Bram Cohen (BitTorrent)

Bram Cohen
Bram Cohen

In 2001 an American computer programmer, named Bram Cohen, began his work on a protocol and a program, which would change the entertainment industry and the interchange of information on the Web. This peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol was named BitTorrent, as well as the first file-sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent.

Bram Cohen was born in 1975 in New York in a Jewish family (a teacher and computer scientist) and grew up in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where his father taught him the basics of computer coding at age 6. In first grade, he flummoxed friends with comparisons of the Commodore 64 vs. the Timex Sinclair personal computers and was actively programming by age 10. Cohen graduated from Stuyvesant High School and later attended for 2 years State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1995 he decided to drop out of college, bored out of his mind, he said, to work for several dot-com companies throughout the mid to late 1990s, the last being MojoNation, an ambitious but ill-fated project.

MojoNation allowed people to break up confidential files into encrypted chunks and distribute those pieces on computers also running the software. If someone wanted to download a copy of this encrypted file, he would have to download it simultaneously from many computers. Cohen found this concept as perfect for a file-sharing program and protocol since programs like the popular then KaZaA take a long time to download a large file because the file is (usually) coming from one source.

That’s why Cohen designed BitTorrent to be able to download files from many different sources, thus speeding up the download time, especially for users with faster download, than upload speeds, which is the case with the vast majority of users. Thus, the more popular a file is, the faster a user will be able to download it, since many people will be downloading it at the same time, and these people will also be uploading the data to other users.

In April 2001, Cohen quit MojoNation and began work on BitTorrent. He wrote the first BitTorrent client implementation in Python language, and several other programs have since implemented the protocol.

BitTorrent gained fame for its ability to share large music and movie files online quickly. Cohen himself has claimed he has never violated copyright law using his software and initially he designed it for the community at etree.org, a site that shares only music by artists who expressly allow the practice. It however didn’t take long for the software to take hold with illegal music and movie swapping.

So how exactly BitTorrent works?

BitTorrent is a protocol that offloads some of the file-tracking work to a central server (called a tracker). Another basic rule is that it uses a principle called tit-for-tat, which means that in order to receive files, you have to give them. This solves the problem of leeching, which was one of developer Bram Cohen’s primary goals. With BitTorrent, the more files you share with others, the faster your downloads are. And as was already mentioned, to make better use of available network bandwidth (the pipeline for data transmission), BitTorrent downloads different pieces of the file you want simultaneously from multiple computers.

How BitTorrent works?
How BitTorrent works?

To download a file with BitTorrent, you have to open a Web page and click on a link for the file you want. BitTorrent client software communicates with a tracker to find other computers running BitTorrent, that have the complete file (so-called seed computers) and those with a portion of the file (peers that are usually in the process of downloading the file).

The tracker identifies the swarm, which is the connected computers that have all of or a portion of the file and are in the process of sending or receiving it.

The tracker helps the client software trade pieces of the file you want with other computers in the swarm. Your BitTorrent client receives multiple pieces of the file simultaneously.

If you continue to run the BitTorrent client software after your download is complete, others can receive .torrent files from your computer and your future download rates improve because you are ranked higher in the tit-for-tat system.

By 2004, Cohen formed BitTorrent, Inc., with his brother Ross Cohen and business partner Ashwin Navin. The company still exists as Rainberry, Inc., but in 2018 it was acquired by cryptocurrency startup TRON, and Bram Cohen left.

Soon P2P network BitTorrent became extremely popular. According to some estimations, in 2004 its traffic represented from 20 to 35% of all traffic on the Internet, and 170 million people used the protocol every month. Around 2008 BitTorrent traffic began to decline, but in the late 2010s was once again on the rise, something many observers attribute to the growing number of streaming services now available.

Due to his principle of contacting many (up to 300-500 servers per second), BitTorrent leads to an interesting network issue. Routers that use NAT (Network address translation), must maintain tables of source and destination IP addresses and ports. Typical home routers are limited to about 2000 table entries while some more expensive routers have larger table capacities. As BitTorrent frequently contacts many servers per second, it rapidly fills the NAT tables, causing home routers to lock up.

Another “copyright-related” issue is that, as the BitTorrent protocol provides no way to index torrent files, a comparatively small number of websites have hosted a large majority of torrents, many linking to copyrighted material, rendering those sites especially vulnerable to lawsuits.

