"Not too bad for working less than 3 hours a night."
What you're paying for is the probably 50+ YEARS total practice, training, shitty unpaid gigs, rehearsal, and the honing of the individual artists' skills, all of which together have created a band which you want to go and see. The three hours is the time your butt is in the seat, not the "working".
Well, put it this way. One day while drinking beer and talking bullshit about games with Tim Willits, he said to me "...yeah, the railgun was my idea, I was the one who pushed to get it in the game. You know where I got the idea, right? I just completely ripped it from 'Eraser'..."
I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but the railgun was the result of Tim Willits's input, and he blatantly ripped it from the Schwarzenegger movie "Eraser".
Come on guys, there was about fifteen, twenty minutes TOPS, of "geek cult movie". The rest of Office Space was just more of the same regurgitated Hollywood "boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl" schlock.
*watches karma evaporate*
I got yer common language right here
on
High Score
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The silly thing is, Cage's 4'33" is not intended to be four minutes and thirty three seconds of TOTAL SILENCE. Cage intended for peripheral noise -- the audience's nervous coughing, the scuffing of seats on the performance venue's floor, passing cars, etc -- to be an integral part of the composition. The wit of 4'33" is that Cage was creating a unique piece of non-reproducible art, in which the audience were active performers, every time the piece was performed. To claim that all recordings of total silence are an infringement of copyright is to completely miss the point of Cage's composition.
actually READ the article? Moby wasn't saying that ripping and burning is bad, he was saying that the record industry's criteria of success and failure are increasingly irrelevant.
(reposted without permission, copied and pasted from a copy saved locally. It's out there on the web somewhere - anyone got a link?)
Imposter Boy
by Alan Deutschman, Gentleman's Quarterly, January 1997
The media and Wall Street believed Marc Andreessen was "the next Bill Gates" -- the singular genius behind the big high-tech breakthrough of the '90s. But his tale really was too good to be true.
His leg is twitching conspicuously--he seems impatient, unbearably bored, resentful that he has to try to sit still in the confinement of this windowless conference room, in Mountain View, California, and subject himself to the banal duty of yet another interview. Only 25 and already he's like a retired quarterback, forced to live in his storied past, condemned to retell his timeworn tales of collegiate glory to all the rabid hangers-on and sycophants and hero-worshipers at the tacky restaurant-bar where he's the front man. For that's what it was, collegiate glory, but not on the gridiron: As a senior at his Big Ten school, Marc Andreessen pulled off the geeky equivalent of a last-minute touchdown pass by writing an arcane computer program that would lead to a $174 million payday. At least, that's the legend.
So here he is, milking the boredom act, but it's not as if the interrogation is keeping him from attending to any weighty and urgent responsibilities, like actually running the computer he cofounded -- there's a hardened guy more than twice his age who does that. Andreessen's official title is vice president of technology, and he's nearly the most famous computer programmer who's ever lived (eclipsed only by Bill Gates). But it's not as if he needs to sit down in front of his screen and busy himself with the notoriously arduous task of hacking out a few lines of software, which, astonishingly, is something he has never done in the short but spectacular history of Netscape Communications Corporation, his closest colleagues have told me. Not a single line of computer code. Never. What Andreessen does, largely, is talk with reporters and make personal appearances at conferences and such. His real job is being the Living Legend, putting on a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt and new-looking blue jeans and hauling his six-four presence in front of his fans. And he's intolerably bored because he's told his story before, so many times that surely he knows is by rote, but he has to show that this is an unspeakably grating role for a man of such supreme intelligence, such technological sophistication, such worldly success. He's inured to the headiness of a reporter's rapt attention and the promise of spilled ink. His iconography is already replete: He's been photographed -- barefoot! -- for the cover of Time, canonized in a Newsweek cover store and in the big-city dailies, glorified by Business Week, treated like a Gen X hero by Rolling Stone and Details. He has achieved just about ever triumph of media overexposure outside of modeling khakis for the Gap.
This time around, though, the report doesn't want the Legend to retell the rote tale, providing the fawning article with the obligator quotes from the Great Man himself. Rather, I've been looking into his past. I have already visited the school in the boondocks where the story begins, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have already talked with the people who worked closely with Andreessen in that remote locale. By now I know that he is more than a little like the Anne Baxter character in All About Eve, someone who was willing to massage the details of his past -- and in certain cases even to lie outright -- to make his story more compelling. Someone who was willing to let himself be the puppet of a powerful older man as part of the bargain in his fast rise to stardom.
I tell Andreessen that I want to reconstruct his role in the creation of Mosaic, the software program that led to his fame. "That story has been told before," he sniffs. So I say that I've talked with Dave Thompson, who worked with Andreessen when the future legend was a lowly college senior making $6.85 and hour in his part-time gig as a programmer for a research center on campus. Thompson said he was the guy who first proposed that the center write a so-called Web browser, not Andreessen. This point, which was confirmed for me by other people, directly contradicted the Newsweek cover story, which said that Andreessen came up with the inspired idea for Mosaic while enjoying a pastry at the Espresso Royale Caffe.
As I confront him with the discrepancy, Andreessen remain unfazed. Well, he says quickly and dismissively and stonily, in his characteristic low-volume bass intonations, since you already know the whole story, you don't need to talk to me. His tone betrays no anger, no emotion at all, but the response is blatantly sarcastic, and there's an outsize arrogance in his unwillingness to cooperate, as if he need not dignify any accusations by arguing on his own behalf, by expending the least bit energy.
It could be that, by this late date, Andreessen has repeated his story so often that he's come to think it's true -- that old trap of believing your own PR. Or perhaps he still grasps that the facts don't underpin the mythology and still has a conscience, and has gut gnaws him every time he has to retell the tale. For even among the greatest egotists, self-delusion goes only so far, and Andreessen of all people has to know that he's not the singular genius of the '90s technological vogue. He's its poster boy, straight from central casting, the obliging raw material for a media that yearned for a new, young hero in a field that had come to be dominated so thoroughly by one invincible corporation and one man -- Microsoft and Bill Gates. Alas, his true genius was taking credit for the work of others; his brilliant insight, that he could profit mightily from the ideas and achievements of a number of naive idealists in his academic field.
The myths promulgated by a lazy and gullible news media concerning the Andreessen story are numerous.
Myth Number One: Andreessen's Mosaic was the first Web browser.
Even as responsible and usually well researched a publication as Business Week has made this claim. Here are the facts: Before Andreessen began work on Mosaic in November 1992, there were already several Web browsers in circulation. The first, designed for NeXT computers, was written in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee, the Oxford-educated Englishman who single-handedly invented the World Wide Web, that ingenious system for linking computers so they could more easily share information. (The browser is an important element of the overall system -- a software program that runs on a personal computer and connects it to this international network.) At the time, Berners-Lee was a stagger at CERN, the French acronym for a research lab in Geneva. Several of his colleagues there wrote other browsers that ran on different computer systems. And research around the world -- at Stanford, Berkeley, the Helsinki University of Technology and elsewhere -- all published their own browsers before Andreessen came into contact with the Web.
Myth Number Two: The Mosaic project was Andreessen's idea.
Essential to the mythology but untrue. The credit belongs to Dave Thompson, who was one of Andreessen's colleagues at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), a research institute at the University of Illinois. In Number 1992, Thompson was a full-time career professional at the prestigious center, not a student. He came across a piece of junk mail from O'Reilly Associates, a publisher of technical books. (O'Reilly is to computer hackers what Knopf is to the literati.) The mailing was a sales pitch for a pamphlet about Internet technologies, including something called the World Wide Web.
