TREotM: The Nineties and the Internet

This is a book in progress Go here to read the previous chaptersThe Nineties ushered in a new very quotwild westquot with the World Wide Webamp160 The Englishman and now Sir Tim BernersLee39s CERN memo became realityamp160 Linus Torvald released the Linux software kernelamp160In 1990 Rouzbeh Yassini cofounded LANcity and introduced the first commercial cable modem allowing high speed Internet to actually workBy 1993 the dam was fully broken when Marc Andreesen released the Mosaic browser and Steve Case39s AOL offered direct access to the InternetThat year also brought a new President Bill Clinton who beat the incumbent George H W Bush partly because the outofleftfield candidate and businessman Ross Perot ran for the office mostly on television buying huge blocks of time creating an quotelectronic town hallquotamp160 That set a trend of politicians quotgoing over the heads of traditional mediaquot by directly connecting with answering questions with the publicAt the beginning of the decade the US had almost 94m TVHH and 65 had more than one set and 69 had VCRsamp160 Some 517million subscribers were connected to 9575 cable systemsJeff Bezos in a suburban Seattle garage founded Amazon in 1994amp160 At the time Barnes ampamp Noble dominated American booksellersamp160 Today Amazon does and Barnes ampamp Noble is a shadow of what it was thenamp160 Amazon went from selling books online and distributing them via UPS and USPS to selling just about everything on earth and distributing quotstuffquot still via the same vendors but fulfilling from centers built all over the world to deliver fasteramp160 Amazon is also testing drones for deliverables todayEarly the same year a couple of students amp8211 David Filo and Jerry Yang amp8211 at Stanford started a sort of online directory of the World Wide Web called Yahoo complete with exclamation pointamp160 The first major portal Yahoo established a way for casual users to connect different Web pages by searching first before connectingAnd General Motors owned GM Hughes Electronics launched the first small dish direct broadcast satellite service called DirecTVamp160 The first customers were in Albuquerque New Mexicoamp160HotWired and Time Inc39s Pathfinder became the first major publisher to produce online versions of their magazinesamp160 Nintendo released the GameBoy and video gaming joined the world of media as developers began creating more and more intricate games that included storytellingPanasonic Philips Sony and Toshiba jointly created the DVD quotoptical storage formatquotamp160 Shortly thereafter floppy discs all but disappearedamp160amp160 Microsoft debuted the Explorer browser amp8230 and later ran into trouble for bundling it with WindowsTeleCommunications Inc39s Dr John Malone speaking at the Western Cable Show predicted a future with some 500 linear TV channels distributed via cableamp160 He was speaking of capacity compression and possibilitiesamp160 It almost came trueCongress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandating Vchips in TV setsamp160 TV networks including cable nets developed a ratings system based on movie ratings that worked with the Vchips to enable parental controlsamp160 More importantly the Act also brought significant deregulation to the entire television ecosystem and sparked a dramatic increase in mergersamp160 TV station groups mergedamp160 Cable operators mergedamp160 The trend continued through the decade culminating with the acquisition of TeleCommunications Inc by the original ATampampT amp8230 then relegated to riding down the end of long distance revenuesamp160 ATampampT didn39t last long as a cable operator it sold to Comcast just a few years laterTime Inc39s American Television ampamp Communications merged with Warner Cable to create Time Warner Cableamp160 And Charlie Ergen39s DISH launched providing competition to DirecTV and PrimeStaramp160 Another entrant AlphaStar had lasted only a few monthsNot limiting themselves to merging cable systems Cablevision Systems bought Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music HallAt the National Cable Show in 1997 Comcast39s Brian Roberts challenged Microsoft39s Bill Gates to invest in the cable business in order to help jumpstart Internet access via higher speed cable amp8230 a couple of months later Gates invested 1b in Comcastamp160 Gates had hoped to also become a major supplier of settop boxes complete with the Windows operating systems and a major cable programmeramp160 Neither quite worked out cable operators just didn39t want to become a subsidiary of Microsoft or find the industry dominated by Gates as did personal computer manufacturersamp160 Gates did join with NBC to create the MSNBC online and cable news channels but backed off years lateramp160 Comcast paid back Microsoft in spadesamp160Meanwhile IBM39s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a televised chess matchamp160 Cox Cable became the first MSO to offer telephone serviceIn 1998 computer magazine publisher Ziff Davis and Yahoo combined to help launch ZDTV later Tech TV covering tech issues with news demonstrations and moreLarry Page and Sergey Brin amp8211 another pair with Stanford roots amp8211 developed a Web search engine that ranked pages based on how many other pages linked to themamp160 Google was founded in 1998 and overnight became a verbIn 1999 Shawn Fanning only 19 launched a file sharing service for music and began a massive disintermediation of the music businessamp160 From that year through 2011 some 5384 record stores in the US closedamp160 PrimeStar39s cable operators gave up and sold out to DirecTVMass panic was expected as the clock ticked past 115959 pm on December 31stamp160 But the muchballyhooed quotY2Kquot doomsday predicted for computers never appearedamp160 Guess that click from 1999 to 2000 wasn39t quite the equivalent of a meteor fallingamp160 Along with sighs of relief were bemused expressions everywhereIf you39re seeing a trend here or actually a whole lot of trends you39re rightamp160 So what39s the biggestamp160 Digitizationamp160 Consolidation amp160Some near mass extinctions All that yeahamp160 But I39d argue that the biggest trend is the merrygoround as technologies appear disrupt destroy amp8230 and continue to change the worldamp160 The only real difference is in how fast that merrygoround is moving amp160Something we39ll discuss when we start looking at the futureNext week Chapter 11 Part 1 amp8211 The 21st CenturyThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecom management or associated bloggers

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