Speaker 1: How the Internet Happened, the new book that I am
Speaker 1: just loving. What's going on. I'm Rich Damiro. This is
Speaker 1: Rich on Tech. Joining me today is Brian McCullough. He
Speaker 1: is the author of a new book called How the
Speaker 1: Internet Happened. It's available today. Man, I've been reading this
Speaker 1: and it is just fascinating. It's basically the world that
Speaker 1: I live through the Internet bubble, the burst, and I
Speaker 1: basically get to relive all of my college and post
Speaker 1: college years through this book.
Speaker 2: Brian, thanks so much for joining me this morning to
Speaker 2: talk about the book.
Speaker 3: Oh, Rich, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: So Brian.
Speaker 1: You also host the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast, which
Speaker 1: is literally the first thing I listened to every day
Speaker 1: on my way to work, which I know it's called
Speaker 1: the ride home, but it's also for me the ride
Speaker 1: in as well.
Speaker 2: Is that Okay?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, And you know, like thirty
Speaker 3: percent of the audiences overseas, so god knows what part
Speaker 3: of their day part they listen.
Speaker 2: Then you also host the Internet History podcast. Tell me
Speaker 2: about that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, essentially the Internet History Podcast is how we
Speaker 3: got the book. Because I'm actually a tech guy myself.
Speaker 3: I founded three different web companies, and I'm used to
Speaker 3: immediate feedback, So when I had this idea to write
Speaker 3: this book, I wasn't used to going away in a
Speaker 3: room and maybe three or four years later something coming
Speaker 3: out of it. So as I was doing research and
Speaker 3: getting interviews with primary sources, I'm recording them and I
Speaker 3: just thought to myself, well why not throw them out
Speaker 3: on the web as a podcast. And the podcast almost
Speaker 3: took off and made me forget about doing the book,
Speaker 3: But then it all came full circle and the books
Speaker 3: out today.
Speaker 1: I love the journey that you take readers on in
Speaker 1: the book because it is how the Internet happened. And
Speaker 1: if you remember any of these little things, these milestones
Speaker 1: that happened over the years, like Netflix starting and Blockbusters
Speaker 1: sort of starting their rival to that, and Netscape and Yahoo,
Speaker 1: it really is a great ride that you bring them on.
Speaker 1: How did you kind of come up with the way
Speaker 1: you were going to do this book?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, in a way, the title could almost
Speaker 3: be how the Internet happened to us. You know, there
Speaker 3: have been other well done history books going back to
Speaker 3: the arpaet and how the Internet itself, you know, was
Speaker 3: came out of the military and academia and things like that.
Speaker 3: But what I was interested in is, you know, what
Speaker 3: has been more disruptive is the word that everyone likes
Speaker 3: to use, but what's been the biggest revolution in all
Speaker 3: of our daily lives? So I wanted to talk about
Speaker 3: the era when the Internet started happening to us. And
Speaker 3: you know, even things like you know, my wife is like, oh,
Speaker 3: tell talk about Excite. Excite was where I got my
Speaker 3: first email address, or you know, people always say, tell
Speaker 3: us about GeoCities or Napster, and people have these really
Speaker 3: formative personal connections to these companies and this technology. And
Speaker 3: even though you know there's individual books about all these
Speaker 3: different companies, I thought no one had put it all
Speaker 3: together in one sort of narrative. And even though it
Speaker 3: is essentially just the A led to b Let to
Speaker 3: see you, I think you can see how it infiltrated
Speaker 3: basically all of modern life.
Speaker 1: And what I love about the story that you tell
Speaker 1: is two things. Number One, you did this in a
Speaker 1: very consumer friendly way where anyone can understand what happened
Speaker 1: and kind of see like what the founders were thinking
Speaker 1: and what the kind of results of their actions were
Speaker 1: to the average person like me, and you like.
Speaker 3: You said, Yeah, I was always thinking of my dad,
Speaker 3: keeping my dad in mind. You know, here's how you
Speaker 3: got a supercomputer in your pocket. But then also, you know,
Speaker 3: I talked to a lot of kids in air quotes,
Speaker 3: people entering the tech industry today, twenty four, twenty five,
Speaker 3: twenty six years old. And you know, if you're twenty six,
Speaker 3: you maybe never heard a modem dial up sound. You know,
Speaker 3: a Facebook is almost fifteen years old, so people might
Speaker 3: not remember there was a MySpace before Facebook and things
Speaker 3: like that. That's that's what I wanted to try to capture.
Speaker 3: The industry itself is not good about its own history
Speaker 3: because everybody's always focused on what's next, what's next, the new,
Speaker 3: the next version in the next gadget, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: But there's a lot of valuable lessons in looking back
Speaker 3: as at like I said, at the A led to
Speaker 3: B led to C even to even give you a
Speaker 3: hint about what might be coming next.