Thompson was curious, so he went to his computer and ran Archie, a program that could search the Internet to see what information was out there on a specific topic. He wanted to find out what he could about this World Wide Web. Soon he was connected to the computers at CERN, which had two browsers available free to anyone who wanted to make copies. One had been created at CERN, the other by a former Berkeley student named Pei Wei. Thompson studied the programs. Both were "buggy," he recalls, and there were few Web sites in existence that he could visit using browsers. Still, he thought "it was really cool technology," and he was intrigued. Maybe the staffers at NCSA, whose mission was publishing software for scientists and researchers, could write a new, improved browser.
Thompson showed the browsers to Joseph Hardin, who ran the center's software group, a collection of a few dozen staffers. Hardin's reaction was, Wow, look into this. Which leads us to...
The Hidden Story Behind the Myth. Andreessen essentially snatched the Mosaic project away from the guy who'd had the idea. Soon after meeting with Hardin, Thompson made what would turn out to be a big mistake: He showed the browsers to his colleague Andreessen. Then Thompson went off to an out-of-town conference. Another bad move.
Andreessen acted swiftly. In one sleepless weekend, he hacked out a crude prototype for a new Web browser. (Andreessen's peers didn't consider him a great programmer, but he was known for being a remarkably fast one.) Then Andreessen used the prototype as a ploy for recruiting a colleague named Eric Bina to team up with him. Like Thompson, Bina was a full-time career professional at the center. Bina was a legend among his compatriots, the object of much awe and reverence -- a god of software. For one thing, he was tireless, reputedly capable of toiling for forty-eight to seventy-two hours straight, then sleeping for a mere two or three hours before he returned to work. Andreessen once called this "Eric's kamikaze work ethic."
Hardin, their boss, had to decide what to do with Mar. Andreessen had been difficult to manage. Hardin had assigned the student to report to Ping Fu, a brilliant full-time professional who had emigrated from mainland China, but Hardin know that things weren't working out between them. "Marc is no fun to work with," Hardin recalls. "He tries very had to make sure anything he touches he gets credit for. Ping doesn't stand for any of that shit."
Fu wanted Andreessen off her project, and he wanted off, too but that mean that he needed another assignment. And now he wanted to team up with Bina and write a Web browser. Hardin knew that somehow Bina worked well with the student. What's more, Hardin considered Bina a "knockout programmer," one of the best he had ever seen and thus a good choice for such a promising project. But then Thompson returned to Champaign and found that Andreessen had hacked out the prototype and gotten Bina on his side. Hey, Thompson said to Hardin, I thought I was going to work on this.
The colleagues gathered in a circular meeting room called the Fishbowl, and Hardin decided to let Bina the software god and the rambunctious Andreessen work on the browser. Of course, Thompson could be part of the team, too. But Hardin would later recall that it seemed as if Thompson felt "frozen out" and didn't want to work with the pair who had attached themselves to his project while he was away. Thompson passed up the assignment. "That was my fatal mistake," he now recalls with a sigh. He could have been the legend, the hero, the centimillionare. He could have been...Marc Andreessen!
Myth Number Three: Andreessen "wrote" Mosaic or "created" Mosaic or is the "author" of Mosaic.
To a large extent, the original programming was done by Eric Bina. And a big chunk of the computer code in the first version of Mosaic wasn't even Bina's own handicraft but consisted of lines that he freely borrowed or lifted from a kind of public-access library of software written by Tim Berners-Lee and his associates in Geneva and made available free of charge and in the spirit of sharing and academic cooperation.
Myth Number Four: Mosaic was an unprecedented breakthrough.
In reality, the initial version of Mosaic drew on the innovations of earlier browsers, which already included many features aimed at making the software easy and appealing for nongeeks, features that would later become staples of the genre, such as icon buttons (back, forward, home), bookmarks (for tracking the addresses of favorite Web sites) and a variety of attractive fonts and typefaces.
To be sure, Mosaic deserves credit for tackling two problems. First, earlier browsers were troublesome to get up and running, while Mosaic was a lot easier, thanks largely to Bina's programming skill. Second, Mosaic was the first published browser that automatically displayed pictures along with text, as in the pages of a magazine layout or an illustrated book. That was important because later on it would be the proliferation of pretty pictures that transformed the Web from the domain of scientists and hackers to a cultural phenomenon that captured the interest of the masses. Tim Berners-Lee, an intellectual in the grand European tradition, had preferred plain text on the screen, free of graphics, "because it forced people to be literate," he would later say. Although Berners-Lee's original 1990 browser could show pictures, too, any particular graphic would pop up on the screen only if the individual user clicked an icon with his mouse. Otherwise, the images remained hidden, unobtrusive.
By late 1992, the leading players in the Web community knew that integration pictures and text was the next important step in the evolution of browser software. (In Berkeley Pei Wei was working to add this feature to his browser, for instance.) Ideas and innovations spread quickly because the players remained in close contact. Back in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had set up and E-mail forum, WWW-Talk, that served as a common source of news, gossip, information, collaboration, technical problem solving and intramural debate for the far-flung pioneers of the World Wide Web (who, typically, were researchers at universities and high-tech corporate labs). WWW-Talk was the town hall for this fledgling virtual community, which was spread across two distant continents but remained just as small and communal as a nineteenth-century New England village. Using the computer screen to mimic the look of a magazine page wasn't Andreessen's original idea -- that idea was out there on Talk.
On Monday, November 16, 1992, Andreessen made his first, inconspicuous appearance on WWW-Talk, announcing briefly and a bit cryptically that he was "hacking something up," referring to his new browser. That day he also sent a private E-mail message to Berners-Lee, introducing himself and mentioning that he had been surfing the Net and checking out the Web browsers that had already been published. "Seems to be very impressive," Andreessen wrote (in what appears to be an uncharacteristic but utterly appropriate bout of humility). In his search, Andreessen would have found not only Pei Wei's browser, called Viola, but also the one from CERN and another from Finland. And that same Monday, he surely would have noticed Tony Johnson from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center proclaiming on WWW-Talk that he was making public his own browser, Midas, which had been in use at Stanford University for a couple of months. Midas introduced an innovative feature that would become standard in future browsers: After you clicked on an underlined word or phrase (which sent you to a related Webs site), the color of that text changed, to serve as a gentle reminder that you had already checked out that particular "hyperlink."
The next day, Andreessen wrote again to Berners-Lee. "I'm starting the game late," he acknowledged. It was true: Much of the hardest work in the creation of browsers had already been accomplished by others working together in a collegial way. A week later, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard's research lab in Bristol, England, posted a thoughtful WWW-Talk message about the need for making Web pages look more like the pages of an illustrated book, with pictures that are "part of the document." The following week, Berners-Lee informed the subscribers that Raggett was "writing a completely new browser."
It was only a matter of time before a Dave Raggett or a Pei Wei realized the next crucial advance: text with pictures. Andreessen and Bina would have to race madly to beat them -- and that's what they did. They deserve credit for speed, yes, but not for brilliant inspiration or an original idea that revolutionized the field.
