The Code

by Margaret O'Mara

  One of the firms that used the Internet in this way was the French conglomerate Schlumberger, where Marty Tenenbaum led a Valley-based AI lab for the better part of the 1980s. Tenenbaum—the guy who’d bought a year’s worth of books before moving out from MIT in the 1960s—saw the growing online traffic, and he became increasingly frustrated at the missed commercial opportunities. “Stuff was going back and forth,” he mused, “and no one was making any money.” Departing Schlumberger after the 1987 stock market crash prompted company-wide consolidation, Tenenbaum finagled an office on the Stanford campus and started thinking hard about how to build a system for electronic commerce.

  Over long walks with colleagues and long runs in the hills, Tenenbaum cooked up his first idea: convert old-fashioned mail-order catalogues into electronic files and send them via e-mail, which by that time had about twenty million users. In 1990, he decamped from Stanford, secured a couple of DARPA grants, and started what became the world’s first e-commerce company, a tiny little outfit called Enterprise Integration Technologies, or EIT. Never mind that sharing such files over dial-up would be a glacial process as long as commercial Internet transactions remained illegal. Tenenbaum believed the NSF would budge from its noncommercial stance eventually.10

  Significantly, the innovation that changed everything was not a product of DARPA, NSF, or one of their American academic grantees. It emerged from outside the U.S. altogether, from the mind of a British scientist employed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva.

  Nonetheless, American hacker-and-homebrew culture provided soul and inspiration for Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted information to be organized, but he also wanted it to flow freely and transparently. Working on a NeXT workstation (just like any self-respecting member of his scientific tribe), Berners-Lee and his CERN team created many of the building blocks of the online future. Hypertext markup language, or HTML, provided a common tongue for all the information now riding atop the Internet, both textual and visual. Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) was a platform on which to share the new language. A mailing-address standard (the uniform resource locator, or URL) got it to the right place. And a browser, “WorldWideWeb,” became a portal through which the user could access it all.11

  When Berners-Lee posted the server and browser programs to an online newsgroup on August 6, 1991, he unsealed powerful channels of Internet communication to non-experts much in the same way that the Apple II had opened up the microcomputing world to non-technical users fourteen years earlier. But unlike an Apple, the Web wasn’t something you bought at your neighborhood Computerland. It didn’t require paying for a pile of floppy disks. Despite the raging Mac-vs.-Windows war, the Web remained as neutral as its Swiss origins. It was free for anyone to download, and deliberately designed to work with everything and transcend what Berners-Lee politely referred to as “the technical and political battles of the data formats.”12

  Meanwhile, back across the Atlantic, the Internet was experiencing serious capacity problems. As more and more users joined the online universe, the middle-aged network didn’t have the speed and bandwidth to keep up. In the words of an all-star group of computer scientists convened by the National Academy of Sciences, the existing Internet networks were “fragmentary, overloaded, and poorly functioning.” The United States long had been at the technological forefront, but now Japan and Western Europe threatened to jump ahead.

  The drumbeat grew in the tech community to open up the Internet to buying and selling, spurring the commercial carriers on the NSFNET to form a trade association to lobby Congress for a change in policy. Pressure was on for additional common, global standards that would permit true “Internetting” to occur. Downloads of Berners-Lee’s Web client racked up into the thousands, but other browsers and protocols were being downloaded a lot too. NSFNET had adopted some common rules and classification systems; this included, significantly, the TCP/IP software protocol developed by Vinton Cerf at Stanford close to two decades before, which allowed different kinds of computers to communicate with one another. But it still was not enough to accommodate the pace of Internet growth, and certainly not enough for a full-blown commercial Internet. Some rule-minded grownup needed to bring order to this house party.13

