So again, I think Paul really created for us the first search engine, and showed that the web could be a mostly consume environment and be extremely useful. If you think about it, if there was no web and there was no content, how would you know that the web is a great way to view content? So Paul Kunz had the advantage that he had a lot of content. And it was content that at least the physicists found extremely valuable. And then people go, oh, I can see. Matter of fact, I remember when I first saw the web. I, I was, like, okay, fine. It's got pictures, who cares? Because other things like Gopher were just as good. And then I saw the ability to go to Federal Express and track a package, and I go like, now that's a cool idea, right? The goph-, Gopher couldn't do that. As a matter of fact, in 1993, sort of three years after the web was created, the web was actually not all that popular. 1991 was the Paul Kunz, but that was mostly physicists. And a few nerds, myself included. But in 1993, Gopher was a much better product and it was a much more beloved product. And the problem again went down to, came down to the fact that the network was so slow that simple text-based things worked better than highly graphical things. As it, there's apocryphal story that happened in March of 1993 where there was a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force that does standards for all these things. And they had a Bird of a Feather session for Gopher and a Bird of a Feather session for the World Wide Web. And the Gopher session is full of people. And they couldn't have enough in the room. They were sitting on the floor and peeking in the door. And then, later, I wasn't at this meeting, by the way. Rich Wiggins, my co-host on the television show was at this meeting. And, what he tells me is at the Birds of a Feathers meeting, there was almost nobody there. And Tim Berners-Lee was like, I've been working on this thing for three years, and it's better than Gopher, but nobody wants to use it. And the people in the room at that point told him, they said it's just too complex, it's too hard to get working. And so, this is a long time ago and the web was not assured to be a success at that point. It just wasn't really clear. So, 1993 was kind of like, it was a real, there's a lot of things that could have been very different in 1993. And I want to show you a commercial, and there's a couple of these out there, from 1993 that one of the large telecommunications vendors put out as a national ad campaign. And this is what the telecommunications industry was thinking about, they saw it all happening. They saw this all happening, they knew it was going to be big. They knew it was going to allow interactions in many ways. They knew it, they weren't dumb, it's wasn't like, oh what's going on? No, not at all, they absolutely knew. So this, this really wonderful series of commercials is, is just quite amazing. So take a look. At the end you'll see, actually, what the large telecommunications company's name is. So take a quick look. I hope you got to see a couple of those. I just, I just love watching them. Over and over and over again and like whoa, what a vision, what a beautiful vision. One of them has to do with like a personal assistant in the shape of a dog. So, again, sort of looking back at this and looking at things that might not have been, there's nobody that really makes the connection that Steve Jobs might have had some impact on the World Wide Web. But in a way, he was actually quite influential. Steve Jobs, of course, founded Apple and then was kicked out of Apple at, after the Macintosh, and he started a new company called NeXT. And if you listen closely to what Robert Cailliau says, and you listen closely to what Paul Kunz says, and the computer that was on my desk during this entire period of the 1990s to 93, were NeXT computers. NeXT was a bold, Unix-based, highly-networked, high-definition display, high-performance computer, that Steve Jobs built when he formed the company NeXT after he got fired from Apple. Of course, he eventually came back to Apple and the NeXT technology is Macintosh, that's the Macintosh operating system. And so if you make a mistake in Macintosh, you might see an error message that starts NS something. That's called NeXT Step, which is the operating system on these NeXT computers. For the first three years of the web, it was pretty much only on the NeXT computer. People would, even the server was, you know, on the NeXT computer and the browser was on the NeXT computer and so it's, the NeXT computer really kind of did that. I, I wrote an article. In sort of a couple months after Steve Jobs died for IEEE Computer Magazine's January 2012 issue, that really sort of tried to, at least from a historical perspective, point out how important Steve Jobs may have been in helping the Internet get formed. So we started our journey at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. We got the NSF, the University of Michigan. We created the web, we created the first web server. And now we're going to come back to where we started. We're going to go back to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These are the folks that basically exploded the web. Moved the web from the academic space to the commercial and end user space. And there's all kind of things. The network was growing. Things were getting faster. Personal computers were getting better at a very rapid pace because the IBM PC is almost ten years old and many computers, they were getting quite fast in the, in the 90s. So the 1990s, our computing and the display capabilities were were getting better very rapidly. And in this environment, NCSA at Urbana-Champaign, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, built an open source web browser that worked on Mac, Windows, and Unix. It was the first web browser that did this and it, it was the thing that really made it so average people who had PCs or Macs in their home could get a network connection and start enjoying all of this new content that was coming up on the World Wide Web. After this, the NCSA staff, student programmers, software developers, all formed the company Netscape in order to commercialize all this. Joseph Hardin was the supervisor of the software development group at NCSA that was responsible for building and releasing both the Mosaic web browser and the httpd web server as open source and gave them away free.