Myth Number Five: Andreessen hatched Mosaic as an unsanctioned project that he worked on instead of his "real" assignments, without the knowledge of his unenlightened, bureaucratic bosses, who only much later would find out about the program and who reluctantly endorsed the software once it was already a hit.
The Newsweek cover story dutifully reported that for Andreessen and Bina, writing Mosaic "sure beat the work they were supposed to be doing," a colorful piece of folklore that has been repeated widely in the press. The truth is that their boss, Joseph Hardin, endorsed the effort from the very start, in November 1992, when Dave Thompson first shoed him the browsers he had found on the Geneva computers. And Hardin was clearly a strong supporter of Mosaic: He took Bina off his earlier project, which was one of the center's highest-priority efforts at the time, and reassigned the software god to work on Mosaic instead. He reassigned Andreessen too and followed up by putting more and more staffers on the team. And Hardin instructed Andreessen to show Mosaic to Hardin's boss, Larry Smarr, who runs the entire 500-person research center, in February 1993, when the software was still undergoing trials, testing and debugging, some two months before its official release (as "version 1.0") on April 21, way before it became such a hit that it attracted media attention.
Although it's far more romantic to portray Mosaic as a renegade, guerrilla effort, that's not what it was. Tellingly, there's only one thing that Andreessen did that he wasn't "supposed to": spending a weekend hacking up a crude prototype as part of what appears to be a maneuver for taking the project away from Thompson.
Myth Number Six: Andreessen put together the team and ran the Mosaic project.
Actually, Hardin was in charge all along. Not only wasn't Andreessen the official leader but he opposed forming the team and expanding the project. The first version of Mosaic was geared especially for expensive computers made by companies such as Sun Microsystems and used mainly by scientists, engineers and computer hackers. (Side note to technology buffs: We're talking about Unix machines running X Windows software.) Mosaic was an instant hit amongst this small but elite population. In keeping with a long-standing practice at the research center, Hardin wanted to create versions of the software for the kinds of computers owned by everyday people -- PCs and Macs, which together accounted for some 95 percent of the consumer market. Hardin says that Andreessen was strongly opposed to his plan, afraid that Mosaic's graphics wouldn't look nearly so impressive on the less costly computers, that his achievement wouldn't seem to grand. Hardin went ahead anyway, assigning a bunch of his other staffers to work on the new version. Eric Bina disputes this, saying the mass-market browsers were really Andreessen's idea.
The Hidden Story Behind the Myth.
Andreessen was the "leader" of the Mosaic team only insofar as he incited dissension and resentment within the ranks. In the fall of 1993, he was looking to make himself the de facto leader of Mosaic rather than just one of the many programmers working on what was becoming a very large, visible and important project. After Hardin went home, Andreessen typically remained in the office building's basement with the midnight hackers, the guys who, like himself, had no lives. They would be his constituency.
All along, the hackers had thought that the research center was the place to be. If you were a computer-science student at the university, you had to be smart enough and lucky enough, one of the chosen, to land apart-time job at this prestigious center, which would set you up with your own office and a computer. NCSA had the best machines on campus -- Andreessen, for instance, had a Silicon Graphics Indigo in his basement office, and expensive machine, far better than a Mac or a PC, and he had it hooked up to a cable-TV line, so he could watch the Cable News Network in a little window on his computer monitor. As a student, you couldn't beat that, recalls Andreessen's colleague Aleksandar Totic, who wrote the Mac version of Mosaic and now works at Netscape. So what if you earned only a few bucks an hour? Most hard-core computer-science students would have interned there without any pay at all, Thompson recalls.
But now, in the fall of 1993, the hackers were under Andreessen's charismatic influence, and he was trying to convince them that the center's managers -- especially Joe Hardin -- were petty government bureaucrats who were using the hapless students to promote their won agendas rather than championing the hacker heroes in the noble, pure quest to create the coolest software around. (For his part, Hardin thought of himself as an idealist, too, an "old hippie who came out of the '60s," in his own words.)
Andreessen needed a big issue, and he decided to organize a resistance to the academic research that Hardin was supporting. Hardin wanted to conduct a study on what people actually did when they ran Mosaic and explored the Web. The center would gear up some special software to keep precise records: What documents did an individual look at and for how long? What features of the software did he use most frequently? and related questions. This sort of research is fascinating to social scientists. It's also a terrific source of insight for software developers looking to improve their programs, which is why companies such as Microsoft invest heavily in such pursuits.
But Andreessen rallied the opposition of the midnight hackers, claiming that Hardin's research represented an invasion of privacy (hackers tend to have fiercely libertarian political beliefs). The argument was nonsense, since the study would use only volunteers and guarantee their anonymity. No participants had to fear that spouses would discover they were checking out some Web site plastered with pornographic images, for example.
Andreessen's ploy seems especially mean-spirited, self-serving and manipulative because only months earlier he had helped promote Hardin's ideas, even co-authoring Hardin's proposal. On February 23, 1993, he posted a message on WWW-Talk announcing that the center was interested in "gather and analyzing sociological data" in the name of "real academic research." He explained that "this would be entirely voluntary" and that "all information would be held in the strictest confidence." And he told his fellow Web enthusiasts that their cooperation in this study would help the center build better software, making the project "a particularly exciting concept for us."
But now, months later, Andreessen was looking to assert his leadership, to rally the troops, to undermine the authority of the group's real manager. In response Hardin assembled the programmers in the Fishbowl. "I think you're missing something huge," he told them. But the dissent was so strong that Hardin acquiesced and abandoned the user study. Andreessen had won. Soon afterward Andreessen had the temerity to approach a deputy director of the center, who ranked above Hardin in the organization's hierarchy: I should be the one running Mosaic, he said, not Hardin. Andreessen was rebuffed.
Andreessen's efforts to create discord among members of the Mosaic team had its apotheosis in the New York Times episode. In late 1993, few reporters on the technology beat at major newspapers and magazines were hooked up to the Internet, a word that rarely surfaced even in the longest articles about the beat's mainstays, such as Microsoft, IBM and Apple. But John Markoff of The New York Times' San Francisco bureau was deeply immersed in the culture of the Net, gleaning insights from its posting and cultivating sources among its denizens. Markoff viewed the Internet as his "personal research library," and that was one of the reason he was arguably the top technology report in the country, quick to see news and trends.
A Silicon Valley hand told Markoff that Mosaic was a "revelatory experience," so the Times man pursued the story. He called Larry Smarr, whom he had known and respected for years. The two men talked frequently, and Markoff considered the NCSA director a helpful source. Smarr referred the reporter to Joe Hardin, who in turn led him to Marc Andreessen. Markoff interviewed Andreessen by phone, but he made no mention of the student in the draft of his article, instead drawing quotes from people like Smarr and Tim Berners-Lee.
Soon the Times dispatched a photographer, Steve Kagan, to the Illinois campus. Following instructions from New York, Kagan shot portraits of Smarr along and Smarr together with Hardin. Hardin assembled the Mosaic team, the guys who actually wrote the software, and insisted that Kagan take a group picture, too. The photographer obliged. Then Hardin encouraged him to publish the team portrait. "It's not my call," Kagan said.
On December 8, 1993, Markoff's big feature on Mosaic led off the Times' business section. "think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age, " he wrote. "A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate." Then, prophetically, he reported that Mosaic's fans believe the software was "so different and obviously useful that it can create a whole new industry from scratch." Alongside the text was a photo of Larry Smarr and Joe Hardin.
