The Microcosm Web viewer served as a hypertext replacement for the standard Web browser. Where browsers like Mosaic—and later Netscape and Internet Explorer—were read-only, Microcosm users could, using their Web viewer, select text from anywhere on the Web to use as the starting point or destination of their own hypertext threads, linking to other Web pages, multimedia documents, and their personal Microcosm linkbases. This all seemed to Wendy to be the most natural thing in the world. Many in the hypertext community balked at the Web’s brutal simplicity, but Wendy corrected for it, layering her robust—and proprietary—system on top of the more skeletal world of interlinked Web pages. “I saw the Web through a Microcosm viewer,” she explains. “Of course, Tim saw it completely the other way around.”
Like many hypertext researchers, Wendy had every reason to assume that her system could happily coexist with the Web. After all, Microcosm worked better. It didn’t suffer from dead links, and where the Web connected Web pages only to one another, Microcosm connected word-processor documents, spreadsheets, videos, images, and CAD files, like a micro-Internet interlinking everything on the desktop. “You could follow links to many different destinations,” she says. “You could have one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many links. And you could reverse it all.” Because Microcosm links were stored in a database rather than embedded into documents, the system could generate new connections on the fly, tailoring itself to individual users’ browsing habits. “I was still thinking of the Web as one of the systems we would use,” Wendy says.
What she didn’t anticipate is the network effect. Because the Web was built on top of the Internet, and because it was free, early adopters quickly gave way to more mainstream users, and the more people got on the Web, the more interesting it became to their friends and family, and so on, very quickly making it dominant. Meanwhile, the Microcosm team released new stopgaps. They streamlined the system’s key concepts—its generic links and linkbases—into a Web browser add-on called the Distributed Link Service, which made any browser into a kind of Microcosm Lite, applying generic linking principles to the interchange between client and server. Effectively, this allowed Web users to interrogate material on the Web regardless of whether an explicit link was there. “By enhancing the Web with Microcosm’s link services, WWW readers would be freed from the tyranny of the button,” Wendy’s team wrote in a 1994 paper.
The tyranny of the button, however, prevailed. People navigating the Web for the first time, few of whom had any experience with the kind of hypertext people like Wendy and Cathy created, were perfectly happy to click buttons, roaming with no clear destination along the Web’s labyrinthine paths. Such curiosity-driven dérives were, in fact, part of the Web’s early appeal. When people hit a dead end, they went back and tried a different link. The maze was a mess, but it was worth running.
Had Wendy’s team at Southampton concentrated its energies differently, it’s very possible that Microcosm could have been the first graphical Web browser to really take off. But that would have entailed making the software as free to use as the Web itself, and Wendy’s team had its sights on commercializing their efforts. In 1994, they established Multicosm, Ltd.: if one microcosm is a window on the world, their company would produce many. The timing couldn’t have been worse. “People used to say,” she remembers, and laughs, “‘I think what you’re doing is wonderful, but this Web thing is free, so we’re gonna try that first.’”
Fortunately, Wendy never abandoned university life. Running an expanding department at Southampton, she remained in contact with the growing Web development community, and after working closely with Tim Berners-Lee to develop the Microcosm Web viewer and the Distributed Link Service, she became a sustained presence on the early Web scene. In 1994, she helped to organize the first Web conference but still wasn’t confident that the Web was the end-all solution. In a 1997 lecture at Southampton, she minced no words. “The Web has shown us that global hypertext is possible, but it has also shown us that it is easier to put rubbish on the Net than anything of real and lasting value,” she said. How right she was.