  THE GENTLEMAN FROM TENNESSEE

  Enter Al Gore. The onetime House backbencher was now a U.S. Senator. Unlike many of his fellow Atari Democrats, Gore long had been a computer user as well as computer advocate. When the personal-computer market was still in its infancy, he declared that micros presented “dramatic new opportunities for optimizing our resources and exploring new frontiers” and organized computer classes for his fellow legislators. He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI, RAM and ROM. On top of all that, he was a baby boomer who invoked E. F. Schumacher and listened to the Grateful Dead.14

  The Tennessean’s worldview was centrist, market-focused, and technophilic. He believed that access to powerful, networked computers would open up marvelous new horizons in education, economic opportunity, and democratic communication. Tech wasn’t just a policy, it was a solution to all sorts of other kinds of policy problems. Gore already had made one bid for the presidency in 1988 and was a fair bet to try again in 1992. For a man with presidential ambitions, beefing up and commercializing the Internet could be a signature issue—an “Information Superhighway” to provide a shot in the arm for an American economy limping along in an early-1990s recession.15

  Gore might have been an early adopter, but he was hardly a lone wolf. It was clear by the start of the 1990s that a new wave was brewing in tech, and that government action now would make or break the Internet’s ability to realize its promise later. Bipartisan support enabled the Gore-sponsored High Performance Computing Act to become law in December 1991, only five months after Tim Berners-Lee released his Internet browser. President Bush endorsed it, and so did House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. The Act ushered in an era of better standards and faster, higher-capacity connections, while still keeping the decentralized, democratic structure of the Internet intact. Soon after, as Marty Tenenbaum had hoped, the NSF started to pull down the walls of its online garden, changing the terms of its “acceptable use policy” to permit business transactions online.16

  Mitch Kapor ran with a crowd that made no bones about its antipathy for government. Along with Barlow, one of his EFF co-founders was John Gilmore. An early Sun Microsystems employee with a net worth in the many millions, Gilmore was a key figure behind the Cypherpunks, a libertarian hacker collective devoted to the pursuit of building cryptography-based monetary and communications systems. The future pursued by the Cypherpunks was an exalted state of “crypto-anarchy,” unbounded by government control.17

  Perhaps because he’d always been bouncing back and forth between East and West Coasts, Kapor understood that making change wasn’t always about storming the barricades. It also came from changing the establishment from within. He’d given $100,000 to Michael Dukakis’s bid for president in 1988, and he was close with Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey, who chaired the committee responsible for setting telecommunications policy. Along with leading the EFF, Kapor took on the chairmanship of the new lobbying group for commercial Internet providers formed in 1991.

  Wearing both those hats, Kapor came to Capitol Hill in the spring of 1992 to underscore the importance of keeping the Internet free, and to warn against letting the structure and management of the network become dominated by just a few, powerful private-sector gatekeepers. Big telecoms and cable companies already were eyeing the commercial Internet hungrily, and he worried that the system’s decentralized and neutral spirit was in jeopardy. “The new information infrastructure will no
t be created in a single step,” he warned, “neither by a massive infusion of public funds, nor with the private capital of a few tycoons.” For decades, the Internet had functioned largely as an academic sandbox of ideas, for iteration and collaboration unencumbered by the demands of the stock market and quarterly earnings reports. Government’s role was to ensure commercial competition, expand access, allow for free expression, and keep it a system where no single entity was in control.18

  The hearing rooms were nearly empty—only Markey, Gore, and a few committee staff people understood enough to pay attention—yet Kapor’s message resonated deeply with his listeners. At a time when few lawmakers understood what the Internet was, much less had any way to experience it directly, the small band of tech-industry advocates and mostly Democratic political staffers began to lay out the future blueprint of the online world.19

  REINVENTION

  Right about this time, the world of technology crashed headlong into the 1992 presidential election. The same week that tech mogul Kapor was giving thoughtful, nuanced commentary on Internet policy on Capitol Hill, candidates Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown were brawling like undisciplined second-graders. The Arkansas governor already had slogged through several near-death moments in the 1992 primary season, many of them self-inflicted—sordid allegations of a longtime affair, revelations of a youthful effort to avoid the draft, a protestation that he once smoked marijuana but “didn’t inhale.” He’d fended off an early and strong challenge from another familiar high-tech name, Paul Tsongas. Now, in the heat of the New York State primary and with the Democratic nomination in his sights, Clinton had to fend off Brown, who’d entered the race making bold promises and with few bridges left to burn.