The hackers felt betrayed. Management wasn't on their side, just as Andreessen had been saying all along. The government bureaucrats were trying to steal the credit for their achievement. the tension that Andreessen had been stirring was at an all-time high. the center's offices were filled with resentment. And Andreessen had established himself as the hackers' leader, their champion. That month he graduated and left for northern California, where he met a guy named Jim Clark.
Aftermath: The Rise of the Myth.
It's burdensome for many people to try to grasp the arcana of computer technology, but it's easy to understand a simple human story, and that's exactly what they had: Jim Clark, the fatherly 50-year-old Silicon Valley legend, discovering and mentoring Marc Andreessen, the 22-year-old prodigy in the mold of Bill Gates, the next impossible young, crude, sloppy, boyish, sleepless, burger-devouring techno-wizard who would rock the computer industry. Together they cofounded Mosaic Communications (renamed Netscape in November 1994), hiring away five of the programmers from the Mosaic team in Illinois, guys who were bitter about how things had turned out at the research center. Their mission: Create a new version of Mosaic and sell it. For three years, academics in Europe and the Untied States had worked together, not seeking any profit, freely sharing their work and ideas, creating something really interesting, inspired by ideals. Now it was time for someone to cash in, and Andreessen and his cohorts were aiming to be the ones to do it.
The media would be their greatest allies. Clark was about as media-savvy as they come. As the founder and chairman of Silicon Graphics, which was one of the hottest growth companies of the '80s, he was interviewed frequently and had appeared on the cover of Fortune, no less. In 1994, before it had created a software product, the nascent Netscape launched a shrewd PR campaign, spreading the Andreessen mythology. Looking back, it's hard to discern to what extent the company's executives manipulated or misdirected reports through careful omissions and inclusions (no crime, that) as opposed to outright lies, although both clearly played some role. But the media were complicit in creating and promoting the myths -- failing to dig into Andreessen's past, not taking the time to understand the technology and the issues involved and, most of all, composing oversimplifications (this tech stuff is complicated!) that morphed into falsities that turned up on countless Nexis searches to be repeated over and over by those harried souls on deadline. Overwhelmingly, reports and their editors wanted, needed, to believe the mythology. Technology was and remains the hottest topic in business journalism -- the tech stocks have been prime movers in the extraordinary bull market. But the software industry is utterly dominated by Microsoft and Bill Gates, who by the mid-'90s had crushed or humbled almost all the colorful individuals who once dared to challenge him, even in isolated niches. The press needed someone else to write about, for God's sake!
The media and Wall Street loved the Andreessen myths. On July 11, 1994, Fortune featured Mosaic Communications as the lead in its feature on twenty-five cool technology companies, writing that Andreessen had "put together a team" to create Mosaic (see Myth Number Six). On October 28, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "At age 23, Marc Andreessen is being talked about as if he were the next Steve Jobs or even another Bill Gates" and said that he had "created" Mosaic (Myth Number Three). Jim Clark called his protege "the smartest person I can ever remember knowing." On November 13, the Los Angeles Times called Andreessen a "boy wonder," a "cyberspace star" and the "author" of Mosaic (Myth Number Three). On July 23, 1995, The Washington Post wrote that Andreessen "is already being classed with some of the visionary pioneers of the industry, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett."
On August 9, 1995, Netscape sold its first shares of stock to the public, and when trading closed, Andreessen was worth $58 million. Jim Clark made $565 million on the deal. All of the guys who had abandoned the NCSA were millionaires, too. And Jim Barksdale, 52, who had previously been the number-two executive at Federal Express and McCaw Cellular and who was now the guy who ran Netscape, held stock worth $245 million.
The killings on august 9 marked the fastest ascent of a business prodigy ever. Even Bill Gates ran Microsoft for eleven years before he took the company public in 1986 and really made his fortune, and he was on the verge of turning 30 by then. But this new kid was only 24, and his startup had been in business for little more than a year. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed, "Mr. Andreessen is Silicon Valley's newest start and some say its next Bill Gates," and The New York Times said, "Mr. Andreessen...is seen as a Wunderkind in the same mold as William H. Gates."
The papers seized on Andreessen's personality quirks that fit the Gatesian image, as if being a slovenly hacker proves that you're a great computer mogul, too. "He doesn't own a suit and traipses around in baggy shorts, shirttails aflutter," wrote the Journal. "He works so late into the night that he often oversleeps and misses appointments. He eats -- usually ketchup-drenched burgers -- 'like a horse, both in quantity and mannerisms,' Mr. Barksdale recalled." USA Today duly reported that Andreessen "never bothers to decorate his apartment" and "wears shorts to work, sometimes with a tie."
By December 1995, the value of Andreessen's stock had risen to $174 million. Around Christmastime, Dave Thompson read in the Newsweek "Year of the Internet" cover story that Andreessen had thought up Mosaic while hanging out at the Espresso Royale Caffe. "It started not with a cosmic plan, but with a pastry," proclaimed the authors. To Thompson that hurt. He knew that it had all started with a piece of junk mail and his own curiosity and enterprise, not Andreessen's. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, Pei Wei's friends showed him an article in Business Week that described Mosaic as "the first Web browser," when in reality Wei had created his own browser beforehand, and the Mosaic guys had studied it. "I'd get pretty annoyed," Wei recalls. "It really annoys me that the popular press makes it look like Marc did this single-handedly."
And one day at Netscape's headquarters in Mountain View, a bunch of University of Illinois alumni jokingly made Andreessen sit in front of a computer and pretend to write a few lines of software code "for PR reasons," recalls his Netscape colleague Jon Mittelhauser. "Marc never wrote code at Netscape," he explains. "We'd all agree that he's not that good a programmer." Mittelhauser also says that when Jim Clark recruited the Mosaic team to join his startup, he assured them that Andreessen would not be their manager, such was the young man's reputation.
Nor was Andreessen anyone's manager during Netscape's rise. There was no one who directly reported to him (aside from his secretary). Bill Gates and Steve Jobs provided the archetypes for the precocious computer entrepreneur, but Andreessen assumed the requisite iconic image without wielding the power, without accepting the hair risks of running his own show. All along, he was a willing prop for an older Silicon Valley wise man, who saw the PR value of a youthful figurehead in an industry that equates youthfulness with innovation and inspiration. These days PR and image making, not scientific genius, are the key to wealth creation in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that one of Harrison Ford's lines in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Oh no, that's right -- that's one of Harrison Ford's ACTIONS in Raiders of the Lost Ark :)
What you're paying for is the probably 50+ YEARS total practice, training, shitty unpaid gigs, rehearsal, and the honing of the individual artists' skills, all of which together have created a band which you want to go and see. The three hours is the time your butt is in the seat, not the "working".
www.easydns.com
No bullshit, great service.
You're kidding, right? This has to be the most ineffectual bunch of non-participants I can think of.
Can someone explain to me wtf a "mission-critical corporate environment" is? Or was this just an attempt to start a game of Bullshit Bingo(tm)?
Correction. After postulating that music would be the most appropriate medium by which to communicate with extraterrestrial life, Lewis continued,
"Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again." He added, "We would be bragging, of course."
ObRef: Thomas, L. Ceti. in Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, Viking Press, New York, 1974, 42-46
Nice! I never thought I'd see a link to BB's site on Slashdot :)
Strangely enough, I never thought of his audition tale as a tale of woe... I found it rather inspirational, myself.
