Introduction

“Man is excellently made and eagerly lives the kind of life

that is being lived.”
– Mikhail Zoshchenko

There are libraries full of detailed histories written about

wars and battles; exploration; dynasties and historical
epochs; business empires; cultural trends; and great men
and women in various fields, but strangely there aren’t
many histories written about the media technologies that
have changed and form our daily lives.
Most educated people are vaguely aware that someone
named Marconi had something to do with the development
of the radio and that Samuel Morse invented the telegraph,
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and
Thomas Edison developed the first phonograph, but they’d
be hard-pressed to name the people who invented the
television, motion pictures, or other key parts of our media
environment like the JPEG, the MP3, or even email.A
They’d be especially hard-pressed to describe the path
these media took from laboratory experiments with no
immediately obvious use to the ubiquitous media appliances
they are today.
Marconi thought the best use of his invention, the
radio (the wireless radio-telegraph) would be to allow ships
at sea to communicate with each other, Bell thought the best
use of the telephone would be piping music to homes, and
Edison originally developed the phonograph as a way to
relay telegraph messages automatically without the need
for a human being to re-send them by hand.

1
 Introduction

One of the themes of media history is that the people

who invent a technology are rarely, if ever, the people who
figure out the practical uses for it that make it commercially
viable, widespread, and ultimately an inseparable part of
everyday life. Those insights come later and very often the
people who do that all-important work are unknown. Even
the fact that things like email, MP3, and JPEG were invented
by someone rarely crosses most people’s minds.
This book is a memoir but is not intended to be a
complete history of the Internet. (That would take a shelf
full of books.)
Instead, I’m focusing on two years when the Internet
suddenly and unexpectedly transformed from a government-
owned network where commerce was forbidden to the
commercial environment we know today where trillions of
dollars in business are transacted annually. In 1989 when
the Internet was formally liberated from its federally-
enforced non-profit and fully subsidized status, no one had
a clue how it could pay its own way, and that cluelessness
persisted unbroken until 1994 when suddenly everything
came together and the path forward was “obvious.”
Because it’s a memoir, the contributions I made to the
transition of the Internet to a commercial medium are at the
center of the narrative. My reason for doing this is threefold:
1. If I don’t do it, who else is going to?
2. If people from the pioneering days don’t tell their
stories, future historians are likely to believe the much-
skewed version of events emanating from the PR departments
of companies like Microsoft and Apple, or worse Google and
Facebook. Fact: In the early 1990s, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
were on the record as being contemptuous, even publicly
hostile, to the idea the Internet would ever develop into
anything significant for the general public.

2
 How the Web Was Won

3. Young people, really anyone who is inspired to take

an uncharted path, need examples of how it’s done and why
the walkers of uncharted paths – not the hyped-up “captains
of industry” – are very often behind much of the practical
progress in this world. In short, to get things done, it helps
to know the stories of people who got things done. This is a
story of someone who got things done.
In this book, I use the terms Internet and Web
interchangeably. At the time of this writing, people are
much more likely to use the term Internet than the Web.
They typically say “I saw it on the Internet” as opposed to
“I saw it on the Web.”
Strictly speaking, the Internet is the foundation - all the
machines, communication links, and software. The Web is
built on top of that, like a very large and growing house with
many rooms, the rooms being websites. It’s the Web that
made the Internet useful and usable for people. The Web is
what all the brand name services like Facebook, Twitter/X,
Instagram, and TikTok are built on. Take away the Web and
there is no Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and TikTok or
Amazon, YouTube, Google, or ChatGPT.
Another term I use often in the book is publishing. I
define this as bringing a piece of intellectual property - an
article, a book, a recording, an interview, a piece of music,
a documentary, a “how to” video - to the marketplace with
the intention of some kind of profit. I use it because it’s more
descriptive of the process than just “releasing” or “posting”.
I realize that much I’ve what I’ve written so far may
seem to many to be obvious to the point of absurdity, but a
back-of-the-envelope estimate reveals that there are roughly
four billion people living today who have no experience of
the world before the Web. Understandably, to them, things
like Facebook and Google just are, like the clouds and the
trees. In many ways, this book is written for them, to give

