How the internet
got built

U.S. Robotics

A Chicago company that did for modems what Formula 1 did for ordinary cars: its own HST protocol, which the sysops of electronic bulletin boards bought for speed rather than for compatibility.

What Wikipedia does not have: The company's name is a literary reference, not a technical one

CBBS

The first mass-market computer bulletin board you reached by dialing in on a modem: two friends from a computer club put the software and the homemade hardware together in Chicago in January and February 1978, so they would not…

What Wikipedia does not have: At first the software was called "CE.C," not CBBS.

CompuServe

The first mass-market commercial online service in the United States: in 1969 an insurance company decided to sell the hours its mainframe sat idle in the evenings to private individuals, and out of that grew forums, chat, three…

What Wikipedia does not have: The company's first president was not Jeff Wilkins but John Goltz.

Usenet

A worldwide network of newsgroups running on top of ordinary telephone modems and the Unix protocol UUCP: thousands of independent computers exchanged text messages by topic on their own, with no single company, server, or owner.

What Wikipedia does not have: The name "Usenet" is a pun on a pun.

Hayes Microcomputer Products

An Atlanta company that invented the Smartmodem and the AT command set, which became the language every modem in the world spoke for decades.

What Wikipedia does not have: The Micromodem 100 was a three-in-one single board.

Minitel

A French state network that from the early 1980s handed households a free terminal in place of the paper phone book and then grew thousands of paid services on top of it, from chat lines to banks, all billed straight to the…

What Wikipedia does not have: At the end of 1984 the PTT proposed keeping a history of the last pages visited and met a rebuff so sharp that around 3,000 terminals were returned in protest

FidoNet

A worldwide network of electronic bulletin boards of the 1980s and 1990s with no single company, no money, and no servers of its own: thousands of independent operators bought their own modems, called each other at night for the…

What Wikipedia does not have: The former USSR outlived the network's world peak by five years and for a while made up more than half of the whole network.

AOL

America Online

The world's largest dial-up internet provider of the 1990s: boxes of floppy disks and CDs in every mailbox in America, the 'You've got mail' voice, chats and IM (ICQ, AIM).

What Wikipedia does not have: AOL capitalized the cost of its floppy disks as an asset instead of writing it off at once

The WELL

Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link

A paid text-based online community launched in 1985 in Sausalito by two people from the Whole Earth movement, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant.

What Wikipedia does not have: Gibson's term "cyberspace" was first applied to the real world in a post on the WELL

Prodigy

Prodigy was a closed online service with advertising on the screen and a flat rate, started jointly by IBM, Sears, and CBS in 1984 and launched in 1988–1990.

What Wikipedia does not have: Trintex had a prehistory back in the early 1980s:

UUNET

The first commercial internet provider in the United States: it grew out of Rick Adams's nonprofit service for the Usenet community (1987) into a company with an IPO (1995), which in 1996 was absorbed by MFS Communications, while…

What Wikipedia does not have: Microsoft was not merely a customer but a co-owner.

IRC

Internet Relay Chat

A chat system that a student in Oulu, Finland wrote in 1988 as an upgrade for the chat program on a student BBS, and that accidentally became the world's first open real-time network: the Gulf War, the coup in Moscow,…

What Wikipedia does not have: OuluBox, the BBS predecessor of IRC, was a rarity for 1988

Archie

The world's first program that searched for files across the whole internet on its own: in 1990 a student at McGill University in Montreal wrote a script that went through anonymous FTP archives around the world and compiled a…

What Wikipedia does not have: Emtage did not work alongside Deutsch as an equal but reported to him.

Relcom

A Soviet computer network put together in 1989–1990 by programmers of the Demos cooperative together with staff of the Kurchatov Institute, at first simply to exchange mail with the outside world.

What Wikipedia does not have:

Gopher

Gopher was a system of text menus for finding and retrieving documents on the internet, built in 1991 by a team of programmers at the University of Minnesota who went around a bureaucratic university committee.

What Wikipedia does not have: The name Gopher is a triple pun taken from RFC 1436 itself

WAIS

Wide Area Information Servers

A system for full-text search across documents on the internet before the web appeared: it was built in 1991 by Brewster Kahle and Harry Morris at Thinking Machines together with Apple, Dow Jones, and KPMG.

What Wikipedia does not have: WAIS Inc. made Ross Perot's presidential campaign its first truly profitable client.

Blockbuster

A video rental chain: in 2004 it had more than 4,500 company-owned stores and revenue of $6.1 billion.

What Wikipedia does not have: Blockbuster's 10-Ks for 2000 and 2001 contain neither the word "Netflix" nor the word "Enron."

Netscape

Mosaic → Mosaic Communications → Netscape Communications

The company survived on its own for less than five years, but it was the one that turned the internet from an instrument for scientists into a product for ordinary people: Netscape Navigator, a free browser grown out of the…

What Wikipedia does not have: Netscape pointedly took not a single line of code from the university Mosaic into the new browser, and that decision was made before the decision to found the company.

Yahoo!

Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web

An internet directory that two Stanford graduate students assembled by hand as a hobby in a university trailer: lists of favorite sites sorted by topic, anything to avoid writing their dissertations.

What Wikipedia does not have: The first specialized category in the directory's history was created personally by Jerry Yang, in one evening, off one letter.

