1995

by Campbell, W. Joseph

  40. André P. Tramble, “Meeting the Challenge,” in Atonement: The Million Man March, ed. Kim Martin Sadler (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1996), 39.

  41. Neil James Bullock, “No Ordinary Day,” in Sadler, ed., Atonement, 27.

  42. See “Minister Farrakhan Challenges Black Men,” CNN, October 17, 1995, retrieved January 30, 2014, www-cgi.cnn.com/US/9510/megamarch/10–16/transcript/.

  43. Ibid.

  44. See Joel Best, Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 136.

  45. See Sari Horwitz and Hamil R. Harris, “Farrakhan Threatens to Sue Park Police over March Count,” Washington Post, October 18, 1995. The Post report quoted a march official named Abdul Alim Muhammad as saying that the Park Service count evoked “plantation days when we would pick 100 bales of cotton and they would give us credit for 40 bales.”

  46. For a discussion of the controversy, see Best, Damned Lies and Statistics, 132–37. As the dispute wore on, the Park Service director, Roger G. Kennedy, was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “Nobody really knows the number.” Michael Janofsky, “Federal Parks Chief Calls ‘Million Man’ Count Low,” New York Times, October 21, 1995.

  47. Quoted in Leef Smith and Wendy Melillo, “If It’s Crowd Size You Want, Park Service Says Count It Out,” Washington Post, October 13, 1996.

  48. See David Segal, “With Windows 95’s Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype,” Washington Post, August 24, 1995.

  49. It was, USA Today observed, “the most talked-about product launch since New Coke’s introduction in 1985.” Dottie Enrico, “Microsoft’s Marketing Coup,” USA Today, July 31, 1995.

  50. Segal, “With Windows 95’s Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype.”

  51. Ibid.

  52. Richard W. Stevenson, “Software Makes Strange Bedfellows in Britain,” New York Times, August 24, 1995. Stevenson reported that, across the bottom of the Times of London front page that day, an advertisement read: “Windows 95. So Good Even The Times Is Complimentary.”

  53. See Lee Gomes, “And Gates Said . . . ‘Let There Be Hype,’” San Jose Mercury News, August 24, 1995.

  54. The Empire State Building was bathed in red, yellow, and green—three of Microsoft’s four colors. The fourth was blue, but “technical problems” limited the display to three colors, the New York Times reported. Carey Goldberg, “Midnight Sales Frenzy Ushers in Windows 95,” New York Times, August 24, 1995.

  55. John Carlin, “Hard Sell for the Software ‘Revolution,’” Independent (London), August 24, 1995.

  56. “Software Hype and Hopes,” New York Times, July 31, 1995.

  57. See Dean Takahashi, “Apple Tries to Be Heard above the Din,” San Jose Mercury News, August 24, 1995. The counter-campaign, Takahashi noted, “reflects the defensive posture of Apple, which still commands a cult-like following among its users, and how much it has fallen in the computer world. As recently as the early 1990s, the company claimed a market share of more than 10 percent in the computer market.”

  58. See Steve Lohr, “Windows of Opportunity for Microsoft,” New York Times, July 31, 1995.

  59. Goldberg, “Midnight Sales Frenzy Ushers in Windows 95.”

  60. Segal, “With Windows 95’s Debut, Microsoft Scales Heights of Hype.” Nearly one million copies of Windows 95 were sold in the five days following its release, according to Computer Reseller News, citing data compiled by PC Data. “Early Windows 95 Sales Sizzle,” Computer Reseller News, September 6, 1995.

  61. See Steve Lohr, “It’s Been an Uphill Battle to Sell Windows 95,” New York Times, January 18, 1996. Microsoft “has found that selling information technology as a mass-market, retail product remains an uphill struggle,” Lohr wrote.

  62. See Goldberg, “Midnight Sales Frenzy Ushers in Windows 95.”

  63. See Walter S. Mossberg, “The Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews; Yes, the Newton,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2013. He wrote: “This was the Microsoft operating system that cemented the graphical user interface and the mouse as the way to operate a computer.”

  64. Lohr, “Windows of Opportunity for Microsoft.”

  65. See Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, “Technology in the American Household: Americans Going Online . . . Explosive Growth, Uncertain Destinations” (Washington, D.C.: TMCPP, October 16, 1995), 10.

