EPISODE 40

Bosco called me into his office.

“What do you know about the Internet?” he asked.  It was the fall of 1995, so this was kind of a loaded question.  Not all that many people were really using it then.

“Not much,” I replied.  “I’ve been on a few news groups and a couple of bulletin boards.  It seems like a waste of time.”

Apparently, I have always been terrible at making meaningful predictions.  You must understand that in 1988, I had picked Dukakis over Bush.  I had also used my baseball prediction system to make a disastrous bet on the Mets to beat the Dodgers in the NLCS that same year.  As you may recall, that series went 7 games with LA winning and going on to beat the Oakland A’s 4-1 in the World Series.  Les Bernstein would eventually parlay my methodical theory of baseball prognostication into a profitable enterprise by betting against it. My record in analyzing the field of commerce had been equally spotty.  I sold the lousy 200 shares of stock I owned in Apple Computer for $14 per just prior to the crash in ’87.  I try very hard not to think about that last one too often.  As it would turn out, my judgment on the Internet would be the least savvy made by any semi-conscious individual during the 1990s.  Fortunately, I worked for a guy who had far better business instincts than I.  He also had far greater vision and significantly more courage.

“You’re the third or fourth person to tell me that in the past week, Michael.  But it doesn’t matter.  I have a new job for you.  Starting next week, I want you to learn everything there is to know about the Internet because we’re going to be running our business there.”

“But where will the money come from?”

“I don’t know yet.  But we’ll find it.”

I gave him a strange look, like a dog owner might give a puppy that has just taken a large dump on the living room carpet.

“You don’t buy it?” he smiled.  “Let me tell you something.  When I was a kid, we used to listen to the radio, just like our parents had all through the Second World War.  But when television came out, my parents didn’t know what in the hell it was for.  Don’t forget, there weren’t a lot of stations and they weren’t even on the air at predictable times.  We used to sit around in the afternoon after school, watching the test pattern, waiting.  We knew that at some point something would come on and we didn’t want to miss it.  Our parents thought we were nuts!  But we understood that something would happen and we had to be a part of it.

“Then, when there were three networks and all of those locals UHF channels, you kids took over the TV.  You knew, without ever being told, that there was always something else on another channel and so you flipped merrily between them all during the commercials.  We told you that you’d hurt your eyes by sitting so close to the tube.  We yelled at you to not flip the stations because we knew that you’d break the TV set.  But we were wrong.  Instinctively, your generation got television in a way that we never could.  You knew what it was for.

“So now we have cable and fuck knows how many networks and stations!  You surf through them like it was nothing and people like me still wonder if maybe, just maybe that still might break the TV set!  But you’ve gotten your own comeuppance!  The personal computer!  The kids going to grammar school right now know what to do with it.  Hell, my granddaughter knew how to turn it on and play her word and number games on the PC before she was two!  It’s intuitive!

“So now we have to figure out the Internet, Michael.  Because sure as hell, if we don’t, we’re going to be left even further behind. You get me?  You might not buy it right now, but everyone is going to be marketing their stuff on the Internet and the people who can figure out how to do it first are going to make a shitload of money.”

When you look back on it, you have to admit that Bosco had been remarkably forward thinking.  At around the time this conversation took place, there were fewer than 40 million people using the Internet, worldwide.  The United States was home to 25 million of those users, so when you consider that there were 260 million people living in the country at that time, less than 10% were on-line.  By 2012, 239 million people in the US were accessing the Internet and almost 100 million were doing so from their smart phones.  Facebook alone would attract more than five times the number of US users than had accessed the Internet just 16 years earlier.  None of this took into account what was happening around the rest of the planet.  By ’12, there were almost 2 billion other users.  China alone had over 400 million.  History sure as hell bore out Bosco’s view of the world. I’m still in awe of his ability to accurately divine the potential for the medium.

But in late 1995, this looked like anything but a sure thing.  The Graphical User Interface (GUI) was the basic technology that eventually helped to drive the popularity of the Internet.  By using icons and images, Xerox created the first system that also utilized windows and menus to open, close and manipulate files in 1973.  It would take 11 more years though before a commercially viable GUI based operating system would be developed for both home and office use.  That was the first generation Apple Macintosh.  I was a big fan of the early Macs and ended up buying a Mac SE in 1988.  Those machines were incredibly expensive at the time.  I recall that the SE retailed for around $4500.  I had a friend who worked with one of the first companies to write software exclusively for the Mac.  She lived in Montpelier and through her I was able to buy my Mac at “developer’s prices”, which meant that I only had to pony up $2500.  That was still a lot of money, but when you realize that I was still running that old Mac when I began to work with Bosco, almost 7 years later, it was a great investment.

At Bosco’s insistence, I brought my Mac into work sometime after the New Year and hooked it up to the dial-up modem that he’d purchased to begin our research into the Internet and the World Wide Web.  For those who never experienced the delights of a 14K connection (and to remind any of you who have blotted the experience from your memories), it could take a very, very long time to load pages on this now antiquated system.  Still, when Bosco and I began to wander quite aimlessly around from Web site to Web site on the Mac, we were struck by the enormous amount of material we found. 

Still, it was almost impossible for us to really take it all in, given how slowly everything moved on our dial-up connection, so we hired a guy named Jeff Glasson who was sort of a mad scientist when it came to computers and the Internet.  Jeff had a home office in Hanover, NH and what we were eventually able to divine was that he had found a way to tap into the data and telephone lines at Dartmouth College and had helped himself to their access.  He’d rigged up his own modem and was able to upload Web pages far faster than we had been able to at Bosco’s office.  He showed us how to use Web Crawler, an early search engine that was his personal favorite.  We’d plod around, looking at stuff, but I had to admit that I still really didn’t see where all of this was going, even if Bosco and Jeff appeared to be very excited about all of it.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 9th.

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