Amazon

An online bookstore run out of a house in Bellevue that nearly kept the name Cadabra.

What Wikipedia does not have: Accounts payable five times the inventory.

Craigslist

A free classifieds site (housing, jobs, stuff, personals) that grew out of one engineer's personal email list about events in San Francisco.

What Wikipedia does not have: The 1997 refusal to run advertising was one man's arithmetic, not a declaration of principle.

eBay

AuctionWeb

In 1995 Pierre Omidyar launched an auctions section on his personal site as an experiment: could the internet support an honest market between strangers.

What Wikipedia does not have: The buyer of the first item kept quiet for 20 years.

GeoCities

A free home-page service that began as a web host with webcams on a Hollywood street corner and in Beverly Hills, and grew into the third most visited site on the web (per CNNMoney, December 1998): anyone at all got a free piece…

What Wikipedia does not have: The company did not remember the date of its own launch.

Match.com

The first genuinely mass online dating service (1995).

What Wikipedia does not have: The access fee was introduced not against the strategy of attracting women but as part of it.

Booking.com

An online hotel booking service that a Dutch university graduate, Geert-Jan Bruinsma, launched in the summer of 1996 with two servers under his desk and money from 18 friends, copying the idea from the American Hilton.com.

What Wikipedia does not have: The affiliate network was born of weakness.

Hotmail

The first mass-market free web email service: a mailbox that opened in any browser, with no internet provider of your own.

What Wikipedia does not have: The term "viral marketing" was coined by the company's own investors, not by journalists after the fact.

ICQ

Mirabilis

The first mass-market internet messenger: it showed which of your friends were online right now and gave every user a permanent number (UIN).

What Wikipedia does not have: By the time of the sale to AOL, Mirabilis did not have a single dollar of revenue, and that was a deliberate strategy.

Netflix

Netflix began as a DVD-by-mail rental site in California (1998), switched in 1999 to a subscription with no late fees, and by 2002 had gone public with half a million subscribers.

What Wikipedia does not have: The subscription came after per-disc rental, not in its place from the very start.

Priceline.com

An American site where the buyer named their own price for a plane ticket or a hotel, and the seller decided whether to take it.

What Wikipedia does not have: The huge 1999 loss was an accounting one.

Blogger

Pyra Labs

A tool for publishing web pages instantly, grown out of a side internal tool at a company that was building something else entirely: Pyra, a web-based task and project manager.

What Wikipedia does not have: The deal that saved Blogger was agreed over dinner at a sushi bar.

Encarta

Encarta was Microsoft's encyclopedia on CD-ROM: it came out in 1993 at $395, quickly fell in price to $99, and shipped bundled with computers, thereby speeding up the decline of the print Britannica, which had begun even before…

What Wikipedia does not have: Britannica's decline began before Encarta.

MP3.com

A California site where independent musicians uploaded songs for free and listeners downloaded them.

What Wikipedia does not have: The main site lived on advertising, not on music.

Google

Two Stanford graduate students built link-based search as an academic project and at first sold it to other companies' portals.

What Wikipedia does not have: The founders' 1998 paper warned explicitly against the very model on which Google later grew rich.

NetSuite

NetSuite was a California company that from 1998 sold small businesses accounting, record-keeping, and CRM not in a box but by subscription through the browser.

What Wikipedia does not have: Ellison was not only the owner but also a lender secured by all the assets.

Overture Services

GoTo.com

A Pasadena company that from 1998 sold places in search results at auction: a bid per keyword, payment only per click.

What Wikipedia does not have: The patent was filed a year after the launch and fifteen months after the announcement.

Boo.com

Boo.com was a London online fashion store that in November 1999 opened in 18 countries at once, with a heavy website and a virtual shop assistant.

What Wikipedia does not have: The main purchase of what was left of the business cost less than $1 million.

Napster

A program for sharing MP3s free, written by a freshman at Northeastern University: with no advertising and no revenue it gathered millions of users, but the labels' lawsuits and court rulings stopped the file sharing in July…

What Wikipedia does not have: Napster sold itself as a community.

PayPal

Confinity → X.com → PayPal

An online payment service that ran on email, grown out of a company that had tried to sell encryption for the Palm Pilot handheld.

What Wikipedia does not have: The "Pay with PayPal" button was invented not by the company but by an eBay seller.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a company that in 1999 in San Francisco began selling software for sales departments not in a box but as a subscription through the browser, under the slogan \"No Software.\" By its IPO in 2004 it had about 9,800…

What Wikipedia does not have: Cash flow arrived before profit.

Zappos

An online shoe store launched in San Francisco in 1999.

What Wikipedia does not have: The first version of the model was a middleman store with no warehouse and no contract with manufacturers:

Kazaa

Kazaa was a free program for sharing files between users' computers, launched in 2001.

What Wikipedia does not have: Kazaa's own money was never disclosed anywhere, but it is visible through its partners.

Wikipedia

A free encyclopedia written by volunteers.

What Wikipedia does not have: By his own account, Sanger heard the wiki idea over dinner on January 2, 2001, and eight days later wrote to the mailing list, while Wales, according to Sanger, expected objections.

Skype

A program for free calls over the internet, launched in 2003 by the creators of the file-sharing network Kazaa.

What Wikipedia does not have: The network's core did not belong to Skype.