  66. James K. Glassman, “Brave New Cyberworld,” Washington Post, August 29, 1995. Glassman is perhaps best known as coauthor of Dow 36,000 (New York: Crown Business, 1999).

  67. Quoted in William Brandel, “The Internet Will Be Bigger Than Anyone Imagines,” Computerworld, January 2, 1995, 34. “I don’t think we know what has hit us,” Negroponte was further quoted as saying.

  68. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage, 1996), 229.

  69. Ibid., 148. He also wrote: “The challenge for the next decade is . . . to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages” (92).

  70. Ibid., 210. “Within the next five years,” he wrote, “one of the largest areas of growth in consumer products is likely to be such wearable devices.”

  71. Ibid., 217.

  72. Ibid., 94.

  73. See Min-Jeong Lee and Jonathan Chen, “Now, Flexible Screens: Samsung, LG Work Toward Bendable Smartphones,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2013.

  74. Negroponte, Being Digital, 152.

  75. Ibid., 173. See also Martin Peers and Shalini Ramachandran, “Bye-Bye for Blockbuster,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2013. The article reported the expected closing of most remaining Blockbuster video-rental stores.

  76. Negroponte, Being Digital, 84–85.

  77. Gordon Borrell, “Ready, Fire, Aim,” Editor & Publisher, February 4, 1995, 20TC–21TC.

  78. The term “innovation blindness” has been in circulation since at least 2009. See, for example, Bret Swanson, “Innovation Yin and Yang,” Maximum Entropy (blog), August 20, 2009, accessed February 8, 2014, www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2009/08/innovation-yin-and-yang/.

  79. Quoted in Tony Case, “‘Print Person’ Pontificates,” Editor & Publisher, February 11, 1995, 11. The Editor & Publisher article noted that Roberts’s “views on electronic news transmission follow the widely held opinion of newspaper people that the Internet will never supplant their time-tested medium.”

  80. See Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, “Technology in the American Household.”

  81. See Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, “In Changing News Landscape, Even Television Is Vulnerable” (Washington, D.C.: PRCPP, September 27, 2012), 14.

  82. See Peter H. Lewis, “Big Newspaper to Help Locals on the Internet,” New York Times, April 20, 1995. A ninth newspaper company joined soon after the launch.

  83. Iver Peterson, “New Service Skims 150 Newspapers for Its Users,” New York Times, June 30, 1997.

  84. See I. Jeanne Dugan, “New-Media Meltdown at New Century,” Business Week, March 12, 1998, accessed October 10, 2013, www.businessweek.com/1998/12/b3570103.htm.

  85. Business Week magazine offered a telling epithet for the failed venture, describing New Century as embodying “everything that could go wrong when old-line newspapers converge with new media.” Dugan, “New-Media Meltdown at New Century.”

  86. See, for example, Arthur Charity, Doing Public Journalism (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).

  87. See, for example, Mike Hoyt, “Are You Now, Or Will You Ever Be, a Civic Journalist?” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October 1995, 28.

  88. See Karen Haywood, “Business News,” Associated Press, August 22, 1995, retrieved from LexisNexis database. The network also agreed to pay legal fees that the companies incurred during the dispute.

  89. See “Apology Accepted” (advertisement), New York Times, August 25, 1995.

  90. See, for example, Gary Levin, “Settling Smoke May Carry News Chill,” V
ariety, August 28–September 3, 1995, 34.

  91. See Lawrence K. Grossman, “CBS, 60 Minutes, and the Unseen Interview,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 1996, 44. See also Daniel Rubin, “Exploring How an Expose Went Awry,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 1999.

  92. Quoted in Howard Kurtz, “‘60 Minutes’ Kills Piece on Tobacco Industry,” Washington Post, November 10, 1995.

  93. See Joe Calderone, “What ‘60 Minutes’ Cut,” New York Daily News, November 17, 1995. The Daily News published portions of the transcript of the 60 Minutes interview in which Wigand also accused Brown & Williamson of abandoning plans to develop a safer cigarette.

  94. Quoted in Grossman, “CBS, 60 Minutes, and the Unseen Interview,” 47.

  95. Robin Clark, “Much Ado about O.J.—and Lance and Johnnie and Marcia,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 31, 1995.