There has been much controversy over the use of BitTorrent trackers. BitTorrent metafiles themselves do not store copyrighted data. Whether the publishers of BitTorrent metafiles violate copyrights by linking to copyrighted material is controversial. Various jurisdictions have pursued legal action against websites that host BitTorrent trackers. High-profile examples include the closing of the trackers Suprnova.org, Torrentspy, LokiTorrent, Demonoid, Mininova, and OiNK.cd. The Pirate Bay torrent website was noted for the “legal” section of its website in which letters and replies on the subject of alleged copyright infringements are publicly displayed. In 2006 the Pirate Bay’s servers in Sweden were raided by Swedish police on allegations of copyright infringement, the tracker however was up and running again three days later.

Shawn Fanning (Napster)

Shawn Fanning
Shawn Fanning

Shawn Fanning was born on 22 November 1980, in Brockton, Massachusetts. He worked summers at his uncle’s (John Fanning) Internet company, called Chess.net. During this work, wanting to create a more straightforward method of finding music than by searching IRC or Lycos, he spent months writing the code for Napster, a program that could provide an easy way to download music, using an anonymous P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing service.

After graduating from Harwich High School in 1998, Shawn enrolled at Boston’s Northeastern University. Still, he rarely attended class and spent Christmas break working at the Hull, Massachusetts chess.net office with his uncle John, pushing himself to get the Napster system completed. In January 1999, Shawn drops out of Northeastern University after the first semester, to finish writing the software.

The service, named Napster after Fanning’s hairstyle-based nickname, was launched in June 1999 and worked till July 2001, before being shut down by court order.

Shawn’s uncle ran all aspects of the company’s operations for a period from their office. The final agreement gave Shawn 30% control of the company, with the rest going to his uncle.

Napster was the first of the massively popular P2P file distribution systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer, since it used central servers, in order to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between client machines. Actually, there were already networks that facilitated the distribution of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, but Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a user-friendly interface.

The result was a system, whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download. Napster made it relatively easy for music enthusiasts to download copies of songs that were otherwise difficult to obtain, like older songs, unreleased recordings, and songs from concert bootleg recordings. Many users felt justified in downloading digital copies of recordings they had already purchased in other formats, like LP and cassette tape, before the compact disc emerged as the dominant format for music recordings.

In 2000, Fanning and Napster were featured on the covers of two of the most popular magazines—Newsweek and Time (see the nearby image).

Napster’s facilitation of the transfer of copyrighted material (songs) raised the ire of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which almost immediately (in December 1999), filed a lawsuit against it. In April 2000, the rock band Metallica also sues Napster for copyright infringement. The service would only get bigger as the trials, meant to shut down Napster, also gave it a great deal of publicity. Soon millions of users, many of them college students, flocked to it.

An injunction was issued in March 2001 ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network. In July 2001, Napster shut down its entire network in order to comply with the injunction. In September 2001, the case was partially settled, as Napster agreed to pay music creators and copyright owners a $26 million settlement for past, unauthorized uses of music, as well as an advance against future licensing royalties of $10 million. In order to pay those fees, Napster attempted to convert their free service to a subscription system. Thus traffic to Napster was reduced.

Although the original service was shut down, it paved the way for decentralized peer-to-peer file-distribution programs, which have been much harder to control.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google)

The name “Google” originated from a misspelling of “googol”, which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin

In January 1996, exactly two years from the moment, when two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University (Jerry Yang and David Filo) started their work on the project, which will become the now ubiquitous web portal Yahoo, two other graduates at Stanford—Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Stanford computer science graduate students, working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library), began collaborating on a research project, which will evolve to the world-renowned web portal Google.

Sergey Brin, was born on 21 August 1973 as Сергей Михайлович Брин in Moscow, Soviet Union, to a Russian Jewish family (the mathematicians Михаил Израилевич Брин (born 1948) and Евгения Валентиновна Брин (b. 1949)), which moved to the USA in 1979. In 1990 Brin enrolled in the University of Maryland, to study computer science and mathematics, where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1993 and began his graduate study in Computer Science at Stanford University on a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Lawrence “Larry” Page, was born in 1973 in East Lansing, Michigan, in a Jewish family of computer science professors at Michigan State University. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and a Masters’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

In 1995, searching for a dissertation theme, Page considered (among other things) exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, and understanding its link structure as a huge graph. His supervisor Terry Winograd encouraged him to pick this idea (which Page later recalled as the best advice I ever got) and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).