  After losing his 1982 bid for Senate, the former California governor had retreated into the cushy world of corporate law and into the political wilderness. Now Brown was coming out swinging, going after Clinton’s wife, Hillary, for her corporate law-firm ties and condemning the governor for his “scandal a week” campaign. Clinton could barely keep his explosive temper in check, scorning Brown’s popular proposal for a super-simple flat tax as something that would benefit only the rich, and demanding that Brown reveal his considerable net worth by releasing his tax returns. The Californian was the longest of long shots, but his scrappy outsider message had appeal in a recession-dampened election year. As he glad-handed morning commuters on the Staten Island Ferry, Clinton had to put up with passersby yelling “Go Jerry!” and “Brown, all the way!”20

  Underscoring the hunger for a different sort of politician was the entry into the race of the unlikeliest of presidential contenders: Ross Perot.

  Perot may have been the first tech mogul to run for president, but he didn’t spend much time talking about the computer hardware and software that had made him rich (much less the Medicare and Medicaid contracts that helped him do it). Instead, he put himself forth as the ultimate self-made businessman, a straight talker who’d fix the mess in Washington and fix the economy along with it. Perot had left old Republican loyalties behind (as well as any lingering friendliness between him and his fellow Texan George H. W. Bush) and ran as an independent. Scorning politics as usual, he announced his candidacy on CNN’s wildly popular Larry King Live and pledged his loyalty to the “everyday folks” who’d written in, urging him to run. Bush’s people considered him a kook, and Clinton’s people dismissed him as a cable-TV gadfly, but by June, Perot was neck and neck in the polls with both of his rivals.21

  When it came to winning the hearts and minds of many in the tech community, however, there wasn’t much of a contest. Jerry Brown might have had a long history in Silicon Valley, and Ross Perot had been a computer business giant for more than three decades, but Bill Clinton had been waging a two-year-long charm offensive to persuade the titans of the new economy that he was going to be their man. And it was starting to bear fruit.

  A couple of years earlier, at about the same time that the agents of Operation Sun Devil were busting up Balderstone Drive, Larry Stone had received a phone call. After two terms as mayor, Stone was back on the Sunnyvale city council, where one of his colleagues was Regis McKenna’s wife, Dianne (she had run for office partly after Stone’s encouragement). Although the Valley had twice gone for Ronald Reagan and many of its CEOs were Republican red, the rank and file of the tech world leaned slightly to the left. When it came to presidential politics, all the Valley needed was the right candidate. So when Bill Clinton’s closest political aide Craig Smith rang his office one spring day, Stone picked up the receiver. The governor was coming to town. Would Stone help host a fund-raiser? “We’re having a difficult time getting people to this event,” Smith explained apologetically.

  Eyeing the date on the calendar, Stone’s heart sank. He had baseball tickets that day. Oakland A’s tickets, no less. It was a great time to be an A’s fan—the team had won the World Series in 1989 and were on their way to winning the pennant again that year—and Larry Stone hated to miss a great game for some long-shot Southern governor. But he was a good Democratic foot soldier, and he reluctantly said yes.