  96. Howard Rosenberg, “The Simpson Verdicts: Valuable Lessons of TV in Courtroom,” Los Angeles Times, October 5, 1995, accessed April 26, 2014, http://articles.latimes.com/1195–10–05/news/mn-53644_1_simpson-trial. Rosenberg deplored what he called the “Simpsonizing of TV news,” writing that it “affirm[ed] that people going into the [TV news] business are dumber and dumber, the people directing them are dumber and dumber and, as a consequence, the public is dumber and dumber.” Rosenberg, “The Simpson Verdicts: Television: Could Coverage Sink Lower?” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1995.

  97. Dave Barry, “All the Evidence Is In: 1995 Was Certifiable,” Washington Post, December 31, 1995.

  98. See William Glaberson, “Times Is Criticized for Using Simpson Account from Tabloid,” New York Times, December 23, 1994. See also David Barstow, “King of Newspapers Quotes the Jester,” St. Petersburg Times (Florida), December 23, 1994.

  99. Quoted in David Shaw, “‘The Godzilla of Tabloid Stories,’” Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1995.

  100. Cited in Andrea Sachs, “Mud and the Mainstream,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1995, 34.

  101. Ibid., 34.

  102. “What’s Hot, What’s Not: People, Places and Products That Have Sizzled—Or Fizzled,” San Francisco Examiner, December 31, 1995.

  103. See Leslie Miller, “Tuning In to Brave New Sounds of the Internet,” USA Today, November 1, 1995.

  104. Quoted in ibid.

  1. THE YEAR OF THE INTERNET

  1. Evgeny Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” New York Times, February 5, 2012.

  2. Farhad Manjoo, “Jurassic Web: The Internet of 1996 Is Almost Unrecognizable Compared with What We Have Today,” Slate.com, February 24, 2009, accessed June 23, 2013, www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2009/02/jurassic_web.html.

  3. See John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005), 68. See also Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 13. Levy noted that Page and Brin soon became fast friends at Stanford, “to the point where people thought of them as a set: LarryAndSergey.”

  4. Sam Vincent Meddis, “Net: New and Notable,” USA Today, December 21, 1995.

  5. Steven Levy, “The Year of the Internet,” Newsweek, December 25, 1995/January 1, 1996, 28.

  6. See, for example, David Bank, “Cerf Sees Net’s Commercial Potential,” San Jose Mercury News, January 11, 1995.

  7. Vinton G. Cerf, “Computer Networking: Global Infrastructure for the 21st Century,” Computer Research Association (North Dakota), accessed July 19, 2013, http://homes.cs.washington.edu/∼lazowska/cra/networks.html.

  8. See Jim Ritter, “Inventive Words Are the Talk of 1995,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 29, 1995. The other word of the year selected by the American Dialect Society was “Newt,” a reference to Newt Gingrich, who became speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in January 1995.

  9. A nationwide telephone survey conducted in mid-October 1995 for the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press found that 55 percent of respondents were aware of the Internet, if vaguely. Forty-two percent of respondents said they had never heard of the Internet, or were not sure what the Internet was. Three percent of respondents gave incorrect answers. Data cited here were retrieved from the “Polling the Nations” database. Newspaper articles in 1995 were known to exhort readers “to quit spectating and check out the Net for yourself. . . . All you need is a willingness to learn—and the patience to put up with the inscrutable error messages and unexplained failures that are a central fact of Net life.” See, for example, “Nothing But Net: Quit Stalling, Read This, Get on the Internet,” Washington Post, April 24, 1995.

  10. The Internet Society’s estimated range of users was cited in Peter H. Lewis, “Technology: On the Net,” New York Times, May 29, 1995.

  11. See Josh McHugh, “Mr. Craigslist, Master of the Nerdiverse,” Wired, September 2004, accessed July 18, 2013, www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/craigslist.html.

  12. See “Craig Newmark on Technology and Freedom,” C-SPAN, June 2, 2009, video accessed October 19, 2013, www.c-spanvideo.org/program/CraigN.

  13. See Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 20–21. “The site was not much to look at,” Cohen wrote, adding, “The computer code Omidyar wrote let users do only three things: list items, view items, and place bids. The name he chose was as utilitarian as the site itself: AuctionWeb.” The name “AuctionWeb” was retired in favor of eBay two years later.

  14. “Pierre Omidyar,” Forbes.com, accessed October 19, 2013, www.forbes.com/profile/pierre-omidyar/.