There is a coda to this story, however. Microcosm’s ideas may not have been implemented on a global scale in their day, but their prescience is undeniable. The way Wendy’s system created links dynamically, based on the context of the information being linked, was a form of what we now call metadata. “We are now, twenty-seven years after the Web, living in a world that is driven by data,” Wendy reminds me. How and why that data are linked is becoming increasingly important, especially as we teach machines to interpret connections for us—in order for artificial intelligence to understand the Web, it will need an additional layer of machine-readable information on top of our documents, a kind of meta-Web that proponents call the Semantic Web. While humans might understand connections intuitively, and are willing to ignore when links rot or lead nowhere, computers require more consistent information about the source, the destination, and the meaning of every link. “That was the core of Microcosm,” Wendy says. When she began to participate in building the Semantic Web in the 2000s, it was “so exciting because I could see all my original research ideas coming to life in the Web world. We still couldn’t do all the things we could do in Microcosm in the ’90s, but we could see how effective our linkbases were.”
In the end, however, the system is immaterial to her. It’s the connections she’s after: the magnificent complexity of human society and thought, all influencing one another in the unfolding of history. “There’s lots of different ways that we could have implemented a global hypertext system,” Wendy says. “The Web won—for now. But it feels like this is an experiment that has involved the entire world. Have you read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”
PART THREE
The Early True Believers
Chapter Eleven
MISS OUTER BORO
The Internet exists at the confluence of culture, code, and infrastructure. As the technology historian Janet Abbate writes, “Communications media often seem to dematerialize technology, presenting themselves to the user as systems that transmit ideas rather than electrons.” This makes the boundary between users and producers, and between software and hardware, so porous as to be effectively permeable. As the story of hypertext shows, technology alone isn’t enough to change the world—it has to be implemented in an accessible way and adopted by a community of users who feel enough ownership over it to invent new applications far beyond the imagination of its architects. To make successful links, in short, we need things worth linking.
Even as it eclipsed the more complex hypertext systems preceding it, the Web didn’t transform the world on its own. A generation of smart, creative, nonacademic, and nontechnical users had to come along first to forge the connections that would make up the vastly interdependent network we love—or love to hate—today. To fill the container with content, these users would need to be intensely familiar with both computers and culture. They’d need to know how to build and connect. They’d need to understand how something that organizes information can also inspire thought. Fortunately, there were plenty of people like that on Echo. One of them called herself Miss Outer Boro.
Marisa Bowe was a teenager in the 1970s when her dad brought home a wood-paneled box with a square plasma gas screen that glowed faintly orange. He installed it in the basement of the family house in suburban Minneapolis, near Lake Minnetonka, where they would speedboat in the summer. It wasn’t a personal computer—it would be several decades before those turned up in suburban basements nationwide. Rather, it was a terminal, mute until the home phone, coupled into a cradle fit for the purpose, dialed the network of supercomputers that brought it to life.
Marisa’s father was a PR executive at the Control Data Corporation, an old-school mainframe computer company. In the 1960s, they produced the fastest supercomputers in the world. But by the time Marisa was a teenager, her father’s company was placing a risky bet on computer-
assisted education, wagering that teachers might someday be replaced with electronic learning systems running specialized software. They called this Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations, or PLATO. The software was built on their mainframes.
The PLATO model was to offer distributed low-cost education, with a number of centrally hosted teaching programs accessed remotely by students at glowing orange terminals like the one in Marisa’s basement. Although PLATO terminals would eventually be installed in universities and schools from Illinois to Cape Town, very few people would ever have one at home. Not that Marisa took advantage of her unique situation to learn anything. PLATO offered lessons in everything from arithmetic to Hebrew, but she used it to talk to boys.
“I didn’t have any interest in programming,” she tells me, “but I discovered there was live chat. So I started up a flirtation with my father’s boss’s son. You would sort of be able to see who was online—there were very few people, ever, online. And here I was, a teenage girl, and they were all boys, but I was shy in real life. I think people asked me what I was wearing; it didn’t get dirty or anything like that, but it was very flirty, and it was really fun.”
Wherever PLATO terminals were installed, students were chatting, posting messages about “science fiction, women’s rights, football, the defense budget, rock ’n’ roll.” PLATO had a primitive version of e-mail called Personal Notes, public “Group Notes” that served as bulletin boards, and one-on-one chat, called TERMType. The PLATO community piloted all the tropes that would become common in online communities—including men impersonating women—and like the Community Memory terminals emerging simultaneously in the Bay Area, it had its own wonky grassroots counterculture.
