the kind of programmer who is hard at work building the future, and making useful things so that people can do stuff. He is the guy you want on your team building go-carts, because he has two favorite tools: duct tape and WD-40. And he will wield them elegantly even as your go-cart is careening down the hill at a mile a minute. This will happen while other programmers are still at the starting line arguing over whether to use titanium or some kind of space-age composite material that Boeing is using in the 787 Dreamliner.

When you are done, you might have a messy go-cart, but it’ll sure as hell fly.

It’s this spectrum of ideology, the two sides of Berners-Lee and Andreessen, that has governed the web’s progress and development from the very beginning. The platform has bounced between the two ever since it began. Some of the web’s biggest missteps have been a result of leaning too far in one direction or the other. We’re seeing that play out in real time today.

It’s very first step, it’s origin, began with Berners-Lee and under his careful guidance. The explosive growth of 1995 is largely due to a major bounce in the other direction, a time when “Netscape Time” became the official canon of web development. The former pace wouldn’t reassert itself until the early 2000’s, after the fatigue of the browser wars led to the creation of the web standards movement. But in 1995, development across the web moved quickly, in a near-endless stream of experimentation, predicated largely on the success of Netscape and its tech ilk. The progress was extraordinary, and unprecedented. The web went from a little known Internet technology to a household name in a single year, and it’s unlikely this could have happened without developers pushing the platform to its limits at every turn. Browser makers, designers, entrepreneurs, and system administrators all tweaked the web to a new level of success.

In other words, 1995 was messy as hell. But it sure as hell did fly. More on that later.