Founders at Work.pdf

318 Founders at Work
It was pretty hard to write popular applications that way though, because
whatever you built would only work on one kind of computer system. You were
building a system for HP UNIX or Apple Macintosh or maybe Windows, and
each particular brand of computer could talk to each other over the network
and let you edit a document together or let you play a game together. But
because there was no standard operating system and no real standard programming
environment, if you built it for the Macintosh, it wouldn’t work for
Windows, or vice versa.
Then the Web came along in the early ’90s and, as soon as I saw it, I said,
“OK, this is how all computer applications are going to be built in the future. I
don’t need to write all this custom code to the operating system anymore. I’ll
just build something that is specified on the server side, and the user experience
will be rendered by the browser. It will have a simpler user interface, but
it will be guaranteed to work on any kind of computer, and it will survive
changes in operating systems.” It pretty much has; I have plenty of web pages
that I built in 1993, and here in 2006 people can still grab them, even though
there have been a lot of changes in computer operating systems and software.
I told the professors at MIT that all I wanted to work on was Internet applications
and they told me I was crazy—that there was no future in it. I decided
that, since they weren’t going to even talk to me about what I wanted to do, I’d
leave MIT for a summer.
Livingston: You were a graduate student?
Greenspun: I was a grad student at MIT and was doing a combination of
research and being a teaching assistant. So I went away for the summer—a
driving trip to Alaska. I wrote a book chapter every week, but really it was a
letter to my friends and family so that I would get interesting email back from
them. I’d email it to my friends and family to spur their thinking and let them
email back to me.
When I got back, I decided that I would stick these emails into HTML and
scan the photos that I had given as a face-to-face slideshow and put them on a
website so that my friends in California could see them.
The book was called Travels with Samantha. Samantha was my old laptop
computer (I was in between dogs at the time). This book was pretty popular,
but most of the questions that I got about it had to do with photography. I
thought, “I’ll write up a couple of short tutorials on photography and then
I won’t have to keep emailing answers to these questions one by one. But photography
is open-ended; if you answer three questions, you raise five more. So
I thought I’d build a question and answer forum on my server, and when someone
asked me a question and I answered, it would be a public exchange, and
then the next person who came to my site would see that public exchange, and
if they had a similar question, they wouldn’t post it again.
Pretty quickly I found that one reader would ask a question and then a second
reader would answer it. I wasn’t having to do anything at all. Things took on
a life of their own and voila: an online community of photographers was born. I
began to write more and more software to make this community easy to