Founders at Work.pdf

Brewster Kahle 269
So this was still being done within Thinking Machines, but I found that
Thinking Machines wasn’t going to go and build some of the pieces needed to
make this Internet publishing world work. We coined the term “Internet publishing”
and tried to say, “OK, this should happen.” Apple would do their piece
and Peat Marwick would do their piece, but nobody would go and do the central
set of tools, the software needed. So I said, “OK, well, I’ll do that. And start
a company to do that.”
There was a decision to try and figure out where it should be. Should it be
in Boston? Should it be in Silicon Valley? Should it be someplace completely
else? So I went around to the smart people I knew and said, “Where should we
put this company? What I’m really trying to do is build an industry.” Not build
a company, build an industry, so there would be all of these pieces that would
make network publishing come about. Some people thought it was a little crazy
to think about starting an industry, but it seemed like it made sense to me.
The best piece of advice that I got was from Bill Dunn, one of my mentors.
He said, “Go someplace where people don’t think you’re crazy.” Which sounds
like a pretty simple thing to say, but it actually turned out to be a very wise piece
of advice. Boston, especially back in 1990/91, was in recession and having
trouble. California was also in recession, but in California there were dreamers.
There were people who wanted to think about new and different things and
wouldn’t think we were crazy to try to build this thing.
So I decided to start the company out here and start with a contract—it was
a bootstrap—doing the information system for the Perot campaign for the presidential
campaign of 1992. They could really use an information system that
leveraged some network. Of course, they didn’t know what network, but we
did. So we could build this Internet using modems and leased lines and all sorts
of things to be able to build this up. The Perot campaign collapsed, but we still
had enough money to make it through most of the first year to go and get our
products built.
One of the interesting ideas out of WAIS was its use of freeware and shareware.
This was a new idea, more or less. There had been some examples of
freeware like GNU, but there were also mixed models: Kermit, where people
basically would make source code available on the Net and sell something
related. We gave away the client version, the equivalent of a Web browser.
It was a WAIS browser and a server, so people could go and build their own
system.
During that free period, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of servers
were set up. We got up to about 10,000 servers—all this is before Gopher and
the Web came out—based on free software. Once people got really hooked on
the free software, they wanted upgrades, or they wanted services. So we were
there as a company to sell it to them. We made the free version, and there was
a for-pay version. It was the same idea that we’ve seen now with Netscape.
There’s a whole set of companies that also tried to give something away and sell
something else.