Inventing the Internet
The Founding Fathers: Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Larry RobertsThey were present at the creation. Baran, at the Rand Corporation in the late 1950s, conjured the idea of “packet switching.” Roberts, chief computer scientist at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, oversaw the creation of the Arpanet in the late 1960s. In Kleinrock’s laboratory at U.C.L.A., in 1969, this new digital way of transmitting data—precursor of today’s Internet—came to life.
The Social Pioneer: Jonathan AbramsAbrams, a former Netscape engineer, founded Friendster in 2002; it initiated the era of social-networking activity on the Internet. Though its popularity has dwindled in the U.S., Friendster currently has 43 million users in Asia. “Before, the Web was very anonymous and people would sign on with handles and pseudonyms,” he says. “Friendster was about not being anonymous. It was about bringing the real-life social context you had in the real world online with you.”
The Legislator: Vice President Al GoreHe got a bum rap. Gore never claimed to have “invented the Internet,” though columnists said otherwise and had sport with him anyway. Here’s what Gore really did: throughout the 1980s, as a senator from Tennessee, he stood out as a highly visible, early proponent of networking. In 1991, Congress passed the High-Performance Computing Act, also known as “the Gore Act,” which paved the way for a privatized, commercialized Internet that could thrive and evolve outside the government’s hands—in other words: the Internet as we know it today.
The Dealer: Jeff BezosBezos launched Amazon in 1995 after stumbling onto the fact that the Web was growing at a rate of 2,300 percent a year. “We had a business plan which called for very, very slow growth,” Bezos recalls. “Our view was that it would take a long time for consumers to change their habits.” It didn’t. In its first 30 days, Amazon shipped books to all 50 states and to 45 countries.
The Next Big Thing? Gina Bianchini and Marc AndreessenAndreessen created one of the first Web browsers, Mosaic, in 1993, before co-founding Netscape Communications with entrepreneur Jim Clark. Netscape’s initial public offering, in 1995, signaled the start of the dot-com boom and changed Silicon Valley forever. Now he has partnered with investment banker Bianchini to create the social network Ning, which lets users design their own social Web pages. “When people start to get comfortable with how something works,” says Bianchini, “they want the freedom to create. We think that is going to happen in social networking.”
The Auctioneer: Pierre OmidyarOmidyar spent years studying ways to make the marketplace more efficient for buyers and sellers. But it took only a three-day weekend to write the rudimentary code for eBay. His idea—that you could send money for merchandise in an Internet transaction to someone you’d never met—at the time seemed preposterous. “What eBay has shown is that, in fact, you can trust a complete stranger.”
The Life of the Party: Chris DeWolfe and Tom AndersonDeWolfe and Anderson founded MySpace in 2003; it is the world’s largest social network, pulling in an estimated 110 million active users. The site has expanded into a formidable media empire with MySpace TV, MySpace News, MySpace Classifieds, and MySpace Mobile. “MySpace is a lot like a cell phone,” says Anderson. “When it came out, people were asking, Why would I have to carry a phone with me wherever I go? Now they can’t imagine not having it.” MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch in 2005 for $580 million.
The Ringmasters: Steve Chen and Chad HurleyAlums of PayPal, Chen and Hurley started YouTube in 2005, proving that a commercial Web site could be built entirely around user-generated content. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. “When we hit a million views we thought that was quite an accomplishment,” says Hurley. “It continues to grow, and we’re in the middle of the storm.”
The Cashier: Elon MuskMusk was among the first to recognize the need for online banking services. “We had a little feature,” he says, speaking about an early electronic-payment system, “which we didn’t think much of initially, that was able to transfer money and securities—instantly—from one customer to the next.” The little feature became PayPal. In 2002, Musk sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion.
The Wizards: Vint Cerf and Robert KahnCerf and Kahn teamed up in the early 1970s to devise the TCP and IP protocols—the basic linking structure of the Internet. Before being anointed “chief Internet evangelist” by his current employer, Google, Cerf served as a senior vice president at MCI; he had begun his distinguished career as a student of Leonard Kleinrock’s at U.C.L.A. Kahn helped design the original Interface Message Processor for the Arpanet at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, in 1969, before heading the computer-research arm of ARPA. In 2005 the two men were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