In his research project, nicknamed BackRub, Page was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student, who Page met in 1995. Page’s web crawler began exploring the web in March 1996, setting out from Page’s own Stanford home page as its only starting point. To convert the backlink data that it gathered into a measure of importance for a given web page, Brin and Page developed the PageRank algorithm.

Analyzing BackRub’s output, which for a given URL, consisted of a list of backlinks ranked by importance, it occurred to them that a search engine based on PageRank would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). This was not an original invention, as a small search engine called Rankdex was already exploring a similar strategy.

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums boxes, running Linux. The primary database is kept on a Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk storage.

As the search engine grew in popularity at Stanford, installed on the Stanford website (domain name google.stanford.edu), both Page and Brin decided that BackRub needed a new name. Page turned to fellow graduate student Sean Anderson for help, and they discussed several possible new names. After several days of brainstorming in their graduate student office, Anderson verbally suggested the word googleplex (a googolplex is the number one followed by a googol zeros. The term googol was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner).

Page and Brin liked googleplex, but Page suggested they shorten it to googol. When Anderson searched to see if the domain name was available, he misspelled googol as google which was available. Because googol was unavailable and Page thought google had an Internet ring to it like Yahoo! or Amazon, Page registered their search engine as google.com on the Internet domain name registry.

In contrast to other busy-looking pages with flashy banners and blinking lights, Brin and Page decided to keep google.com clean and simple to allow for faster searches. This appeared to be a wise decision.

Though the Stanford Digital Library funded them $10000 which Brin and Page used to build and string together inexpensive PCs, they were still perpetually short on money. As google.com’s popularity continued to grow at Stanford, they were faced with a decision: finish their graduate work or create a business around their growing search engine. Reluctant to leave their studies, Page and Brin offered to sell their search engine for one million USD first to the AltaVista search portal. To their disappointment, however, AltaVista passed, as did Yahoo, Excite, and other search engines.

They were rejected in part because many search engines wanted people to spend more time and money on their Web site, while Google was designed to give people fast answers to their questions by quickly sending them to relevant Web pages. Then Yahoo’s cofounder David Filo advised them to take a leave of absence from Stanford to start their own business. Filo initially encouraged Brin and Page not only because they were friends, but also because Yahoo was interested in cultivating a field of healthy search engines they could use.

The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997. Page and Brin formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on 4 September 1998 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California.

Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an “advertising funded search engines” model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. However, they soon changed their minds about allowing simple text ads.

By the end of 1998, Google had an index of about 60 million pages. The home page was still marked as “BETA”, but some observers already argued that Google’s search results were better than those of competitors like Hotbot or Excite.com, and praised it for being more technologically innovative than the overloaded portal sites (like Yahoo!, Excite.com, Lycos, Netscape’s Netcenter, AOL.com and MSN.com), which at that time, during the growing dot-com bubble, were seen as “the future of the Web”, especially by stock market investors.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. The ads were text-based to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bids and click-throughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This was not a pioneering approach, as this model of selling keyword advertising was already used by Goto.com. While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.

Now Google runs over one million servers in data centers around the world, and processes over one billion search requests and twenty petabytes of user-generated data every single day. Google’s rapid growth since its incorporation has triggered a chain of products, acquisitions, and partnerships beyond the company’s core product—the search engine. Google offers online productivity software, such as its Gmail e-mail software, and social networking tools, including Orkut and, more recently, Google Buzz. Google’s products extend to the desktop as well, with applications such as the web browser Google Chrome, the Picasa photo organization and editing software, and the Google Talk instant messaging application. In 2006 Google created the Android mobile phone operating system (based on Linux), used on a number of GSM smartphones.

Pierre Omidyar (eBay)

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Morad Omidyar

On 4 September 1995, the 28-year-old software developer and entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar launched the famous eBay auction site as an experiment in how a level playing field would affect the efficiency of a marketplace. As of 2022, eBay is still one of the world’s leading marketplace and eCommerce platforms, with yearly revenue of over $10 billion.