3
 Introduction

them a picture of life before the Web and let them see how
the media world they live in came to be.
Does it matter? I believe yes, for a number of reasons.
First, it’s generally a good principle to know what
the heck is going on around you and part of that involves
knowing something about how the things you deal with
every day work and where they come from.
Second, while a bare list of the names of people you’ve
never heard of is understandably not very interesting, the
story of how these people and others came to create what
they did and how they did it most definitely is. There were
many twists and turns on the road to creating the Web.
It was not a straight line. It was not easy. The end of
the story was by no means obvious at the beginning and at
many critical junctures it would have been very easy for the
whole thing to have gone completely off the rails - it almost
did - and we would not have the Web we have today.
According to the dictionary, a memoir is “any
nonfiction writing based on an author’s personal memories.
The assertions made in the work are thus understood to be
factual.” Based on this definition, I’d call this a Memoir Plus.
The “Plus” of this Memoir Plus is that while putting
the book together I did some digging to make sure I spelled
names correctly and got dates right. In the process, I expanded
my knowledge of details of the back stories of many of the
events I was involved in, details I wasn’t aware of at the
time the events were unfolding. It was a fascinating process
and as part of it, I learned that there’s a lot of inaccuracy in
the commonly told versions of Internet history.
There’s also a tremendous amount of interesting and
important detail that’s been entirely left out. So I set out to
fill in the blanks and now that the work is done I can say
that as far as I can tell from a serious deep dive, there is no

4
 How the Web Was Won

book that covers the critical formative years of the Web’s

history, 1993 to 1995, in such a comprehensive way. Thus all
the footnotes.
Speaking of footnotes, there are two kinds: 1) short
ones that are right on the page and 2) long ones that are in
the back of the book. I put in the short ones to briefly explain
things that might not be common knowledge, but in such a
way as not to break the flow. The long ones are a mini-book
unto themselves. Obviously, you can ignore them, unless
you need them (the short ones) or are enjoying the story so
much you just have to have more (the long ones).
The book is broken up into four parts.
Part One “Stirring the Pot” covers my pre-digital life
in the pre-digital world where creating media was literally
manual labor. I imagine young folk will look at this account
in the same way we read stories about people who used to
hand-churn their own butter.
Part Two “Planting Seeds” details what it was like to
be in San Francisco in the early 1990s unknowingly at the
cusp of a media revolution on par with the inventions of
writing and printing.
Part Three “Getting the Band Together” is where I
take out a magnifying glass and lay out the details of all
the uncoordinated, but interlocking events that had to take
place with Swiss watch precision necessary for the Web to
have come into being.
In Part Four, “Now What?”, I tell the story of some of
the things that happened after the Web won and became the
only online game in town.
The back part of the book has three artifacts from that
era: 1) an article I published in October of 1994, 2) a talk I
gave on November 5, 1994, and 3) an interview I published
in May of 1995. Make sure you read them. There’s also an
excerpt from an article that appeared in Time Magazine in
2017 that’s worth a look too.
- Ken McCarthy

5
 - Part One -
Stirring the Pot
Chapter One
Least Likely to Succeed

“Keep a green tree in your heart, and perhaps a singing

bird will come.”
– Chinese proverb

I am not a journalist and I’m not a scholar. And I’m most

definitely not a technologist.
If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to do
anything but the most basic things with my computer, I
would have to start a serious contemplation of the Afterlife.
That said, I also don’t know how ink is made or paper
is milled and if you asked me about the details of how the
physical version of this book came to be - what brand of
printing press was used, the details of how it works, what
one must do to maintain or repair it - I’d be equally clueless.
I can’t code. I’m not even sure what it means “to code”.
I didn’t get a personal computer until a year after
the Macintosh came along and I still miss MacWrite and
MacPaint.
Most computer programs, and even many apps, leave
me scratching my head at best and cursing at worst.
I surf, I send and receive email, I use Zoom, and
occasionally I compose an old-fashioned letter on a word
processor. And, of course, I can order things and press play
on YouTube and audio players. But that’s it. I don’t know
much more and I don’t want to know much more.

