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