Pierre Morad Omidyar was born on 21 June 1967 in Paris, France, to Iranian immigrant parents (Cyrus Omidyar, a physician, and Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, a linguist), both of whom had been sent by his grandparents to attend university there. In 1973 Pierre moved to the US (Maryland), where his father Cyrus began his residency at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center as a surgeon. Omidyar graduated with a degree in computer science from Tufts University in 1988. Shortly after, he went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he helped write the vector-based drawing application MacDraw.

In 1991 Pierre started his career as an entrepreneur, co-founding Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that was later rebranded as an e-commerce company and renamed eShop.

On a long holiday weekend sometime in the middle of 1995, Pierre sat down in his living room in San Jose, California, to write the original computer code for what eventually became an internet superbrand—the auction site eBay. Initially, he wanted to call his site echobay, but the name had already been registered. Thus the word eBay was made up on the fly by Omidyar.

The site www.ebay.com was launched on Labor Day, 1995, under the more prosaic title of Auction Web, and was hosted on a site, Omidyar had created for information on the Ebola virus. The site began with the listing of a single broken laser pointer. Though Pierre had intended the listing to be a test more than a serious offer to sell at auction, he was shocked when soon the item sold for $14.83.

Auction Web was later renamed eBay. The service, meant to be a marketplace for the sale of goods and services for individuals, was free at first but started charging in order to cover internet service provider costs and soon started making a profit.

What is the profitable Business Model of eBay?

It was built on the idea of an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner, where sellers are permitted to list items for sale, buyers to bid on items of interest, and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, and each type of auction has its own category.

eBay has both streamlined and globalized traditional person-to-person trading, which has traditionally been conducted through such forms as garage sales, collectibles shows, flea markets, and more, with their web interface. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.

Browsing and bidding on auctions are free of charge, but sellers are charged two kinds of charges:
• When an item is listed on eBay, a nonrefundable Insertion Fee is charged, which ranges between 30 cents and $3.30, depending on the seller’s opening bid on the item.
• A fee is charged for additional listing options to promote the item, such as highlighted or bold listing.
• A Final Value (final sale price) fee is charged at the end of the seller’s auction. This fee generally ranges from 1.25% to 5% of the final sale price.

eBay notifies the buyer and seller via e-mail at the end of the auction if a bid exceeds the seller’s minimum price, and the seller and buyer finish the transaction independently of eBay. The binding contract of the auction is between the winning bidder and the seller only.

This appeared to be an excellent business model.

By 1996 the company was large enough to require the skills of a Stanford MBA in Jeffrey Skoll, who came aboard an already profitable ship. Meg Whitman, a Harvard graduate, soon followed as president and CEO, along with a strong business team under whose leadership eBay grew rapidly, branching out from collectibles into nearly every type of market. eBay’s vision for success transitioned from one of commerce—buying and selling things—to one of connecting people around the world together.

With the exponential growth and strong branding, eBay thrived, eclipsing many of the other upstart auction sites that dotted the dot-com bubble. By the time eBay had gone public in 1998, both Omidyar and Skoll were billionaires. In 2021, Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 24th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $21.8 billion. In 2009 the net worth of the company reached S$5.5 Billion. Over one million people worldwide now rely on their eBay sales as part of their income. As of 2022, with 185 million active buyers and 19 million sellers worldwide, eBay is one of the world’s leading marketplace and eCommerce platforms.

Omidyar served as chairman of eBay from 1998 to 2015. In 2020, he stepped down from the board of the company as part of a broader overhaul. He has, however, stayed active in the company, retaining the title of director emeritus.

Jeff Bezos (Amazon)

Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey (Jeff) Preston Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos, the founder of the famous Amazon.com, was born on 12 January 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when his mother, Jackie, was still in her teens. Her marriage to his father lasted a little more than a year. She remarried when Bezos was five and Jeffrey took the name of his stepfather, Miguel Bezos. If you want to know more about how much money Jeff Bezos make in a second, click here at lizzardco.com for more information.

In 1971 the family moved to Houston, Texas, where Jeffrey attended an elementary school, showing intense and varied scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and maintain his privacy and converted his parents’ garage into a laboratory for his science projects.

Later the family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended a high school. While in high school, he attended the student science training program at the University of Florida, which helped him receive a Silver Knight Award in 1982. He entered Princeton University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. Then Bezos worked for Bankers Trust, becoming a vice president. Later on, he also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co.

In 1994, Bezos decided to take part in the Internet gold rush, developing the idea of selling books to a mass audience through the Internet. There is an apocryphal legend, that Bezos decided to found Amazon after making a cross-country drive with his wife from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way and setting up the original company in his garage.