Marisa was, in PLATO slang, a zbrat: a kid using her father’s log-in to mingle on the nascent network. She doesn’t remember ever seeing another female zbrat, but she made her share of online friends. Beyond the flirtation with the boss’s son, she chatted with college students in Boulder, Colorado, and in Champaign-Urbana, at the University of Illinois, where the PLATO software was being developed.
PLATO users shared recipes, gave each other love advice, used emoticons, and played fantasy role-playing games. For a suburban kid in the Midwest, all of this was totally unexpected, as though a household appliance had suddenly become a window into another dimension. PLATO altered the course of Marisa’s life. When most people her age still thought of computers as monolithic calculators in university basements, she understood that once connected, they became social machines. It would take a decade for the rest of the world to catch up—and by the time it did, Marisa had a head start.
As Marisa grew older, she couldn’t quite shake her fascination with words on screens. Trying LSD for the first time, she laid on her back in the yard, watching her “mother-of-pearl” cigarette smoke coil beneath the stars, which seemed to her “like a TV set, moving around and forming words which I couldn’t read.” When she moved to New York in 1985—during the “Donald and Ivana Trump, merger-and-acquisition, junk-bond boom-time”—she discovered BBS culture, and The WELL. “Oh my God,” she thought. “This is just like PLATO but with interesting people!” She was eager to relive her adolescent flirtations, but The WELL didn’t do it for her.
On today’s Web, geographical distance doesn’t count for much, beyond tonal differences—e-mails from abroad arrive at seemingly strange hours, and East Coast late-night Twitter dead-ends into the West Coast morning feed. But in the dial-up days, a significant technological and cultural boundary divided the East and West Coast Internet. These digital Rockies presented Marisa with two insurmountable passes: dialing into The WELL was a long-distance phone call, with the accompanying costs. And once she dialed in, there would be Deadheads. “I’m allergic to the Grateful Dead,” she confessed in a 2011 interview.
Thankfully, another tech-savvy New Yorker named Stacy Horn had just had an identical crisis. After Marisa Bowe gave up on The WELL, she discovered Echo—a local call—where Jerry Garcia’s name was verboten. The way she tells the story, it was love at first keystroke: “I logged on to Echo and four years later I looked up.” The diverse community and the alternative it presented from traditional media was seductive and novel. She loved “the idea that you could converse and get opinions from people who weren’t, like, the twelve guys from Harvard who ran the New Yorker, Harper’s, and the Atlantic.”
Marisa lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so she gave herself the username Miss Outer Boro, as in “borough.” As MOB, she posted constantly, to the point where her real-life friends started to worry. “They felt sorry for me,” she tells me now, with a gleeful cackle, Skyping from her Williamsburg apartment on a hot summer day almost exactly twenty years later. “They felt it was such a losery thing to do.” Little did they know that Miss Outer Boro had a cult following: Marisa’s natural instinct for online conversation had made her an instant Echo favorite. Where she was shy in real life, she was bold and irrepressible online. “She makes me spit out my coffee on my keyboard more than any other person on Echo,” Stacy Horn wrote.
Stacy appreciated Marisa’s presence on Echo so much that she begged her to host the Culture conference. Marisa knew how to draw worthwhile conversation out of people. Although getting a good thread going online could be like pulling teeth, she had the constitution for it: a combination of patience and magnetism, with a quick wit and fast-girl charisma that popped from the screen. “She knows she’s smart, powerful and beautiful,” wrote Stacy, “part tart”—those formative years cyberflirting on PLATO had served her well—“part total queen.” She became the conference manager, the host of hosts, and the object of plenty of one-sided ardor. “Half of Echo was dying of love for her for the longest time.” On Echo, Marisa was the ultimate arbiter of cool. The writer Clay Shirky called her “the Henry James of the Alley.” In a sense, she was one of the earliest online “influencers,” so popular that she sometimes felt uncomfortable turning up for Echo’s in-person events. “It was like a mini-celebrity experience,” she recalls.