  15. Linda J. Engelman, “Need a Date? Just Pick Up Your Modem,” San Jose Mercury News, August 6, 1995. Engelman also wrote that “cyber-dating” was “a real alternative to singles bars and pathetic pickup lines.”

  16. Its first iteration was “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” See Robert H. Reid, Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future of Business (New York: Wiley, 1997), 242.

  17. Ibid., 41, 69.

  18. Ibid., 103.

  19. See Steve Lohr, “Tickling the Ivy and Tweaking the Javascript: Part Artist, Part Hacker and Full-Time Programmer,” New York Times, September 9, 1996. See also David Flanagan, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th ed. (Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media, 2011), 1–3.

  20. See Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press, “Technology in the American Household: Americans Going Online . . . Explosive Growth, Uncertain Destinations” (Washington, D.C.: TMCPP, October 16, 1995), 10.

  21. See ibid., 22.

  22. In her book about America Online, Kara Swisher described the mid-1990s content offerings of the online service as “moribund.” She wrote: “Like much of the online industry, AOL had come to depend on the major media brand names such as Time Warner, Disney, and others. Their parcels were heavy with regurgitated content from magazines and news services. The level of substance was low.” Swisher, AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times Business, 1998), 116. The major commercial services by 1995 were offering browsers for navigating the Web. But doing so seemed a bit pointless, rather like traveling to Alaska from California by way of New York City, as Stephen Lynch wrote in a column, “Death Watch Begins for Online Services,” Orange County Register (California), October 2, 1995. Lynch also noted: “Almost everything you can find on a commercial service can be found on the Web.”

  23. Levy, “The Year of the Internet,” 21.

  24. Ibid, 27.

  25. See, for example, Rex Weiner, “Internet Upstages Techie TV,” Variety, July 31–August 6, 1995, 1; Matt Roush, “Plugging in to the New Media,” Crain’s Detroit Business, August 7, 1995, 1; and Mary Brandel, “Ready or Not, Companies Are Getting Web’d for Commerce,” Computerworld, April 29, 1996, 19.

  26. Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 11.

  27. Ibid., 36.


  28. Ibid., 184–85.

  29. Ibid., 190.

  30. Ibid., 198.

  31. Ibid., 157.

  32. Quoted in Lory Zottola Dix, “An Interview with Cliff Stoll,” Computerworld, August 14, 1995, 85. Stoll also said in the interview: “I’m concerned that for all of the on-line wonders, there is damned little content on-line. Very little of what I see on-line has any value, other than as juvenile entertainment for adults.”

  33. Clifford Stoll, “The Internet? Bah!” Newsweek, February 27, 1995, 41. “What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you,” Stoll wrote, “is that the Internet is an ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”

  34. Clifford Stoll, comments posted to Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Curmudgeonly Essay of ‘Why the Internet Will Fail’ from 1995,” BoingBoing.net, February 26, 2010, accessed June 22, 2013, http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#comment-229414366.

  35. Bob Metcalfe, “Predicting the Internet’s Catastrophic Collapse and Ghost Sites Galore in 1996,” InfoWorld, December 4, 1995, 61.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Bob Metcalfe, “Will Netscape Eat Its Hat over Claims It Was Too Busy for Web Conference?” InfoWorld, January 8, 1996, 48.

  38. Scott Kirsner, “The Legend of Bob Metcalfe,” Wired, November 1998, accessed June 23, 2013, www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.11/metcalfe.html.

  39. “Sage Who Warned of Net’s Collapse Eats His Words,” Reuters news agency, April 11, 1997, accessed February 3, 2014, www.ibiblio.org/pjones/ils310/msg00259.html. See also “Internet Sage Eats His Words,” Toronto Star, May 8, 1997, and Sandy Reed, “Fulfilling His Promise Columnist Bob Metcalfe Dines on His Own Words,” InfoWorld, April 28, 1997, 75.

  40. Quoted in “Beyond the Ether,” Economist, December 12, 2009, 23.

  41. Reed, “Fulfilling His Promise.”

  42. See Lauren Kirchner, “Salon and Slate in the Way-Back Machine,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 4, 2011, accessed June 23, 2013, www.cjr.org/the_news_frontier/salon_and_slate_in_the_way-bac.php?page=all. Kirchner noted that the Internet of the mid-1990s “was so wide open and undefined that the right language didn’t even exist to talk about it yet.”