Well, put it this way. One day while drinking beer and talking bullshit about games with Tim Willits, he said to me "...yeah, the railgun was my idea, I was the one who pushed to get it in the game. You know where I got the idea, right? I just completely ripped it from 'Eraser'..."
Hilarious :)
:)
My personal taste would have been to replace the line
"Thy software come, thy games be done"
with
"Thy software come, when it is done"
I don't disagree with the spirit of your post, but the railgun was the result of Tim Willits's input, and he blatantly ripped it from the Schwarzenegger movie "Eraser".
id.
Not iD.
Not ID.
Not Id.
id.
I mean, seriously... how fucking hard is it to get a TWO-LETTER WORD right?
Pearl Jam, "Vs."
I flunked a course in my first year of college because there was a Tetris coin-op in the student cafeteria.
Netfilter = iptables.
Wakey wakey.
Wow. Oh well, consider me better-informed now. Thanks for clearing that up :)
I'm guessing that the text is meant to read
"...used gene sequencers from a mail-order supplier..."
Come on guys, there was about fifteen, twenty minutes TOPS, of "geek cult movie". The rest of Office Space was just more of the same regurgitated Hollywood "boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl" schlock.
*watches karma evaporate*
u u d d l r l r b a b a sel start
You either grok it or you don't.
The silly thing is, Cage's 4'33" is not intended to be four minutes and thirty three seconds of TOTAL SILENCE. Cage intended for peripheral noise -- the audience's nervous coughing, the scuffing of seats on the performance venue's floor, passing cars, etc -- to be an integral part of the composition. The wit of 4'33" is that Cage was creating a unique piece of non-reproducible art, in which the audience were active performers, every time the piece was performed. To claim that all recordings of total silence are an infringement of copyright is to completely miss the point of Cage's composition.
As a great musician and the most influential fingerstyle bassist in rock history he will be sorely missed. RIP.
WHAT YOU SAY !!
actually READ the article? Moby wasn't saying that ripping and burning is bad, he was saying that the record industry's criteria of success and failure are increasingly irrelevant.
I give Moby a +1, Insightful.
Imposter Boy
by Alan Deutschman, Gentleman's Quarterly, January 1997
The media and Wall Street believed Marc Andreessen was "the next Bill Gates" -- the singular genius behind the big high-tech breakthrough of the '90s. But his tale really was too good to be true.
His leg is twitching conspicuously--he seems impatient, unbearably bored, resentful that he has to try to sit still in the confinement of this windowless conference room, in Mountain View, California, and subject himself to the banal duty of yet another interview. Only 25 and already he's like a retired quarterback, forced to live in his storied past, condemned to retell his timeworn tales of collegiate glory to all the rabid hangers-on and sycophants and hero-worshipers at the tacky restaurant-bar where he's the front man. For that's what it was, collegiate glory, but not on the gridiron: As a senior at his Big Ten school, Marc Andreessen pulled off the geeky equivalent of a last-minute touchdown pass by writing an arcane computer program that would lead to a $174 million payday. At least, that's the legend.
So here he is, milking the boredom act, but it's not as if the interrogation is keeping him from attending to any weighty and urgent responsibilities, like actually running the computer he cofounded -- there's a hardened guy more than twice his age who does that. Andreessen's official title is vice president of technology, and he's nearly the most famous computer programmer who's ever lived (eclipsed only by Bill Gates). But it's not as if he needs to sit down in front of his screen and busy himself with the notoriously arduous task of hacking out a few lines of software, which, astonishingly, is something he has never done in the short but spectacular history of Netscape Communications Corporation, his closest colleagues have told me. Not a single line of computer code. Never. What Andreessen does, largely, is talk with reporters and make personal appearances at conferences and such. His real job is being the Living Legend, putting on a white Ralph Lauren polo shirt and new-looking blue jeans and hauling his six-four presence in front of his fans. And he's intolerably bored because he's told his story before, so many times that surely he knows is by rote, but he has to show that this is an unspeakably grating role for a man of such supreme intelligence, such technological sophistication, such worldly success. He's inured to the headiness of a reporter's rapt attention and the promise of spilled ink. His iconography is already replete: He's been photographed -- barefoot! -- for the cover of Time, canonized in a Newsweek cover store and in the big-city dailies, glorified by Business Week, treated like a Gen X hero by Rolling Stone and Details. He has achieved just about ever triumph of media overexposure outside of modeling khakis for the Gap.
This time around, though, the report doesn't want the Legend to retell the rote tale, providing the fawning article with the obligator quotes from the Great Man himself. Rather, I've been looking into his past. I have already visited the school in the boondocks where the story begins, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I have already talked with the people who worked closely with Andreessen in that remote locale. By now I know that he is more than a little like the Anne Baxter character in All About Eve, someone who was willing to massage the details of his past -- and in certain cases even to lie outright -- to make his story more compelling. Someone who was willing to let himself be the puppet of a powerful older man as part of the bargain in his fast rise to stardom.
I tell Andreessen that I want to reconstruct his role in the creation of Mosaic, the software program that led to his fame. "That story has been told before," he sniffs. So I say that I've talked with Dave Thompson, who worked with Andreessen when the future legend was a lowly college senior making $6.85 and hour in his part-time gig as a programmer for a research center on campus. Thompson said he was the guy who first proposed that the center write a so-called Web browser, not Andreessen. This point, which was confirmed for me by other people, directly contradicted the Newsweek cover story, which said that Andreessen came up with the inspired idea for Mosaic while enjoying a pastry at the Espresso Royale Caffe.
As I confront him with the discrepancy, Andreessen remain unfazed. Well, he says quickly and dismissively and stonily, in his characteristic low-volume bass intonations, since you already know the whole story, you don't need to talk to me. His tone betrays no anger, no emotion at all, but the response is blatantly sarcastic, and there's an outsize arrogance in his unwillingness to cooperate, as if he need not dignify any accusations by arguing on his own behalf, by expending the least bit energy.
It could be that, by this late date, Andreessen has repeated his story so often that he's come to think it's true -- that old trap of believing your own PR. Or perhaps he still grasps that the facts don't underpin the mythology and still has a conscience, and has gut gnaws him every time he has to retell the tale. For even among the greatest egotists, self-delusion goes only so far, and Andreessen of all people has to know that he's not the singular genius of the '90s technological vogue. He's its poster boy, straight from central casting, the obliging raw material for a media that yearned for a new, young hero in a field that had come to be dominated so thoroughly by one invincible corporation and one man -- Microsoft and Bill Gates. Alas, his true genius was taking credit for the work of others; his brilliant insight, that he could profit mightily from the ideas and achievements of a number of naive idealists in his academic field.
The myths promulgated by a lazy and gullible news media concerning the Andreessen story are numerous.
Myth Number One: Andreessen's Mosaic was the first Web browser.
Even as responsible and usually well researched a publication as Business Week has made this claim. Here are the facts: Before Andreessen began work on Mosaic in November 1992, there were already several Web browsers in circulation. The first, designed for NeXT computers, was written in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee, the Oxford-educated Englishman who single-handedly invented the World Wide Web, that ingenious system for linking computers so they could more easily share information. (The browser is an important element of the overall system -- a software program that runs on a personal computer and connects it to this international network.) At the time, Berners-Lee was a stagger at CERN, the French acronym for a research lab in Geneva. Several of his colleagues there wrote other browsers that ran on different computer systems. And research around the world -- at Stanford, Berkeley, the Helsinki University of Technology and elsewhere -- all published their own browsers before Andreessen came into contact with the Web.
