[This post is a continuation of the third installment of a series that began with "The Internet". ]
In a shiny blue tower in Oak Brook Illinois, Jim Crowe has logged onto the Internet in front of his 25 most senior MFS Communications executives. The group is quiet and skeptical as Jim teaches them about the Internet. The next 60 minutes did more to shape my career than perhaps any other meeting. Though I don’t recall the words he used, I will take some liberties to re-create as best I can what transpired in this meeting. (If any other attendees-including Jim-has a recollection, please shoot me an email or drop me a line.)
“We’ve all used corporate data networks for a long time,” Jim told the group. “Primarily, these were used for email. The Internet is something entirely different. Corporate Networks are closed systems, not much more than speeding up intra-company mail.”
Jim continued: “The Internet is an open network. But to think of it solely as a faster way to exchange mail would be a mistake. It will change the way people live and work throughout the globe.”
“The Internet will speed up business. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Using FTP, large files can be sent over vast distances both rapidly and cheaply. Whereas FedEx would charge $20 to overnight a document, the Internet will deliver the same document in a few minutes at less than 5% of the cost.” Jim used the Internet to send a document, probably to Ron Vidal.
“Information is power. The Internet will speed up the pace in which people get access to information.” Then Jim asked a question that will look silly in today’s world: “Who here has heard of Yahoo!?” Maybe eight hands went up and mine wasn’t one of them.
“Who has actually used Yahoo!?” prompted a couple of the hands to drop.
“Yahoo! is a web portal,” Jim explained to the perplexed crowd. “Internet users get information from a portal. Some of the information is prepackaged by Yahoo! itself, like an online magazine. But a portal is also used to find information that could reside anywhere on the Internet.”
I seriously doubt the audience followed the “anywhere on the Internet” comment.
“Who knows what a search engine is?” Perhaps two or three hands were raised proudly. Jim demonstrated a search engine-perhaps Yahoo’s! or perhaps some other pre-Google version. He’d type in words and links would come back. Wow. Powerful.
Jim demonstrated several other capabilities, though recall them I cannot. As he went on, I was realizing how lucky I was to have chosen a career in telecom. We would be part of this revolution.
It is what Jim said next that made that day so important in my career. [To Be Continued]
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You know, i didn’t know yahoo has been around that long. The first ‘nextgen’ search engine I remember was Altavista but clearly my memory is failing me.
Details Details….Perhaps it was Altavista that he demonstrated.
Nope, you could have very well been correct. The company website says that Yahoo was around as far back as 1994.
I remember the first time I heard the name Yahoo!. It was 1995 and I was building fiber networks for MFS in the Bay Area. One of my fellow OSP / ISP engineers (Bart Caldwell) walked into the job office in Palo Alto and said: “This place is really weird. I just did a site survey at the offices of a company called Yahoo!. What the hell kind of name is that for a business?” Soon after, I did a site survey for a prospective customer in Sunnyvale called Mosaic. Pretty sure it was the same Mosaic from U of I setting up shop in Silicon Valley. I also wandered the halls of Silicon Graphics (including part of their campus later taken over by Google), MAE West at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Intel’s Santa Clara campus, Cisco’s Tasman Dr campus and dozens of other firms, some destined for legend, some destined for bust. But all contributing to what the Internet has become. At the time I had no idea what I was looking at, but like Dan’s experience at Level 3, once I arrived and understood Jim’s vision for what the network we were building was to become, I was converted.