1990: Archie

In the early years of the Internet, the connection between users and resources was quite informal. If A wanted a specific kind of file or program, he asked around, hoping that someone had seen something like that somewhere and remembered the address. If B wrote a cool program that she thought others might like, she tried to find ways to spread the news This was not ideal, but in the early days of the Net everybody knew everybody else (practically), so the problem was not acute.

But by 1990 the community was expanding rapidly and finding stuff was getting harder. That year three McGill students, Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter J. Deutsch, attacked the problem with a program they called Archie (from “archive”). Archie worked by sending a message from your local system to each entry on a list of servers, asking for the public files available on that server. It would then combine the responses into a single master list on your local system, which you would then interrogate with “Find” commands. Archie was crude, but it illustrated two big points about networking.

First, connectivity is self-extending; it creates entirely new objects, which can themselves become subject to connectivity. And if you connect A, B and C, you can create AB, BC, AC, ABC and so on. These newly created objects might be more useful than A or B or C. The master list generated by Archie was the first step in the evolution of the Internet from a network of networks to a library of resources.

Second, on a network, digital resources can be reused, over and over, forever, at next to no additional cost. Put a search engine on that network and you allow this efficiency to scale without limit. This fact would turn out to have huge economic consequences.

1991: Linux

Linus Torvalds parties at the University of Helsinki.

A student at the University of Helsinki named Linus Torvalds released a half-finished operating system, hoping that a few hands might be willing to help out. To his surprise, he found hundreds and then thousands of programmers willing and able to work on the program, which he named Linux. As it turned out, a large network is perfect for supporting projects that are themselves networks, projects made up of pieces that can be worked on in isolation and then combined...over the network. These types of enterprises are enormously efficient, leveraging small investments in time and energy by many people into highly useful (and usually free) tools. Linux was one of the first of these massively parallel collaborations, but soon enough they would sprout up everywhere, from cartography (“mashups”) to encyclopedias. And the Web itself.

1992: Windows

A very young Bill Gates holds a Windows 1.0 floppy disk.

In 1992 Microsoft finally got a functional version of its latest operating system out the door. Windows 3.1 advanced the art in two ways; it was the first version to carry a useful graphics interface, allowing inputs and outputs to be represented and altered by manipulating icons. And more important, Microsoft’s immense marketing power meant it went on desktops everywhere in the world, becoming a de facto standard.