Speaker 1: It all starts with Netscape, right, And I remember downloading Netscape,
Speaker 1: and then of course we all switched to Firefox, and
Speaker 1: then of course we all switched to Chrome. So tell
Speaker 1: me about how Netscape kind of the word you use,
Speaker 1: they let the riff raff in right.
Speaker 3: Yes, because you know he he denies it. But Tim
Speaker 3: berners Lee, who invented the Worldwide Web, originally really conceived
Speaker 3: of it as an academic sort of tool. And the
Speaker 3: kids at the University of Illinois, among them Mark Andresen,
Speaker 3: they really conceived of it as this kind of sexy,
Speaker 3: sort of new kind of medium that could have newspapers
Speaker 3: and movies and you know, videos and things. So essentially
Speaker 3: the thing that the Netscape browser did, it was sort
Speaker 3: of a chicken and an egg. It was a lot
Speaker 3: of people's first introduction to the web, and so they
Speaker 3: would get on a Netscape browser, try the web for
Speaker 3: the first time, see all this cool stuff that was
Speaker 3: suddenly popping up, and then they themselves wanted to go
Speaker 3: off and create some of this cool stuff. So Netscape
Speaker 3: both made the Web mainstream and was mainstreamed by the
Speaker 3: Web being mainstream.
Speaker 2: And I'll never forget.
Speaker 1: And I, like I said, Brian, when you're when I'm
Speaker 1: reading this book, I felt like you were inside my
Speaker 1: brain because everything in this book sort of happened to
Speaker 1: me as I went along. But I'll never forget. I
Speaker 1: had AOL and I remember going to this AOL sort
Speaker 1: of portal that said the world Wide Web is coming soon.
Speaker 1: Because AOL was not the Web, right, but they had
Speaker 1: this little section of AOL that like you can kind
Speaker 1: of access the Web through before they had a browser
Speaker 1: built in. It was really crazy, and you talk about
Speaker 1: that in the book, which I thought was really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is another thing that, like people that
Speaker 3: listened to the Internet History podcast, when I've done stories
Speaker 3: or Sorry episodes on things like AOL, I would get
Speaker 3: these tweets and emails saying thank you, I didn't actually
Speaker 3: understand what AOL actually did, Like, if there's the Web,
Speaker 3: why does AOL need to be there?
Speaker 2: And I get it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Again, if you're twenty six and the internet's just
Speaker 3: always been around in the ether, things like an ISP
Speaker 3: and a dial up modem and things like that, you
Speaker 3: didn't understand what it was for.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean the delineation between those things was tough at
Speaker 1: a certain point in our lives. And you just nailed
Speaker 1: it on the head when you said what is AOL for?
Speaker 1: I mean, realistically, they had a big struggle when they
Speaker 1: went from being the way you got to the Internet
Speaker 1: to oh wait, I don't really need this for the Internet, so.
Speaker 3: Yes, But at the same time in the book, I
Speaker 3: give them a ton of credit for they were the
Speaker 3: training wheels for the Internet, which was a pejorative at
Speaker 3: the time, but someone needed to do that. Someone needed
Speaker 3: to train Americans how to live their lives online. And
Speaker 3: we really we have to give aol and Steve Case
Speaker 3: and all those guys a lot of credit for that.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, in the book, you debunk some of the Internet
Speaker 1: lore that we all grew up with, like the eBay story.
Speaker 1: I don't want to give it away, but I love
Speaker 1: how you did that. And one theme that I kind
Speaker 1: of noticed throughout the book is a lot of these
Speaker 1: founders you know nowadays, I feel like, and maybe you
Speaker 1: could speak to this more. I feel like founders today
Speaker 1: have more lofty visions of things, whereas back in the
Speaker 1: day they just seem kind of like crazy kids that
Speaker 1: had a good idea, but not necessarily like a crazy
Speaker 1: business plan and all the I you know, they didn't
Speaker 1: sort of flush it out for ten years.
Speaker 3: You know that's funny because I can even speak to
Speaker 3: that as a three time founder myself. Anyone that's actually
Speaker 3: been a company founder an entrepreneur knows that, yes, if
Speaker 3: you're successful. You know, ten fifteen years later you can say, oh,
Speaker 3: I was brilliant. I knew all along that this was no.
Speaker 3: The reality is is a lot of it is, and
Speaker 3: especially in this era when no one knew it was
Speaker 3: going to work, it was a lot of it was
Speaker 3: throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck. And
Speaker 3: I was very yeah, I purposely tried to capture some
Speaker 3: of that because legitimately, even Jeff Bezos didn't know for
Speaker 3: sure that people would want to buy books on the internet.