Myth Number Two: The Mosaic project was Andreessen's idea.
Essential to the mythology but untrue. The credit belongs to Dave Thompson, who was one of Andreessen's colleagues at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), a research institute at the University of Illinois. In Number 1992, Thompson was a full-time career professional at the prestigious center, not a student. He came across a piece of junk mail from O'Reilly Associates, a publisher of technical books. (O'Reilly is to computer hackers what Knopf is to the literati.) The mailing was a sales pitch for a pamphlet about Internet technologies, including something called the World Wide Web.
Thompson was curious, so he went to his computer and ran Archie, a program that could search the Internet to see what information was out there on a specific topic. He wanted to find out what he could about this World Wide Web. Soon he was connected to the computers at CERN, which had two browsers available free to anyone who wanted to make copies. One had been created at CERN, the other by a former Berkeley student named Pei Wei. Thompson studied the programs. Both were "buggy," he recalls, and there were few Web sites in existence that he could visit using browsers. Still, he thought "it was really cool technology," and he was intrigued. Maybe the staffers at NCSA, whose mission was publishing software for scientists and researchers, could write a new, improved browser.
Thompson showed the browsers to Joseph Hardin, who ran the center's software group, a collection of a few dozen staffers. Hardin's reaction was, Wow, look into this. Which leads us to...
The Hidden Story Behind the Myth. Andreessen essentially snatched the Mosaic project away from the guy who'd had the idea. Soon after meeting with Hardin, Thompson made what would turn out to be a big mistake: He showed the browsers to his colleague Andreessen. Then Thompson went off to an out-of-town conference. Another bad move.
Andreessen acted swiftly. In one sleepless weekend, he hacked out a crude prototype for a new Web browser. (Andreessen's peers didn't consider him a great programmer, but he was known for being a remarkably fast one.) Then Andreessen used the prototype as a ploy for recruiting a colleague named Eric Bina to team up with him. Like Thompson, Bina was a full-time career professional at the center. Bina was a legend among his compatriots, the object of much awe and reverence -- a god of software. For one thing, he was tireless, reputedly capable of toiling for forty-eight to seventy-two hours straight, then sleeping for a mere two or three hours before he returned to work. Andreessen once called this "Eric's kamikaze work ethic."
Hardin, their boss, had to decide what to do with Mar. Andreessen had been difficult to manage. Hardin had assigned the student to report to Ping Fu, a brilliant full-time professional who had emigrated from mainland China, but Hardin know that things weren't working out between them. "Marc is no fun to work with," Hardin recalls. "He tries very had to make sure anything he touches he gets credit for. Ping doesn't stand for any of that shit."
Fu wanted Andreessen off her project, and he wanted off, too but that mean that he needed another assignment. And now he wanted to team up with Bina and write a Web browser. Hardin knew that somehow Bina worked well with the student. What's more, Hardin considered Bina a "knockout programmer," one of the best he had ever seen and thus a good choice for such a promising project. But then Thompson returned to Champaign and found that Andreessen had hacked out the prototype and gotten Bina on his side. Hey, Thompson said to Hardin, I thought I was going to work on this.
The colleagues gathered in a circular meeting room called the Fishbowl, and Hardin decided to let Bina the software god and the rambunctious Andreessen work on the browser. Of course, Thompson could be part of the team, too. But Hardin would later recall that it seemed as if Thompson felt "frozen out" and didn't want to work with the pair who had attached themselves to his project while he was away. Thompson passed up the assignment. "That was my fatal mistake," he now recalls with a sigh. He could have been the legend, the hero, the centimillionare. He could have been...Marc Andreessen!
Myth Number Three: Andreessen "wrote" Mosaic or "created" Mosaic or is the "author" of Mosaic.
To a large extent, the original programming was done by Eric Bina. And a big chunk of the computer code in the first version of Mosaic wasn't even Bina's own handicraft but consisted of lines that he freely borrowed or lifted from a kind of public-access library of software written by Tim Berners-Lee and his associates in Geneva and made available free of charge and in the spirit of sharing and academic cooperation.
Myth Number Four: Mosaic was an unprecedented breakthrough.
In reality, the initial version of Mosaic drew on the innovations of earlier browsers, which already included many features aimed at making the software easy and appealing for nongeeks, features that would later become staples of the genre, such as icon buttons (back, forward, home), bookmarks (for tracking the addresses of favorite Web sites) and a variety of attractive fonts and typefaces.
To be sure, Mosaic deserves credit for tackling two problems. First, earlier browsers were troublesome to get up and running, while Mosaic was a lot easier, thanks largely to Bina's programming skill. Second, Mosaic was the first published browser that automatically displayed pictures along with text, as in the pages of a magazine layout or an illustrated book. That was important because later on it would be the proliferation of pretty pictures that transformed the Web from the domain of scientists and hackers to a cultural phenomenon that captured the interest of the masses. Tim Berners-Lee, an intellectual in the grand European tradition, had preferred plain text on the screen, free of graphics, "because it forced people to be literate," he would later say. Although Berners-Lee's original 1990 browser could show pictures, too, any particular graphic would pop up on the screen only if the individual user clicked an icon with his mouse. Otherwise, the images remained hidden, unobtrusive.
By late 1992, the leading players in the Web community knew that integration pictures and text was the next important step in the evolution of browser software. (In Berkeley Pei Wei was working to add this feature to his browser, for instance.) Ideas and innovations spread quickly because the players remained in close contact. Back in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee had set up and E-mail forum, WWW-Talk, that served as a common source of news, gossip, information, collaboration, technical problem solving and intramural debate for the far-flung pioneers of the World Wide Web (who, typically, were researchers at universities and high-tech corporate labs). WWW-Talk was the town hall for this fledgling virtual community, which was spread across two distant continents but remained just as small and communal as a nineteenth-century New England village. Using the computer screen to mimic the look of a magazine page wasn't Andreessen's original idea -- that idea was out there on Talk.
On Monday, November 16, 1992, Andreessen made his first, inconspicuous appearance on WWW-Talk, announcing briefly and a bit cryptically that he was "hacking something up," referring to his new browser. That day he also sent a private E-mail message to Berners-Lee, introducing himself and mentioning that he had been surfing the Net and checking out the Web browsers that had already been published. "Seems to be very impressive," Andreessen wrote (in what appears to be an uncharacteristic but utterly appropriate bout of humility). In his search, Andreessen would have found not only Pei Wei's browser, called Viola, but also the one from CERN and another from Finland. And that same Monday, he surely would have noticed Tony Johnson from Stanford Linear Accelerator Center proclaiming on WWW-Talk that he was making public his own browser, Midas, which had been in use at Stanford University for a couple of months. Midas introduced an innovative feature that would become standard in future browsers: After you clicked on an underlined word or phrase (which sent you to a related Webs site), the color of that text changed, to serve as a gentle reminder that you had already checked out that particular "hyperlink."
The next day, Andreessen wrote again to Berners-Lee. "I'm starting the game late," he acknowledged. It was true: Much of the hardest work in the creation of browsers had already been accomplished by others working together in a collegial way. A week later, Dave Raggett at Hewlett-Packard's research lab in Bristol, England, posted a thoughtful WWW-Talk message about the need for making Web pages look more like the pages of an illustrated book, with pictures that are "part of the document." The following week, Berners-Lee informed the subscribers that Raggett was "writing a completely new browser."