  Getting his friends to come was like pulling teeth, Stone remembered, but when the night of the event rolled around, Bill Clinton exceeded everyone’s expectations. The young governor didn’t know much about tech, but he wanted to learn. Everyone in the room got the full Clinton treatment: close listening, lots of questions. Clinton’s preternatural talent for making his audience members feel that they were the most significant people in the universe—even if ever so briefly—hit the mark in Silicon Valley, a self-important place with a chip on its shoulder about whether outsiders could ever properly recognize its greatness.22

  The event was the beginning. Shortly before Clinton formally announced his candidacy, he had a one-on-one meeting with Dianne and Regis McKenna amid the grand trappings of San Francisco’s Fairmount Hotel. The three talked tech, and they talked politics. “Were there any Willie Hortons lurking out there?” Dianne McKenna asked Clinton, referring to the race-baiting wedge that Republicans had used to derail Mike Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. After being assured otherwise, the McKennas became early and ardent supporters.23

  Silicon Valley people weren’t just rich sources of campaign cash. They were smart, they were powerful, and they were building the future. Clinton was a son of the Sunbelt, a fan of self-made entrepreneurs, public-sector poor but drawn to private-sector riches. Silicon Valley tech people were exactly the kind of company he liked to keep. “He was so alert, in touch and technologically literate,” enthused one CEO. “He listened to us.”24

  Dave Barram was one of those convinced that night. Like so many others, Barram came west as a young man after his discharge from the Navy, lured by a place where, he once said mistily, “dreams were being fulfilled every day.” He started his career at Hewlett-Packard in 1969, the same year that Dave Packard went to Washington as Nixon’s Deputy Secretary of Defense. While Barram’s politics skewed left, not right, the boss’s move showed him that it was possible to be both a tech leader and a political statesman. At the end of the 1970s, he ran for Sunnyvale city council along with Regis McKenna’s wife, Dianne. She’d won, and Barram hadn’t, but he and the McKennas remained good friends, bonded by the lonely distinction of being among the few outspoken Democrats in tech. Eager to share what he knew with national party leaders, Barram had sent bullish position papers on tech policy to every Democratic presidential nominee from Jimmy Carter to Michael Dukakis. He never got a reply.

  As Silicon Valley’s star had risen, Barram had found a far more willing audience among policy wonks for his ideas about education and the tech economy, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he first had met in 1987. Five years later, Barram had even greater wealth and industry connections—he’d been an early hire at the high-performance computing superstar Silicon Graphics, and then moved into a senior role at Apple—but hadn’t lost his desire to find a Democratic leader who shared the Valley�
�s worldview. With Clinton, he believed he’d found his man. And given the moribund economy and the chilly relations with the Bush White House, the time was right to lure some Republicans over to Clinton’s side as well.25

  Fired up and ready to go, Barram took a leave of absence from Apple in the spring of 1992 to work full-time on Clinton’s election effort. Drawing on decades of personal and professional connections, Barram organized a private meeting between Clinton and leading Valley CEOs, including lifelong Republicans John Sculley of Apple and John Young of HP. Young was perhaps the biggest fish, and the hardest sell—he had chaired Reagan’s Council on Industrial Competitiveness, after all, and he remained close with many Bush insiders.

  Clinton entered the room and started talking. Twenty-five rich and powerful men listened. Young took copious notes. Clinton sounded some of the same themes as Packard had in an earlier era, talking about a government that helped people help themselves, and that invested in education and research. He echoed the message that Gary Hart and others had put forth the decade before, about the need to build an economy around sunrise industries and to modernize trade policy. He emphasized how important technology—Silicon Valley technology—was to the nation’s future. He was sensible, self-deprecating, and obviously smart. The group was impressed. Afterward, Clinton walked straight over to John Young, who, in the words of one observer, “gushed” with enthusiasm.26

  Not too long after that, on a stickily hot Arkansas day in early July, Clinton made the move that sealed his tech credentials. He announced that Al Gore would be his running mate. The choice was surprising, given that Clinton and Gore were both in their mid-forties and from neighboring states; to maximize electoral appeal, vice presidential picks often presented a demographic contrast to the top of the ticket. But, Clinton promised, Gore would be a different kind of veep. He’d be an equal, not a subordinate, responsible for a broad policy portfolio that included being the nation’s “technology czar.”