9
 Chapter One

In my abysmal ignorance, somehow I’ve managed to

get by.
In contrast, my father was one of the first generation of
practical commercial computer guys.B He started his career
in the mid-1950s and specialized in building and managing
large computer systems for health insurance companies,
like Blue Cross/Blue Shield New Jersey-sized systems. If
I remember correctly, he once had 300 people working for
him and was in the top 10% of IBM mainframe customers
in the world.
It doesn’t seem very dramatic now, but at one
time keeping a few million individual accounts straight
and mailing accurate statements was space-age stuff. I
remember going to visit him at work and seeing long rows
of refrigerator-sized computers with what looked like big
audio tape reels going back and forth visible through glass
windows. I had no idea what they were doing or how they
worked. I still don’t.
On a couple of occasions, I remember him coming
home from work and talking excitedly about new things
like random access memory. Another time, he came home
thrilled with the news of keyboards that came with cathode
ray tubes, something he’d recently been pitched on. What
we call a computer screen now. I didn’t get what the big
deal was.
I typed all my high school (Class of ‘77) and college
papers (Class of ‘81) on a manual typewriter. So did everyone
else. The only technical thing we needed to know was how
to change a typewriter ribbon. That was enough. Even
though Radio Shack was selling the Tandy TRS-80 way back
then, no one I knew had a personal computer.
The only classmate I knew who wrote his senior thesis
on a computer, Blair Ireland, used the mainframe at the
campus’ only computer center at the Engineering Quad. He

10
 How the Web Was Won

did it because he enjoyed making hopelessly complicated

things work, not because it made any sense or made the
process any easier.
The model back in those days was one big computer
(or cluster of big computers) locked away from the public,
controlled by technologists, and accessible only by “dumb”
terminals that could not do a single useful thing on their
own.
The only other connection I had with computers in
those days was through my roommate, Stanley Jordan.
Music fans may recognize his name. In addition to being
a fantastic guitar player (he was already burning the paint
off the walls when he arrived on campus as a freshman),
and having grown up in Palo Alto, he had a fascination with
computers, electronics, and computer music.
In those days, not only were computers rare and distant
so was software. Princeton did not own any music software,
but Columbia University did, so Stanley would program his
music in Princeton, send it via a pipe to Columbia where
it was processed, and receive the output via a device that
transferred it to an audio cassette. The process took weeks,
(maybe even months) to generate about 30 seconds of music
and you couldn’t be sure what it would sound like until you
heard the output.
The pipe Stanley used to access the Columbia
University music software from central New Jersey?
I learned many years later it was the ARPANET which
later became the Internet on January 1, 1983. So theoretically
I was aware of the Internet back in the 1970s, but I was
entirely clueless about it.
My next encounter with computers took place five
years, but first I did a deep and practical dive into the
realities of human reading, memory, and cognition.

11
 Chapter One

A year after graduating from college, I spent a year

on the road with a company that provided speed reading
and study skill classes to private colleges. We’d land on a
campus, teach for four weeks, pick up stakes, and then go
to the next place. I got to see parts of the country a Yankee
like me might otherwise have never visited like Due West,
South Carolina (Erskine College), Salem, Virginia (Roanoke
College), and Ashland, Virginia (Randolph-Macon College).
It was a lonely job. I’d land in places where I didn’t
know a soul and I had a lot of time on my hands. So I read – a
lot. The first thing I’d do when I got to a new campus was go
to the library and take out every book on reading, memory,
study skills, cognition, and rhetoric and read through them
all in an attempt to make my classes more interesting and
effective.
Every college library seemed to have its own unique
collection of books on these subjects, with each book coming
at it from a slightly different angle often with unique sets
of facts. In the process I learned an important lesson: If you
want to learn a subject, don’t just read a book about it, read
shelves of books about it. If you do that, there are very few
subjects you can’t become a legitimate armchair expert
about in six months or less.
This was reinforced for me later by Eugene Schwartz,
the scholar/ad copywriter/publishing entrepreneur/art
collector. Before he sat down to write an ad about anything,
he not only knew everything about the product but also
everything about all the products in the market – past and
present – and as much “peripheral” information as he could
find.
One of my favorite sayings is “The mine is bigger
than the gem.” You never know what you’ll find if you dig
through tons, not pounds, of earth. I can’t think of a single
time in my life when the process was ever a waste of time.