Bezos decided to name the company Amazon after the world’s largest river and reserved the domain name Amazon.com. The company was incorporated in the state of Washington, beginning service in July 1995. The initial Web site was text heavy and gray, it wasn’t pretty and didn’t have even listing book publication dates and other key information. But that didn’t concern Madrona Venture Group’s Tom Alberg, who invested $100000 in Amazon in 1995.

By the fourth month in business, the company was selling more than 100 books a day.

Bezos succeeded to created more than a bookstore, he created an online community. The site was revolutionary early on for allowing average consumers to create online product reviews. It not only drew people who wanted to buy books, but also those who wanted to research them before buying.

The company began as an online bookstore, but gradually incorporated a number of products and services into its shopping model, either through development or acquisition.

In 1997, Amazon added music CDs and movie videos to the Web site, which many considered to be a wise move designed to complement the company’s expansive book collection. Soon Amazon added five more product categories—toys, electronics, software, video games, and home improvement.

Time magazine with Jeff Bezos
Time magazine with Jeff Bezos

In 1999, Time magazine (with the nearby image shown on the cover) named Bezos Person of the Year and recognized the company’s success in popularizing online shopping.

Amazon’s initial business plan was unusual: the company did not expect a profit for four to five years and the strategy was effective. In 1996, its first full fiscal year in business, Amazon generated $15.7 million in sales, a figure that would increase by 800 percent the following year. The company successfully survived the dot-com bubble and remains profitable now. Revenues increased thanks to product diversification and an international presence: $3.9 billion in 2002, $5.3 billion in 2003, $6.9 billion in 2004, $8.5 billion in 2005, and $10.7 billion in 2006. In May 1997 Amazon.com issued its initial public offering of stock.

In 2007 Amazon launched the remarkable series of e-book readers Kindle. In 2011 Amazon entered the tablet business with Kindle Fire.

The site amazon.com attracted over 900 million visitors annually by 2011. In 2012 the company has over 56000 employees. Amazon’s annual revenue for 2021 was $469.822B, a 21.7% increase from 2020, and the number of employees is 1468000.

In 2004, Bezos founded a human space flight startup company called Blue Origin. He is known for his attention to business process details, trying to know about everything from contract minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press releases.

David Filo and Jerry Yang (Yahoo )

David Filo and Jerry Yang
David Filo and Jerry Yang

At the beginning of 1994 two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University—Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang (born 6 November 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan) and David Robert Filo (born 20 April 1966, in Wisconsin) were looking for a single place to find useful Web sites and for a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. As they didn’t manage to find such a tool, they decided to create their own. Thus the now ubiquitous web portal and global brand Yahoo! began as a student hobby and evolved into a site, that has changed how people communicate with each other and find and access information.

Filo and Yang started the realization of his project in a campus trailer in February 1994, and before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David’s lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories. When the categories became too full, they developed subcategories, thus the core concept behind Yahoo was born.

The Web site started out as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. Filo and Yang decided to select the name Yahoo because they liked the general definition of the word (which comes from Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, where a Yahoo is a legendary being): rude, unsophisticated, uncouth. Later the name Yahoo was popularized as an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.

The Yahoo! first resided on Yang’s student workstation, Akebono, (URL was akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo), while the software was lodged on Filo’s computer, Konishiki, both named after legendary sumo wrestlers.

To their surprise, Jerry and David soon found they were not alone in wanting a single place to find useful Web sites. Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Word spread from friends to what quickly became a significant, loyal audience throughout the closely-knit Internet community. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

The Yahoo! domain was created on 18 January 1995. Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo! was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, looking for financing. They eventually came across Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle, and Cisco Systems. Sequoia Capital agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

Like many other web search engines, Yahoo started as a web directory, but soon diversified into a web portal and a search engine.

Realizing their new company had the potential to grow quickly, the founders began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell’s WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. After securing a second round of funding in the Fall of 1995 and an initial public offering, Yahoo raised $33.8 million in April 1996, with a total of 49 employees.

