How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

Overview

A Library Journal Best Book of the Year

Tech-guru Brian McCullough delivers a rollicking history of the internet, why it exploded, and how it changed everything.

The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first “dotcom.”

Depicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet’s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631493072
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/23/2018
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	216,520
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Brian McCullough is a two-decade veteran of the internet industry and the founder of various web-based startups. Host of the Internet History Podcast, he was named a 2016 TED Resident. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Intro 1

1 The Big Bang The Mosaic Web Browser and Netscape 7

2 Bill Gates "Gets" The Internet Microsoft and Internet Explorer 38

3 America, Online AOL and the Early Online Services 53

4 Big Media's Big Web Adventure Pathfinder, HotWired and Ads 69

5 Hello, World The Early Search Engines and Yahoo 82

6 Get Big Fast Amazon.com and the Birth of Ecommerce 94

7 Trusting Strangers eBay, Community Sites and Portals 108

8 Blowing Bubbles The Dot-com Era 132

9 Irrational Exuberance The Dot-com Bubble 143

10 Pop! Netscape vs. Microsoft, AOL + Time Warner and the Nuclear Winter 160

11 I'm Feeling Lucky Google, Napster and the Rebirth 182

12 Rip. Mix. Burn. The iPod, iTunes, and Netflix 208

13 A Thousand Flowers, Blooming PayPal AdWords, Google's IPO and Blogs 222

14 Web 2.0 Wikipedia, YouTube and the Wisdom of Crowds 242

15 The Social Networl Facebook 265

16 The Rise of Mobile Palm, BlackBerry and Smartphones 294

17 One More Thing The iPhone 304

Outro 321

Acknowledgments 325

Notes 327

Index 357

Editorial Reviews

"Brian McCullough vividly recounts the brilliant hunches, happy accidents, and fortuitous timing that converged to create the first 25 years of the internet era. Even for those of us who lived through it, it's astonishing to step back and realize the scale of the changes in human habits, communication, and society as a whole that have occurred in just one generation."

Chris Anderson

"For those of us who’ve grown up with computers and the Internet, McCullough offers an insider’s look at the unplanned and undirected romp that enabled the web to infiltrate our lives. He provides fresh perspectives on the famous names – including Gates, Page, Jobs and Zuckerberg – but, more entertainingly, introduces the lesser-known geniuses, like Sean Parker with Napster and Plaxo, as well as the academic godfathers, such as J.C.R. Licklider of ARPA. McCullough sprinkles his well-told tale with trivia nuggets, such as the first web advertisement being for a Silicon Valley law firm, and he shows how success resulted from some combination of timing, brilliance, and an uncanny awareness that consumers want unlimited selection and instant gratification. How the Internet Happened is a fast-paced and enjoyable perspective on our lives, as well as a compelling exploration for how humanity and computers came together in profound ways."

Richard Munson

"Mr. McCullough takes a broader view, showing how a handful of powerful companies—all of them American, in his telling—came to dominate web technology. In his story, the internet didn’t happen only because of wizardly coding and cheaper computers. It also happened because of serendipity, failure, friendships and blood feuds.... Such historical tidbits help us see that today’s tech titans didn’t arrive on the scene as superhuman."

Jon Gertner

"How the Internet Happened is destined to become the definitive text on how the web became big business—and came to dominate every facet of our lives, from communication to commerce. Painstakingly researched and deftly written, McCullough gives us a comprehensive guide to the startups and CEOs who ushered in the internet age."

Brian Merchant

"Along with profiling the internet’s key players, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough provides an entertaining and informative technological history which computer geeks and readers interested in everything from sociology to business and media will relish."

Carl Hays

★ 2018-07-31

The internet was not meant for the likes of us—and yet we have it, through means that tech historian McCullough capably recounts in this wide-ranging history of the internet era.

It wasn't so long ago that technologists dismissed the thought that ordinary mortals would have a use for a computer and not so long ago that the internet was a skeletal version of its present self, confined to computers administered by the military-industrial complex. Chalk the change up, writes the author, to the opening of the net to civilian traffic—and then to techies at the University of Illinois who, building on earlier platforms, launched the first browser in 1993, early on called X Mosaic "because it was designed to work with X Window, a graphical user interface popular with users of Unix machines." If any of the terms in the preceding clause are mysterious, then this book may prove tough slogging, but it has plenty of odd drama. For example, Bill Gates came calling on what later became Netscape, hoping to build an alliance; when rebuffed, he retooled Microsoft in order to build a browser of its own, having quickly divined how important the internet would become. McCullough's story is populated by numerous geeky heroes, notable among them Steve Jobs but most far less familiar, along with some free-riders and businesspeople who realized that the internet's free gift to the world was something that could be turned into a cash cow. Writes the author, "the Internet might have been launched in Silicon Valley, but to a large extent, it was monetized by startups in New York City." Most of the individual components of McCullough's story, which closes with the arrival of the "completely, conceptually perfect" iPhone in 2007, are well-documented, but few other histories of modern technology connect them so fluently. In this, the narrative resembles Steven Levy's by now ancient Hackers (1984) and John Markoff's more recent What the Dormouse Said (2005); it compares favorably to both.

A tasty, educational treat for tech heads and other web denizens.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 09/01/2018
The main takeaway in McCullough's first book is to value changing consumer expectations on the participatory web. He builds a detailed and highly insightful overview of the influencers and ideas that have shaped the everyday technologies we take for granted, showing how the Internet has infiltrated our homes and lives to the degree it is today. Covering developments between 1993 and 2008, McCullough draws from his oral history podcast and lived experiences to share stories about how everyday online terms were born, and how innovations such as virtual shopping carts and recommender systems evolved from developers striving to meet changing consumer expectations. Most surprising is the elaboration of simple, obvious ideas to solve consumer problems that gave rise to giants like eBay, Yahoo, Hotmail, or Paypal. McCullough's nonlinear, weblike organization of chapters keeps the narrative flowing but also makes one wish for a dashboard to maintain context. VERDICT Tech enthusiasts and students of business, marketing, and ecommerce will benefit from the detailed chronicling of the early Internet days. Readers will delight in being reminded of long-forgotten platforms and in understanding how Internet evangelists, Wall Street, and the moneyed elite have shaped our online lives.—Nancy Marksbury, Keuka Coll., Keuka Park, NY

Library Journal