12
 How the Web Was Won

It’s not unheard of for people to read entire libraries.

For example, Harry Truman, while he had some education
after high school, never got a college degree, but managed
to read every book in the Independence, Missouri library.
His conclusion: “Maybe I was a damn fool, but it served me
well when my terrible trial came.” In his case, the terrible
trial was suddenly finding himself President of the United
States in the middle of World War II.
If I remember correctly, the course we taught had twenty
days of material – five days a week, one hour a day, for four
weeks. I’d teach the same class four times a day which to me
was a great thing because I could continuously refine my
presentation and make it clearer and more impactful. After
six months of this process, I had developed a very strong
class, one which bore almost no relation to the one I had
been trained to teach.
The big thing I learned is that virtually everyone, no
matter how intelligent or well-educated, has some trouble
with reading, sometimes physical, sometimes cognitive,
sometimes both, and that school systems, either through
ignorance or sloth or a combination of both, don’t teach
students how to identify these problems and overcome
them. They can all be overcome.
When I taught this subject later in New York City, I had
a student who had had twelve unsuccessful eye operations
and was only able to read about 80 words per minute which
is beyond slow. Despite these physical limitations, he loved
books (he even made his own) and was whip-smart. Within
a month, he was reading at a normal pace of about 350
words per minute. I just helped him retrain the way he used
his eyes.
The main cognitive problem many people have when
reading for information is that they mistakenly believe
reading starts at Word One and carefully read each word
to the last word. This may make sense if you’re an attorney

13
 Chapter One

reading a contract for a client, but it’s a terrible strategy for

getting the meat from a book. Reading non-fiction (I know
nothing about reading fiction) is all about information
extraction.
Books, if they’re written halfway decently, are
structured packages of information. Your goal as a
reader is to methodically go through the “Big Store” of
information that a book represents, identify the different
departments, and find the interesting and useful “products”
in each department. If you methodically do this, you will
automatically read faster and remember more. These two
positive outcomes are not contradictory.
Unlike a computer, which eventually maxes out on
storage, the more structured information you put into a
human mind, the bigger the capacity for the mind to absorb
new information becomes. Long ago, I wrote a book about
all this and I recently discovered the manuscript in my attic.
I will be putting it between the covers of a book at some
point in the not-too-distant future.
While I was at my last teaching assignment, Moravian
College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I decided to create
a one-day seminar version of my own for the students at
Lehigh University, another college in town. I rented a space,
put up flyers all over campus, took phone calls (no Internet
then), and when the day of the seminar came, collected
people’s cash and checks (no credit cards for college students
then either).
The seminar was a success. I made just one mistake.
When I got to the classroom, I realized that I’d left my
teaching notes at home which was 90 minutes away. So I just
walked the students through the notebooks I’d prepared for
them and did it all from memory. It worked and I gained
new faith in my ability to improvise and keep a roomful of
people entertained for a day.

14
 How the Web Was Won

Previous to my year on the road teaching, I was not a

public speaker. My limited experience speaking to groups
was something out of a cartoon. My knees knocked against
each other as I stood there in terror. I’d heard the expression
of what the knees did in a panic situation, but I didn’t know
it was a real thing. I can tell you from first-hand experience,
it’s a real thing. Another real thing: cotton mouth. How can
a mouth go so thoroughly dry so quickly?
Anyway, I got over it. It’s a very good thing to get over,
as painful as the process may be for a bit. Now, speaking
to groups of any size is like riding a bicycle to me, fun and
good exercise.
It occurred to me that the material I’d gathered would
be very helpful to the students at the college I went to. It had
no such program.
Princeton gets a lot of kids from prep schools, short for
college preparatory, where they are specifically trained to be
prepared for college-level work. They arrive fully at home
knowing how to take useful notes from complex lectures,
tackle difficult reading, engage in give-and-take discussions,
do research, and write multi-page essays.
But Princeton also gets some kids who are not up
to speed on these things. When I was a student, I clearly
remember one young woman with an impressive but
misguided initiative who learned shorthand so she could
take down every word of every lecture, transcribe them,
and then read and study the transcriptions. No one had ever
taught her how to take notes.
I contacted Princeton, and told them about my
experiences teaching reading and study skills to college
students, and offered to help. And lo and behold, I was
invited to give a workshop during Freshman Week and
I was told that if it went well it might lead to developing
some kind of formal program. Based on the incoming