Here you can see the earliest known Yahoo! website from October 1996.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet communications, commerce, and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to more than 350 million individuals each month worldwide. It provides internet communication services (such as Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Mail), social networking services and user-generated content (such as My Web, Yahoo! Personals, Yahoo! 360°, Delicious, Flickr, and Yahoo! Buzz), media contents and news (such as Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games), etc. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Yahoo! has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

In June 2017, Verizon Communications Inc. completed the acquisition of Yahoo. David Filo and Jerry Yang became billionaires a long time ago. As of 2022, the net worth of Filo is 3.2 billion USD, while Yang’s net worth is only 2.6 billion USD.

Matthew Gray (Wanderer)

Matthew Gray
Matthew Gray

The brilliant idea of the World Wide Web was devised in the spring of 1989 at the head of Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN, but it didn’t gain any widespread popular use until the remarkable NCSA Mosaic web browser was introduced at the beginning of 1993.

In the spring of 1993, just months after the release of Mosaic, Matthew Gray, who studied physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was one of the three members of the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) who set up the site www.mit.edu, decided to write a program, called World Wide Web Wanderer, to systematically traverse the Web and collect sites. Wanderer was first functional in the spring of 1993 and became the first automated Web agent (spider or web crawler). The Wanderer certainly did not reach every site on the Web, but it was run with a consistent methodology, hopefully yielding consistent data for the growth of the Web.

Matthew was initially motivated primarily to discover new sites, as the Web was still a relatively small place (in early 1993 the total number of websites all over the world was about 100, and in June of 1995, even with the phenomenal growth of the Internet, the number of Web servers increased to a point where one in every 270 machines on the Internet is a Web server). As the Web started to grow rapidly after 1993, the focus quickly changed to charting the growth of the Web. The first report, compiled using the data collected by Wanderer (see the table below) covers the period from June 1993 to June 1995.

Results Summary
Month/Year Nr. of Web sites % of .com sites Hosts per Web server
06/93 130 1.5 13000
12/93 623 4.6 3475
06/94 2738 13.5 1095
12/94 10022 18.3 451
06/95 23500 31.3 270
01/96 100000 50.0 94

Wanderer was written using the Perl language and while crawling the Web, it generated an index called Wandex—the first web database. Initially, the Wanderer counted only Web servers, but shortly after its introduction, it started to capture URLs as it went along.

Matthew Gray’s Wanderer created quite a controversy at the time, partially because early versions of the program ran rampant through the Web and caused a noticeable network performance degradation. This degradation occurred because it would access the same page hundreds of times a day. The Wanderer soon amended its ways, but the controversy over whether spiders were good or bad for the Internet remained for some time.

Wanderer certainly was not the Internet’s first search engine, it was the Archie of Alan Emtage, but Wanderer was the first web robot, and, with its index Wandex, clearly had the potential to become the first general-purpose Web search engine, years before Yahoo and Google. Mathew Gray however does not make this claim and he always stated that this was not its purpose. Anyway, Wanderer inspired a number of programmers to follow up on the idea of web robots.

From 2001 to 2006, Matthew Gray was CTO of Newbury Networks, Inc., a provider of wireless location technology. As of 2022, he has spent more than 15 years as a software engineer and engineering director at Google.

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina (NCSA Mosaic)

Eric Bina (left) and Marc Andreessen (right)
Eric Bina (left) and Marc Andreessen (right)

NCSA Mosaic of Marc Andreessen (born 9 July 1971) and Eric Bina (born 25 October 1964) was neither the first web browser (the first was the WorldWideWeb of Berners-Lee) nor the first graphical web browser (it was preceded by the lesser-known Erwise and ViolaWWW), but it was the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port, and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened up the Web to the general public.

In 1992 Marc Andreesen was a student in Computer Science and a part-time assistant at the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the University of Illinois. His position at NCSA allowed him to become quite familiar with the Internet and World Wide Web, which began to take off.

NCSA Mosaic beta version
NCSA Mosaic beta version

There were several web browsers available then, but they were for Unix machines which were rather expensive. This meant that the Web was mostly used by academics and engineers who had access to such machines. The user interfaces of all available browsers also tended to be not very user-friendly, which also hindered the spread of the WWW. That’s why Marc decided to develop a browser that was easier to use and more graphically rich.

In the same 1992, Andreesen recruited his colleague from NCSA and the University of Illinois, Eric Bina (Master in Computer Science from the University of Illinois from 1988), to help with his project. The two worked tirelessly. Bina remembers that they would work three to four days straight, then crash for about a day. They called their new browser Mosaic. It was much more sophisticated graphically than other browsers of the time. Like other browsers, it was designed to display HTML documents, but new formatting tags like center were included.

