Internet History Podcast

Claire Evans is the author of the new book: Broad Band The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. This is the best tech history book I’ve read in a while and you know I read them all. Of special note, considering our 90s-heavy focus on this podcast, the book includes the stories of Word.com, which was a competitor to Feed.com (which we’ve previously covered) and Women.com which was a competitor to Ivillage (which, again, we’ve spoke at length about). But you also get an amazing portair of tech in the 1970s, hypertext as a movement outside of the web, and stories about amazing women like Grace Hopper and Jake Feinler.Buy it today!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Podcast listener Thomas Ganter gives us a first person, anecdotal account of how the web came to Germany in the 1990s.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Gregg Spiridellis has been making things go viral on the web since before the term VIRAL was even a thing. His company, JibJab has been producing web videos since the dialup dotcom era, producing hits you might remember such as Elf Yourself, Nasty Santa and This Land Is Your Land. JibJab has survived the dotcom bust, the coming of broadband, the coming of YouTube, the coming of social media and the mobile internet. What you’ll hear today is absolutely a masterclass in pivoting, in adapting a business model to thrive in every new technology environment and embracing every new platform and paradigm.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

David Pakman is a well respected venture capitalist at Venrock, but also a lifelong musician and music fan. Earlier in his career he played a significant role in bringing music to the web. David tells us about cofounding Apple’s Music Group, his role in facilitating the first digital sales of music online at dotcom-era companies N2K and MyPlay, and competing directly against iTunes when he was at eMusic. As a bonus, he gives us some background on the more recent founding story of Dollar Shave Club.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It gets my goat that these days, the history of ecommerce begins and ends with Amazon. There were so many companies and big ideas that got us where we are today, and one of the most important companies was Open Market. Jeff Bussgang is here to tell us the (today) often overlooked story of the earliest days of trying to sell stuff on the web. Today, Jeff is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

An exploration of what it was like to come of age in the early web era.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Plato was an online and interactive learning computer system developed in the 1960s at the University of Illinois. But in the early 1970s, Plato got truly networked, and the users took over. Plato had already pioneered such things as touch screen computing, but the kids introduced and pioneered concepts like forums, message boards, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, multiplayer games and even emoticons/emojis were pioneered on the Plato system.Buy The Friendly Orange Glow  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Bob Stein was the founder of Voyager, publisher of the first consumer CDROM titles, and, far and away the leader of the CDROM industry in the late 1980s and early 90s. Bob was also one of the founders of the Criterion Collection, as well as the publisher of the first electronic books.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You might know him as Rob Malda, or you might know him as CmdrTaco, but he was the founder of the great geek social website Slashdot. Slashdot recently turned 20 years old, Rob commemorated this in a great Medium post, and so I reached out to him to tell us the story of one of the first great social media websites.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dave Winer has been called the godfather of a lot of things. The godfather of blogging. The Godfather of Podcasting. One of the key people involved in the development of RSS. But as you’ll hear in this great and wide-ranging chat, Dave Winer is just a software developer who has never stopped tinkering, never lost his interest in coming up with new tools and new technologies. Dave was kind enough to sit down and go over his whole career, from the very earliest days of the PC era, to the present day.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

SUMMARY:Nicole Laporte has a cover story in Fast Company magazine this month about Giphy, potentially the next big story in online advertising and marketing, as well as… search? Read her profile of Giphy here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Om Malik is, of course, a legend. One of the first journalists on the “tech beat” in the 1990s, one of the first bloggers to “turn pro,” one of the driving forces behind the Web 2.0 time period, and one of the most trusted analysts of the technology industry in general, today he is a venture capitalist at True Ventures.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What is generally considered the worst merger of all time, and certainly the crescendo event of the dotcom bubble era, today we take a look at the AOL/Time Warner merger, again with the excellent guys at the podcast Acquired.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

David Shen was employee #17 at Yahoo, where he eventually had a hand in, not only the birth of advertising as the primary business model for the web but, eventually, the development of digital ads into their more modern, interactive form. As you'll hear, David recounts the early days of Yahoo, surviving the dotcom bust and taking advertising beyond the simple banner ad.And he recounts all of this in his recently published new book: Takeover! The Inside Story of the Yahoo! Ad Revolution  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Karel Baloun was the first senior software engineer hired at Facebook in 2005. This was after the Accel round of funding, when Facebook truly began to staff up and grow up. Baloun was only at Facebook for a year, from 2005 to 2006, but he provides some amazing insights about the company. What was Facebook’s culture like in 2005? What were the key innovations that ultimately let Facebook succeed where others failed? Would Zuckerberg make a good President of the United States? What became of Pokey, the mascot Facebook once considered launching?You can buy Karel’s 2007 book here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Just as last week’s episode posted, another great piece about SoundCloud was posted on Buzzfeed by the great Ryan Mac. So, in a rare attempt by me to be topical, today’s episode is with Ryan Mac, discussing his article, which fills in some of the details about what Christina and I were speculating on last week.Ryan’s article can be found here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Our friend Christina Warren is back for another analysis episode. Christina recently posted a tweetstorm about SoundCloud, and its prospects for the future. So she kindly agreed to come on the show, look at the history of SoundCloud as a company, and try to help me figure out why SoundCloud finds itself on the brink of oblivion. You all know Christina from her years at Mashable and most recently, Gizmodo. As you’ll hear toward the end, she’s at Microsoft now, and you can always hear her on the Rocket podcast.The Verge article we refer to can be found here.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Don Melton is popularly known as the father of the Safari web browser or WebKit. He’s basically a web browser legend. Not only does Don tell us a lot of great stuff about Safari, WebKit, Apple and more, but he was also an early Netscape employee, so we get some more great details about that company, especially in its later stages.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The first text message (or, to be accurate, SMS message) was sent on December 3, 1992. It was sent by Neil Papworth, and it said, “Merry Christmas.” This is the story of that first text, recorded for the first time.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As promised, Mike Slade is back to tell stories from the period 1998 through 2004, when he was Special Assistant to Steve Jobs. Background details on the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone and more!   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.