It was only a matter of time before a Dave Raggett or a Pei Wei realized the next crucial advance: text with pictures. Andreessen and Bina would have to race madly to beat them -- and that's what they did. They deserve credit for speed, yes, but not for brilliant inspiration or an original idea that revolutionized the field.
Myth Number Five: Andreessen hatched Mosaic as an unsanctioned project that he worked on instead of his "real" assignments, without the knowledge of his unenlightened, bureaucratic bosses, who only much later would find out about the program and who reluctantly endorsed the software once it was already a hit.
The Newsweek cover story dutifully reported that for Andreessen and Bina, writing Mosaic "sure beat the work they were supposed to be doing," a colorful piece of folklore that has been repeated widely in the press. The truth is that their boss, Joseph Hardin, endorsed the effort from the very start, in November 1992, when Dave Thompson first shoed him the browsers he had found on the Geneva computers. And Hardin was clearly a strong supporter of Mosaic: He took Bina off his earlier project, which was one of the center's highest-priority efforts at the time, and reassigned the software god to work on Mosaic instead. He reassigned Andreessen too and followed up by putting more and more staffers on the team. And Hardin instructed Andreessen to show Mosaic to Hardin's boss, Larry Smarr, who runs the entire 500-person research center, in February 1993, when the software was still undergoing trials, testing and debugging, some two months before its official release (as "version 1.0") on April 21, way before it became such a hit that it attracted media attention.
Although it's far more romantic to portray Mosaic as a renegade, guerrilla effort, that's not what it was. Tellingly, there's only one thing that Andreessen did that he wasn't "supposed to": spending a weekend hacking up a crude prototype as part of what appears to be a maneuver for taking the project away from Thompson.
Myth Number Six: Andreessen put together the team and ran the Mosaic project.
Actually, Hardin was in charge all along. Not only wasn't Andreessen the official leader but he opposed forming the team and expanding the project. The first version of Mosaic was geared especially for expensive computers made by companies such as Sun Microsystems and used mainly by scientists, engineers and computer hackers. (Side note to technology buffs: We're talking about Unix machines running X Windows software.) Mosaic was an instant hit amongst this small but elite population. In keeping with a long-standing practice at the research center, Hardin wanted to create versions of the software for the kinds of computers owned by everyday people -- PCs and Macs, which together accounted for some 95 percent of the consumer market. Hardin says that Andreessen was strongly opposed to his plan, afraid that Mosaic's graphics wouldn't look nearly so impressive on the less costly computers, that his achievement wouldn't seem to grand. Hardin went ahead anyway, assigning a bunch of his other staffers to work on the new version. Eric Bina disputes this, saying the mass-market browsers were really Andreessen's idea.
The Hidden Story Behind the Myth.
Andreessen was the "leader" of the Mosaic team only insofar as he incited dissension and resentment within the ranks. In the fall of 1993, he was looking to make himself the de facto leader of Mosaic rather than just one of the many programmers working on what was becoming a very large, visible and important project. After Hardin went home, Andreessen typically remained in the office building's basement with the midnight hackers, the guys who, like himself, had no lives. They would be his constituency.
All along, the hackers had thought that the research center was the place to be. If you were a computer-science student at the university, you had to be smart enough and lucky enough, one of the chosen, to land apart-time job at this prestigious center, which would set you up with your own office and a computer. NCSA had the best machines on campus -- Andreessen, for instance, had a Silicon Graphics Indigo in his basement office, and expensive machine, far better than a Mac or a PC, and he had it hooked up to a cable-TV line, so he could watch the Cable News Network in a little window on his computer monitor. As a student, you couldn't beat that, recalls Andreessen's colleague Aleksandar Totic, who wrote the Mac version of Mosaic and now works at Netscape. So what if you earned only a few bucks an hour? Most hard-core computer-science students would have interned there without any pay at all, Thompson recalls.
But now, in the fall of 1993, the hackers were under Andreessen's charismatic influence, and he was trying to convince them that the center's managers -- especially Joe Hardin -- were petty government bureaucrats who were using the hapless students to promote their won agendas rather than championing the hacker heroes in the noble, pure quest to create the coolest software around. (For his part, Hardin thought of himself as an idealist, too, an "old hippie who came out of the '60s," in his own words.)
Andreessen needed a big issue, and he decided to organize a resistance to the academic research that Hardin was supporting. Hardin wanted to conduct a study on what people actually did when they ran Mosaic and explored the Web. The center would gear up some special software to keep precise records: What documents did an individual look at and for how long? What features of the software did he use most frequently? and related questions. This sort of research is fascinating to social scientists. It's also a terrific source of insight for software developers looking to improve their programs, which is why companies such as Microsoft invest heavily in such pursuits.
But Andreessen rallied the opposition of the midnight hackers, claiming that Hardin's research represented an invasion of privacy (hackers tend to have fiercely libertarian political beliefs). The argument was nonsense, since the study would use only volunteers and guarantee their anonymity. No participants had to fear that spouses would discover they were checking out some Web site plastered with pornographic images, for example.
Andreessen's ploy seems especially mean-spirited, self-serving and manipulative because only months earlier he had helped promote Hardin's ideas, even co-authoring Hardin's proposal. On February 23, 1993, he posted a message on WWW-Talk announcing that the center was interested in "gather and analyzing sociological data" in the name of "real academic research." He explained that "this would be entirely voluntary" and that "all information would be held in the strictest confidence." And he told his fellow Web enthusiasts that their cooperation in this study would help the center build better software, making the project "a particularly exciting concept for us."
But now, months later, Andreessen was looking to assert his leadership, to rally the troops, to undermine the authority of the group's real manager. In response Hardin assembled the programmers in the Fishbowl. "I think you're missing something huge," he told them. But the dissent was so strong that Hardin acquiesced and abandoned the user study. Andreessen had won. Soon afterward Andreessen had the temerity to approach a deputy director of the center, who ranked above Hardin in the organization's hierarchy: I should be the one running Mosaic, he said, not Hardin. Andreessen was rebuffed.
Andreessen's efforts to create discord among members of the Mosaic team had its apotheosis in the New York Times episode. In late 1993, few reporters on the technology beat at major newspapers and magazines were hooked up to the Internet, a word that rarely surfaced even in the longest articles about the beat's mainstays, such as Microsoft, IBM and Apple. But John Markoff of The New York Times' San Francisco bureau was deeply immersed in the culture of the Net, gleaning insights from its posting and cultivating sources among its denizens. Markoff viewed the Internet as his "personal research library," and that was one of the reason he was arguably the top technology report in the country, quick to see news and trends.
A Silicon Valley hand told Markoff that Mosaic was a "revelatory experience," so the Times man pursued the story. He called Larry Smarr, whom he had known and respected for years. The two men talked frequently, and Markoff considered the NCSA director a helpful source. Smarr referred the reporter to Joe Hardin, who in turn led him to Marc Andreessen. Markoff interviewed Andreessen by phone, but he made no mention of the student in the draft of his article, instead drawing quotes from people like Smarr and Tim Berners-Lee.