Speaker 3: Once he proved that, he decided that people would buy
Speaker 3: everything on the internet. But at the you know, if
Speaker 3: you could get Bezos or anybody to be honest about
Speaker 3: it and go back in time to their mindset twenty
Speaker 3: years ago, they'd have to admit that they didn't necessarily
Speaker 3: know what they were doing.
Speaker 1: Do you have very specific numbers, dates, times, places? Was
Speaker 1: that all tough to kind of dig up?
Speaker 3: Well, you know what the hardest part is is we
Speaker 3: think that now you know, in the Internet era, that
Speaker 3: all information is there and it never goes away. It's not,
Speaker 3: you can't erase it. There was a lot of stuff
Speaker 3: from the nineties that you know, things like like Newsweek
Speaker 3: their archives are all gone. There's a lot of magazines
Speaker 3: like Industry Standard from the time gone. So there was
Speaker 3: a lot of me actually going to the library what
Speaker 3: and finding old copies of these business magazines and these
Speaker 3: technology magazines and you know, Computer World and Computer Week
Speaker 3: and things like that to actually find that, like you said,
Speaker 3: the actual hard numbers and dates and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: that legitimately real library research was required.
Speaker 1: Wow, like old school, like microfiche or is that even
Speaker 1: I did?
Speaker 3: I did microfiche. Oh yeah, well, but you can put
Speaker 3: it on your little thumb drive. So actually it's much
Speaker 3: easier now. You just go and download, you know, a
Speaker 3: whole year's worth of periodicals and you've got it on
Speaker 3: your thumb drive to take home and pour through.
Speaker 2: Brian, what's your favorite story you tell inside the book?
Speaker 3: I would say I like telling I liked telling the
Speaker 3: real story of Facebook. Everybody knows the movie version, which
Speaker 3: is not inaccurate. It's just it focused on different things
Speaker 3: other than the actual founding of a company. And I
Speaker 3: fought hard to keep a lot of the dot com
Speaker 3: stuff in there, the dot com bubble, because I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot of lessons to be learned, just even
Speaker 3: from a larger cultural and social thing in terms of
Speaker 3: that was the first bubble that all of us mainstream,
Speaker 3: main street Americans experienced, and we've had several since then,
Speaker 3: and seemingly the only thing we can do with the
Speaker 3: economy is inflate fulls all the time. But I wanted
Speaker 3: to I wanted to preserve what was unique and special
Speaker 3: about the dot com bubble and maybe have people take
Speaker 3: some lessons from that.
Speaker 1: And that perfectly segues into another theme that I noticed
Speaker 1: in the book. Even the biggest tech companies seemingly can
Speaker 1: be leveled by the next big idea. We saw it
Speaker 1: happen to Netscape in the book, Yahoo, Palm, MySpace. Do
Speaker 1: you think that can still happen today?
Speaker 3: One would hope so, because you know, the reality is
Speaker 3: is that today I think it's seven or eight of
Speaker 3: the top ten companies by market cap are all technology companies,
Speaker 3: and even as as recently as five years ago, there
Speaker 3: was only one. You would like to think that someone
Speaker 3: can come out of left field and level all of them,
Speaker 3: but the worry would be that they're creating a sort
Speaker 3: of oligopoly where now you've got five trillion dollar and
Speaker 3: half a trillion dollar companies that the next guy that
Speaker 3: comes up to try to disrupt them, you've got you know,
Speaker 3: five to seven huge companies that can just buy them
Speaker 3: up and bring them in and like the borg, assimilate them.
Speaker 3: I feel like that's the danger because like think of
Speaker 3: think of Instagram. If Instagram had been allowed to stay independent,
Speaker 3: like what would that company look like?
Speaker 1: How the Internet Happened by Brian McCullough available now on
Speaker 1: Where should people buy this?
Speaker 2: Where's the best place to buy it?
Speaker 3: Anywhere that books are sold. There's ebook versions, so you
Speaker 3: know Kindle and all that. There's also an audiobook version.
Speaker 3: So basically anywhere that you that find books can be had,
Speaker 3: you'll find this.
Speaker 2: Book, all right. I think you'll really enjoy the book.
Speaker 1: Also check out Brian on the Tech Meme Ride Home
Speaker 1: podcast and the Internet History Podcast. Brian mcc on Twitter,
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for joining me today to talk about
Speaker 1: the book again. It's called How the Internet Happened. I
Speaker 1: am thoroughly enjoying it. I think you will too. If
Speaker 1: you want to learn more, you can go into the
Speaker 1: show notes of the podcast. You can find a link there,
Speaker 1: or just go to my website. Rich on tech dot Tv, Thanks.
Speaker 2: So much for listening. I'm Rich Dmiro. I'll talk to
Speaker 2: you real soon.
Speaker 1: Three