15
 Chapter One

students’ reaction to the workshop which was very positive,

I assumed the people who were getting paid to help new
students adjust to college life would want to continue the
momentum and see that other students were helped. For
some of these freshmen, starting at Princeton with the lack
of preparation they had received was like jumping out of an
airplane without a parachute.
The administration certainly made noises like they
were interested in the idea, and in my naïveté I took those
noises to mean something, but as I learned as the months
drew on, and my savings diminished, they were just paying
lip service to the idea. They had no intention of developing
a skills program for students with me or anyone else.
As best as I could figure out, the idea of teaching
Princeton students something so common as how to study
was somehow “beneath” the school and wasn’t congruent
with its image of itself. (Better to let the kids flounder
needlessly I guess.) So instead, I started teaching local high
school students and their moms were more than happy to
pay me to help their kids learn how to study.
Then I saw an ad for a job paying $15 an hour to do
something called technical writing. I had no idea what
technical writing was, but I knew I could write and at that
time $15 an hour which worked out to $30,000 a year which
seemed like a fortune. By way of comparison, my classmates
were making on average $18,000 their first year out.
With high hopes, I applied for this dreamlike position,
and much to my surprise, I got the job. For a few weeks, the
work was about 15 minutes from home. Then I got the word
that I was needed in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
Fort Lee, New Jersey is 60 highly urban miles away
from Princeton. Not the end of the world, but I had a car
that probably only had about 1,000 miles left on it if I was
lucky. So I drove to the train at Princeton Junction, took the

16
 How the Web Was Won

train to New York City, took the A Train to the uptown Port
Authority bus terminal near the George Washington Bridge,
took the bus over the bridge to Fort Lee, and then walked to
my office. It took well over 2 hours each way. Up at 5 AM.
Home at 8 PM. Wash, rinse, and repeat. But, hey $15 an hour
and I had a lot of time to read on the various trains, when I
was awake.
The job was “interesting.”
The year was 1984. Personal computers were not in
every home and were not in every office. Microsoft hadn’t
gone public yet. That wouldn’t happen for two years.
Microsoft Word was floundering. Sometime around then I
stumbled on Bill Gates personally pitching Word in a newly-
minted Egghead Software store in Manhattan. I was going
to say hello, but he looked so sickly I was afraid I might
catch whatever it was he had and my overriding thought
about him was, “That poor guy. He’s not going to make it.”
‘Make it’ as in live very long.
In 1984, most industrial strength word processing
was done on Wang, a line of computers named after the
company’s co-founder, An Wang. It was a single-use
dedicated machine. It did word processing and that was it.
IBM PCs and PC clones were already seriously nipping at
Wang’s heels in ‘84, but the machine still had a large installed
base and came with a service contract. Corporate managers
worship at the altar of inertia, and computer repairmen in
those days were few and far between, so Wangs persisted.
Being a Wang operator was a good gig, especially
if you lived in New York City. Corporate law firms and
financial institutions produce mountains of high-level
documents every day and there was a serious shortage of
Wang operators. Thus, for a brief shining moment, people
who could type and knew the system not only made $25
or more per hour during their post-5 PM shifts (a fantastic
hourly wage in 1984 the functional equivalent to $75 per