But although she was a big deal on the Internet, her real life wasn’t always so glamorous. She spent a lot of time holed up in her apartment, nose to a screen of endless text, its white words on blue scrolling like clouds through the sky. To pay rent, she took temp word-processing jobs. It hadn’t yet occurred to her that she might be able to combine the two.
THE BIGGEST BITCH IN SILICON ALLEY
In 1994, a new personality tore across Echo. Her real name was Jaime Levy, but in a nihilistic nod to Kurt Cobain’s suicide, she posted online as “Kurt’s Brains.” An inveterate Nirvana fan, she looked the part: her peroxide-blonde hair was usually gelled into upright whorls, and she was rarely photographed without a skateboard, a hand-rolled cigarette, and an oversized flannel shirt.
Jaime grew up a latchkey kid in the San Fernando Valley, freely roaming the haze-tinted sprawl. While her brother stayed indoors to mess around with the family Commodore 64, she preferred the punk rock scene, then at its cultural apex in late 1970s Los Angeles. Computers didn’t appeal to her; the command-line language her brother was always banging onto his keyboard didn’t look creative at all. In her first year of film school in San Francisco, a boyfriend showed her how to make animations on an Amiga, the successor to her brother’s Commodore 64. It clicked: computers are punk. She started adding computer graphics to her experimental films.
By twenty-one she was already too big for her britches in San Francisco. “The video art scene was overrun with people who didn’t care about money,” she tells me now, at fifty. “I knew that I needed to be viable. I didn’t want to be a starving artist.” She turned in her thesis film, an effects-laden skate video, and bought a plane ticket to New York City, having decided that NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) was for her. Some of her favorite filmmakers—Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee—had graduated from NYU, and it seemed like an interesting time to be in New York. There was video art being screened
at The Kitchen, and this interesting band, Sonic Youth, was playing gigs in the city. In typical style, she marched into the Tisch Building at NYU without an appointment.
The move was part bombast, part desperation: she didn’t think she could have gotten an interview if she tried. She wandered around the fourth floor until someone led her to the office of Red Burns, the program’s venerable chair, a bristly redheaded matriarch some called the Godmother of Silicon Alley. Jaime was intimidated, but she had only two days in the city, so she told Burns she wanted to tell stories using computers. Later, she’d joke that everyone at ITP was there “on a Citibank scholarship to design ATM machines.” Burns took a shine to Jaime, the kid with a skateboard and an Amiga whom she may have seen as a swift kick to the program. “I think she saw the opportunity to attract younger people who wanted to push technology in new ways for art, for entertainment, for publishing, for everything.” Burns gave Jaime a full ride.
Jaime spent her years at NYU experimenting with interactive media. For her master’s thesis, she combined the do-it-yourself ethos of punk with the emerging possibilities of desktop publishing, producing an electronic magazine, Cyber Rag, on floppy disk. With color-printed labels Krazy Glued onto each disk, Cyber Rag looked the part of a punk rock fanzine. Loaded onto a consumer Mac, Jaime’s stories came to life with images pilfered from the Village Voice, the Whole Earth Review, Mondo 2000, and Newsweek collaged together on-screen as though they’d been xeroxed by hand. Cyber Rag was programmed in Apple HyperCard, with graphics drawn in MacPaint. Along with her animations, she added edgy interactive games (in one, you chase Manuel Noriega around Panama), hacker how-tos, and catty musings about hippies, sneaking into computer trade shows, and cyberspace. Before the first graphical Web browsers brought hypertext to the masses, Jaime was publishing disks she thought would replace print magazines. They were rewriteable, after all. “If you hate it, take the files off, throw ’em away, put your own files on it,” she told a reporter in 1993.
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