Soon the Times dispatched a photographer, Steve Kagan, to the Illinois campus. Following instructions from New York, Kagan shot portraits of Smarr along and Smarr together with Hardin. Hardin assembled the Mosaic team, the guys who actually wrote the software, and insisted that Kagan take a group picture, too. The photographer obliged. Then Hardin encouraged him to publish the team portrait. "It's not my call," Kagan said.
On December 8, 1993, Markoff's big feature on Mosaic led off the Times' business section. "think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Information Age, " he wrote. "A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate." Then, prophetically, he reported that Mosaic's fans believe the software was "so different and obviously useful that it can create a whole new industry from scratch." Alongside the text was a photo of Larry Smarr and Joe Hardin.
The hackers felt betrayed. Management wasn't on their side, just as Andreessen had been saying all along. The government bureaucrats were trying to steal the credit for their achievement. the tension that Andreessen had been stirring was at an all-time high. the center's offices were filled with resentment. And Andreessen had established himself as the hackers' leader, their champion. That month he graduated and left for northern California, where he met a guy named Jim Clark.
Aftermath: The Rise of the Myth.
It's burdensome for many people to try to grasp the arcana of computer technology, but it's easy to understand a simple human story, and that's exactly what they had: Jim Clark, the fatherly 50-year-old Silicon Valley legend, discovering and mentoring Marc Andreessen, the 22-year-old prodigy in the mold of Bill Gates, the next impossible young, crude, sloppy, boyish, sleepless, burger-devouring techno-wizard who would rock the computer industry. Together they cofounded Mosaic Communications (renamed Netscape in November 1994), hiring away five of the programmers from the Mosaic team in Illinois, guys who were bitter about how things had turned out at the research center. Their mission: Create a new version of Mosaic and sell it. For three years, academics in Europe and the Untied States had worked together, not seeking any profit, freely sharing their work and ideas, creating something really interesting, inspired by ideals. Now it was time for someone to cash in, and Andreessen and his cohorts were aiming to be the ones to do it.
The media would be their greatest allies. Clark was about as media-savvy as they come. As the founder and chairman of Silicon Graphics, which was one of the hottest growth companies of the '80s, he was interviewed frequently and had appeared on the cover of Fortune, no less. In 1994, before it had created a software product, the nascent Netscape launched a shrewd PR campaign, spreading the Andreessen mythology. Looking back, it's hard to discern to what extent the company's executives manipulated or misdirected reports through careful omissions and inclusions (no crime, that) as opposed to outright lies, although both clearly played some role. But the media were complicit in creating and promoting the myths -- failing to dig into Andreessen's past, not taking the time to understand the technology and the issues involved and, most of all, composing oversimplifications (this tech stuff is complicated!) that morphed into falsities that turned up on countless Nexis searches to be repeated over and over by those harried souls on deadline. Overwhelmingly, reports and their editors wanted, needed, to believe the mythology. Technology was and remains the hottest topic in business journalism -- the tech stocks have been prime movers in the extraordinary bull market. But the software industry is utterly dominated by Microsoft and Bill Gates, who by the mid-'90s had crushed or humbled almost all the colorful individuals who once dared to challenge him, even in isolated niches. The press needed someone else to write about, for God's sake!
The media and Wall Street loved the Andreessen myths. On July 11, 1994, Fortune featured Mosaic Communications as the lead in its feature on twenty-five cool technology companies, writing that Andreessen had "put together a team" to create Mosaic (see Myth Number Six). On October 28, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "At age 23, Marc Andreessen is being talked about as if he were the next Steve Jobs or even another Bill Gates" and said that he had "created" Mosaic (Myth Number Three). Jim Clark called his protege "the smartest person I can ever remember knowing." On November 13, the Los Angeles Times called Andreessen a "boy wonder," a "cyberspace star" and the "author" of Mosaic (Myth Number Three). On July 23, 1995, The Washington Post wrote that Andreessen "is already being classed with some of the visionary pioneers of the industry, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett."
On August 9, 1995, Netscape sold its first shares of stock to the public, and when trading closed, Andreessen was worth $58 million. Jim Clark made $565 million on the deal. All of the guys who had abandoned the NCSA were millionaires, too. And Jim Barksdale, 52, who had previously been the number-two executive at Federal Express and McCaw Cellular and who was now the guy who ran Netscape, held stock worth $245 million.
The killings on august 9 marked the fastest ascent of a business prodigy ever. Even Bill Gates ran Microsoft for eleven years before he took the company public in 1986 and really made his fortune, and he was on the verge of turning 30 by then. But this new kid was only 24, and his startup had been in business for little more than a year. The Wall Street Journal proclaimed, "Mr. Andreessen is Silicon Valley's newest start and some say its next Bill Gates," and The New York Times said, "Mr. Andreessen...is seen as a Wunderkind in the same mold as William H. Gates."
The papers seized on Andreessen's personality quirks that fit the Gatesian image, as if being a slovenly hacker proves that you're a great computer mogul, too. "He doesn't own a suit and traipses around in baggy shorts, shirttails aflutter," wrote the Journal. "He works so late into the night that he often oversleeps and misses appointments. He eats -- usually ketchup-drenched burgers -- 'like a horse, both in quantity and mannerisms,' Mr. Barksdale recalled." USA Today duly reported that Andreessen "never bothers to decorate his apartment" and "wears shorts to work, sometimes with a tie."
By December 1995, the value of Andreessen's stock had risen to $174 million. Around Christmastime, Dave Thompson read in the Newsweek "Year of the Internet" cover story that Andreessen had thought up Mosaic while hanging out at the Espresso Royale Caffe. "It started not with a cosmic plan, but with a pastry," proclaimed the authors. To Thompson that hurt. He knew that it had all started with a piece of junk mail and his own curiosity and enterprise, not Andreessen's. Meanwhile, in Berkeley, Pei Wei's friends showed him an article in Business Week that described Mosaic as "the first Web browser," when in reality Wei had created his own browser beforehand, and the Mosaic guys had studied it. "I'd get pretty annoyed," Wei recalls. "It really annoys me that the popular press makes it look like Marc did this single-handedly."
And one day at Netscape's headquarters in Mountain View, a bunch of University of Illinois alumni jokingly made Andreessen sit in front of a computer and pretend to write a few lines of software code "for PR reasons," recalls his Netscape colleague Jon Mittelhauser. "Marc never wrote code at Netscape," he explains. "We'd all agree that he's not that good a programmer." Mittelhauser also says that when Jim Clark recruited the Mosaic team to join his startup, he assured them that Andreessen would not be their manager, such was the young man's reputation.
Nor was Andreessen anyone's manager during Netscape's rise. There was no one who directly reported to him (aside from his secretary). Bill Gates and Steve Jobs provided the archetypes for the precocious computer entrepreneur, but Andreessen assumed the requisite iconic image without wielding the power, without accepting the hair risks of running his own show. All along, he was a willing prop for an older Silicon Valley wise man, who saw the PR value of a youthful figurehead in an industry that equates youthfulness with innovation and inspiration. These days PR and image making, not scientific genius, are the key to wealth creation in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.
Let me get this straight. You want control placed in the hands of
1. A government agency
2. That is independent
3. And has stable staff
4. And that depends directly on ICANN
Anything else? Must have unlimited funding? Must be able to fly? Must have jars full of M&Ms in the office but no brown ones?
> Gyrocompasses can fail, so can satellite receivers...
Windows NT can try and divide by zero...