17
 Chapter One

hour today), but they also got dinner delivered to their desks
(lobster and steak were not unheard of) and car service
home at the end of the night. It was a special boon to actors,
musicians, and other creative people who if they landed a
creative gig, could afford to take it knowing they’d always
be welcome back later – and at $25 per hour – until word
processing became democratized and they weren’t.
I was not a Wang operator, but I was intrigued. After
all, $25 an hour is better than $15 an hour, but it looked
too complicated to me. Instead, I was a proofreader and
copy editor. I would do things by hand using a pencil, as
everyone else did, give it to the Wang ladies, and they’d do
their Wang magic.
But there was just one problem. When I checked their
work, they would make the changes asked for (most of the
time), but somehow they managed to create brand-new
and quite random errors. (These were not the $25 per hour
operators. They were former typists who were struggling
with the new technology.) We were working under incredibly
tight deadlines and the responsibility – and the pressure – of
getting these documents done and ready for the typesetter
on time fell on me.
The owner of the tech writing company, the guy who
went out and got the business, wisely had his office on
another floor and never set foot in the production office. My
theoretical $30,000 a year was grossing him $30,000 a year
too because he marked up our invoices 100%.
There were twenty of us on this project and this was not
the only crew he had working. Do the arithmetic. Of course,
he had rent, utilities, insurance, the Wang workstation rental
fees, and probably kickbacks to the corporate people who
threw him business, but clearly he knew how to shake the
money tree.

18
 How the Web Was Won

The guy who was supposed to manage our project and

troubleshoot it rarely made an appearance in our office and
when he did he was twitchy and fast-talking. His purported
job was to supervise the company’s production offices in
various parts of Northern New Jersey. My guess is he spent
a good part of his day powdering his nose (which for people
who don’t know the slang means doing cocaine, which was
a popular activity at the time for people who had more
money than brains).
What exactly was the job I signed up to be part of?
The client, AT&T, had decided they wanted to go into
the personal computer business. They also wanted to have
proprietary software. They had none and didn’t have the
capacity to produce software for PCs so they acquired the
software from another company.
In those days, all software came with printed manuals.
The only manuals for the software AT&T acquired were
stamped with the original company’s logos and copyrights
and had to be redone from scratch. This was in the age before
reliable optical character recognition, so effectively, they had
to be retyped from scratch by hand and reformatted with all
the appropriate AT&T logos and copyright notices.
There were three problems with this venture:
1) The deep thinkers at AT&T were very late to realize
that they needed manuals to accompany their PC clones.
Thus the Glorious Launch they envisioned of putting an
AT&T logo on PC clones and charging a premium price for
them was stuck on the launch pad.
2) Amazingly, we, the people who had to produce the
new manuals, on short notice and under high pressure, were
not allowed to have access to either the machines or the
software to use as a reference to confirm that the instructions
in our new manuals made any sense.

19
 Chapter One

3) The manuals from the original software company

that we were given to work from and adapt for AT&T made
no sense. To say they were utter crap would be charitable.
Our mission:
Using garbage manuals as our reference and having
no access to the software or the machines it ran on was to
somehow intuit how the software should work, make the
fictional manuals look good, and get them out the door on
time so that the deep thinkers in the C suite could have their
epic launch.
If you’ve ever wondered why the user manuals for
products you’ve spent your hard-earned money on are
often useless to the point of worthlessness, this story pretty
much sums up how manuals get made. At the last minute
tech writers receive incomplete, and often inaccurate,
information, with no way for them, short of corporate
espionage or telepathy, to get access to the information they
need to do the job right.
AT&T had some dealings in the computer hardware
and software market, but my understanding is that this
particular personal computer venture sunk without a trace.
After about five months of this “work,” I started to
mentally come apart at the seams. This was no job for a
perfectionist.
The owner of the tech writing company with his office
downstairs was never troubled by any of this. He had his
eyes on the prize and for him, that meant incoming checks
from his corporate clients. If his assistant, the guy with the
well-powdered nose, had any concerns about the situation,
he kept them well hidden. In my exit interview, when I
pointed out the structural impossibility of the situation, the
twitchy fast-talking guy said, “Look. We paid you $15 per
hour.” And so they did.

20
 How the Web Was Won

None of this left me with a good feeling about the

computer industry.

21