The most important feature was the inclusion of the image tag which allowed the inclusion of images on web pages. Earlier browsers allowed the viewing of pictures, but only as separate files. NCSA Mosaic made it possible for images and text to appear on the same page. It also featured a graphical interface with clickable buttons that let users navigate easily and controls that let users scroll through text with ease. Another innovative feature was the new form of hyperlinks. In earlier browsers, hypertext links had reference numbers that the user typed in to navigate to the linked document. The new hyperlinks allowed the user to simply click on a link to retrieve a document.

NCSA Mosaic for Mac
NCSA Mosaic for Mac

NCSA Mosaic was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher.

In January 1993, Mosaic was posted for free download on NCSA’s servers and became immediately popular, more than 5000 copies were being downloaded each month. Within weeks tens of thousands of people had downloaded the program. The original version was for Unix, but Andreesen and Bina quickly put together a team to develop PC and Mac versions, which were released in the late spring of the same year. With Mosaic now available for more popular platforms, its popularity soon skyrocketed. More users meant a bigger Web audience. The bigger audiences spurred the creation of new content, which in turn further increased the audience on the Web and so on. As the number of users on the Web increased, the browser of choice was Mosaic so its distribution increased accordingly.

NCSA Mosaic for Windows
NCSA Mosaic for Windows

By December 1993, Mosaic’s growth was so great that it made the front page of the New York Times business section. The article concluded that Mosaic was perhaps “an application program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch”. NCSA administrators were quoted in the article, but there was no mention of either Andreesen or Bina. Marc realized that when he was through with his studies NCSA would take over Mosaic for themselves. So when he graduated in December 1993, he left and moved to Silicon Valley in California.

Later Andreesen and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, incorporated Mosaic Communications Corporation and developed the famous Netscape browser and server products.

NCSA Mosaic won multiple technology awards, including being named 1993 Product of the Year by InfoWorld magazine and 1994 Technology of the Year by Industry Week magazine.

NCSA discontinued support for Mosaic in 1997, shifting its focus to other research and development projects.

Alan Emtage (Archie)

There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realize it’s a tool that we use in this world.
Tim Berners-Lee

Alan Emtage
Alan Emtage

The Internet’s first search engine—the Archie system, was created in 1989 by a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, Alan Emtage. Emtage (born 27 November 1964, in Barbados) conceived the first version of Archie, which was actually a pre-Web internet search engine for locating material in public FTP archives.

A native of Barbados, Alan attended high school at Harrison College from 1975 to 1983 (and in 1981 became the owner of a Sinclair ZX81 with 1K of memory), where he graduated at the top of his class, winning the Barbados Scholarship. Alan was always crazy about computers and while a student at Harrison College, he tossed around a number of other career choices including meteorology and organic chemistry, but chose computer science.

In 1983 Alan entered McGill University in Montreal, Canada, to study for a Bachelor’s degree in computer science. In 1987 he continued his study for a Master’s degree, which he obtained in 1991. He was part of the team that brought the first Internet link to eastern Canada (and only the second link in the country) in 1986.

In 1989 while a student and working as a systems administrator for the School of Computer Science, Alan conceived and implemented the original version of the Archie search engine, the world’s first Internet search engine and the start of a line that leads directly to today’s giants Yahoo and Google. (The name Archie stands for “archive” without the “v”, not the kid from the comics.)

Working as a systems administrator, Alan was responsible for locating software for the students and staff of the faculty. The necessity for searching for information became the mother of invention. He decided to develop a set of programs, that would go out and look through the repositories of software (public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites) and build basically an index of the available software, a searchable database of filenames. One thing led to another and word got out that he had an index available and people started writing in and asking if we could search the index on their behalf.

As a result, rather than doing it himself, Alan allowed them to do it themselves so we wrote software that would allow them to come in and search the index themselves. That was the beginning.

It seems that the administration of the university was the last to find out about what Alan had done. As Alan remembered: “We had no permission from the school to provide this service; and as a matter of fact, the head of our department found out about it for the first time by going to a conference. Somebody went up to him and said they really wanted to congratulate him for providing this service and he graciously smiled, said ‘You’re welcome’ and went back to McGill and said ‘What the hell is all of this? I have no idea what they’re talking about’… That was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It was largely being in the right place at the right time with the right idea. There were other people who had similar ideas and were working on similar projects, I just happened to get there first.”

