1993: Mosaic

Mosaic was released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. What Windows 3.1 was to the microcomputer, Mosaic was to the World Wide Web. Together, they acted to standardize the Internet, allowing all the 3.1 installations (and other compatible machines) to talk to each other with reasonable levels of predictability and stability.

Metcalfe’s law is not automatic. As networks grow, the potential to do more for less rises, but this benefit remains theoretical until the network has passed through a phase of greater formalization. As a systems scientist might put it, the standardization of the core goes hand in hand with differentiation of the edge. Each advances the other. No better illustration of this point exists than the two episodes of standardization above, which kicked off the immense flowering of Internet content known as the World Wide Web.

As the Web appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, people became convinced that something revolutionary was under way. CIOs everywhere arrived at work to find a new item in their job description: responsibility for getting their company a website, beginning with registering the company’s name as a URL, and weighing the delicate ethics of swiping those of their more laggard competitors.

1994: Spam and More

Connectivity, we learned, has a dark side.

In 1994 two lawyers began advertising their services by posting to Usenet groups en masse. They were widely reviled (their ISP revoked their access), though in all fairness, someone was going to walk through that door sooner or later. “Green Card” spam (the villains were immigration lawyers) was the opening gun of the age of malware for profit, which eventually evolved into hundreds of flavors of spyware, extortion schemes, Trojan horses, key loggers, zombies, phishers, bots and so on. Today the average CIO probably spends more time and energy worrying about blocking the bad that networks can do than extending the good.

1995: Convergence

The Israeli company VocalTec announced Internet telephony and RealAudio, streaming audio. These two announcements marked the beginning of the great convergence carnival.

The VocalTec rollout presaged the struggle that VoIP was about to catalyze between telecommunications and IT. The core idea is that someday soon the network is going to eat it all up—voice, music, video, news, data. Everything will be connected to everything else. It’s inevitable, but that doesn’t make dealing with the business, legal, political and technological issues all this raises any easier.