Internet’s first search engine
Archie of Alan Emtage, the Internet’s first search engine

Archie is considered the original search engine and a lot of the techniques that Emtage and other people who worked with him on Archie came up with are basically the same techniques that Google, Yahoo!, and all the other search engines use.

Later Alan and his colleagues developed various versions that allowed them to split up the service so that it would be available at other universities rather than taxing the facility at McGill.

In 1992, Emtage along with the computer scientist Peter Deutsch formed Bunyip Information Systems—the world’s first company expressly founded for and dedicated to providing Internet information services with a licensed commercial version of the Archie search engine used by millions of people worldwide.

Emtage was a founding member of the Internet Society and went on to create and chair several Working Groups at the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standard-setting body for the Internet. Working with other pioneers such as Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, Mark McCahill (creator of Gopher), and Jon Postel, Emtage co-chaired the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) Working Group which created and codified the standard for Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).

Emtage is currently the Chief Technical Officer at Mediapolis, Inc., a web engineering company in New York City. Besides computers, traveling and photography are his passions. He has been sky-diving in Mexico, hand-gliding in Brazil, diving in Fiji, hot air ballooning in Egypt, and white-water rafting in the Arctic Circle.

Jarkko Oikarinen (Internet Relay Chat)

If it is not logic, it’s magic. If it is not magic, it is female logic.
Jarkko Oikarinen

Jarkko Oikarinen
Jarkko Oikarinen

It was already mentioned on this site, that the first chat program in the world (EMISARI) was designed in 1971 by Murray Turoff. EMISARI however was used mainly for government and educational purposes and never became popular. The program, which gave birth to the modern extremely popular chat movement was the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) of Jarkko “WiZ” Oikarinen.

During the summer of 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen (born 16 August 1967, in Kuusamo, Finland), a 2nd-year student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Oulu, Finland, was working at the University Department of Information Processing Science, where he administered the department’s Sun-3 Unix server “tolsun.oulu.fi”, running on a public access BBS (bulletin board system) called OuluBox.

The work with server administration didn’t take all his time, so Jarkko started doing a communication program, which was meant to make OuluBox a little more usable. Partly inspired by Jyrki Kuoppala’s “rmsg” program for sending messages to people on other machines, and partly by Bitnet Relay Chat, Oikarinen decided to improve the existing multi-user chat program on OuluBox called MultiUser Talk (MUT) (which had a bad habit of not working properly), itself based on the basic talk program then available on Unix computers. He called the resulting program IRC (for Internet Relay Chat), and first deployed it at the end of August 1988.

When IRC started occasionally having more than 10 users (the first IRC server was the above-mentioned tolsun.oulu.fi), Jarkko asked some friends at the Tampere University of Technology and Helsinki University of Technology to start running IRC servers to distribute the load. Some other universities soon followed. Markku Järvinen made the IRC client program more usable by including support for Emacs editor commands, and before long IRC was in use across Finland on the Finnish network FUNET, and then on the Scandinavian network NORDUNET.

In 1989 Oikarinen managed to get an account on the legendary machine “ai.ai.mit.edu” at the MIT university, from which he recruited the first IRC users outside Scandinavia and arranged to start the first outside-Scandinavian IRC server. Soon followed two other IRC servers, at the University of Denver and at Oregon State University, “orion.cair.du.edu” and “jacobcs.cs.orst.edu” respectively. The administrators emailed Jarkko and obtained connections to the Finnish IRC network to create transatlantic connections, and the number of IRC servers began to grow quickly across both North America and Europe.

IRC became well known to the general public around the world in 1991, when its use skyrocketed as a lot of users logged on to get up-to-date information on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, through a functional IRC link into the country that stayed operational for a week after radio and television broadcasts were cut off.

The Internet Relay Chat Protocol was defined in May 1993, in RFC 1459 by Jarkko Oikarinen and Darren Reed. It was mainly described as a protocol for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfers via Direct Client-to-Client.

As of the end of 2009, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time, with hundreds of thousands of channels, operating on a total of some 1500 servers worldwide. As of 2016, a new standardization effort is under way under a working group called IRCv3, which focuses on more advanced client features like instant notifications, better history support, and improved security. As of June 2021, there are 481 different IRC networks known to be operating,