tl;dr

GREAT book, but not without very notable omissions, including:

• Usenet Newsgroups
  
  
• Jim Griffin
  
  
• Travis Kalanick
  
  
• MP3.com & Michael Robertson
  
  
• Advertising.com & Scott/John Ferber
  
  
• LendingTree & Doug Lebda

I LOVE the Internet. :-)

Although I am an immigrant to the Internet – i.e. as a Gen-X’er, I lived a few years as an adult WITHOUT an Internet – I am definitely a STUDENT of the Internet. Always have been.

Thus, I was excited to see the book “How the Internet Happened” by Brian McCullough was published in October 2018. I just finished the audiobook version:

My first computer was an Atari 1200 (1983) and featured storage on a CASETTE(!) drive:

My first computer with a modem was a Packard Bell 286 featuring 1MB of RAM an internal 40MB hard drive – just barely powerful enough to run the new Windows OS:

With that computer, I would join various BBS systems hosted by other BBS users.

With that same computer, I also joined all the nascent online services – CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online (before being re-branded AOL).

The book somewhat covers these early pre-Internet services, but the story is largely documented between the Netscape IPO in 1995 and the launch/release of the first iPhone in 2007.

By and large, I thought that McCullough did a masterful job in covering all the key names/players and the most impactful events over his 400-pages, and probably couldn’t fit many more in without violating page-count guidance from his editors and publisher.

However, I do believe some key names/players were either covered a bit light relative to what I remember in terms of their impact or were not covered at all…

Usenet Newsgroups

IMHO, the big three components of the original “Internet” were:

1. Email
   
   
2. World Wide Web
   
   
3. Usenet Newsgroups

Usenet Newsgroups are covered in the book (I counted 5 different mentions), but not nearly to the extent of Email and the World Wide Web.

Perhaps it was because Usenet Newsgroups obviously did not retain nearly as many users as did Email and WWW.

Nonetheless, my personal journey as an Internet Entrepreneur began with Usenet Newsgroups.

In the mid-90’s I was working my way through grad school by selling high-end audio and home-theater equipment at a local retailer, Gramophone.

I would put the distressed merchandise (open box, display items, scratch and dent – which were difficult to sell in-store against new-in-box options) on the rec.audio.marketplace Usenet Newsgroup and sell the equipment to a national audience instead of a local foot-traffic audience.

It worked fabulously well and my sales commissions often outpaced everyone else’s because of this early “growth hack.” ;-)

I think the author could’ve gone down the Usenet Newsgroup rabbit hole a bit more, perhaps describing the myriad of client software and the decline into Deja News (ultimately acquired and deprecated by Google).

Usenet Newsgroups are now archived as part of Google Groups and is still growing in popularity for the transfer of binary files by a very small set of techie users.

Also, my personal opinion about the growth of Reddit.com (which is mentioned several times in the book) into a Top-5 domestic website was that it filled the “online community” void left behind by the collapse of Usenet Newsgroups.

Music – Jim Griffin & Aerosmith “Head First” Download on Compuserve

Music on the Internet is a major recurring theme in the book – MP3 compression tech, Napster (Shaun Fanning and Sean Parker), Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA.com), the Diamond Rio PMP300 MP3 Player, RIAA, iTunes/iPod, etc. However, I believe there are several notable omissions from the story of Music on the Internet.

In 1994, Jim Griffin was the CTO at the immensely-popular Geffen record label.

A true tech visionary, Jim is credited with creating the world’s first corporate intranet (using Mosaic browsers) so that the Geffen employees who were Windows/PC users could effectively co-exist on the same tech platform as the Geffen employees who were Mac users.

Jim also is credited as the architect of the FIRST digital song file download – Aerosmith’s “Head First” via Compuserve in 1994: https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/6vapxr/go-aerosmith-how-head-first-became-the-first-song-available-for-digital-download-20-years-ago-today

I first met Jim in 1999 and he became a Board Member of my first Internet startup ListenSmart.com and continues to be one of the smartest minds in the space – to this day.

Jim continues to moderate and participate in the “Pho” Email List, which he co-founded with John Parres in the late 90’s, a vibrant Email community filled with some of the greatest thinkers in digital media.

I have been a lurker to the Pho list since 1999 and have observed some of the biggest names in the digital music ecosystem participate in the group, including many individuals that were discussed in the book, including:

• Marc Cuban
  
  
• Jason Calacanis
  
  
• Travis Kalanick

Music – Travis Kalanick & Scour

Actually, Travis Kalanick was not mentioned by name in the book but the business he founded and catapulted in the fastest-growing tech startup in history, Uber, was mentioned several times.

I believe that the author could’ve used the opportunity to anchor the Kalanick celebrity name into the digital music ecosystem during time span covered by the book vis-à-vis Kalanick’s first tech startup, Scour Inc. (a music search engine), and Scour Exchange (a peer-to-peer file sharing service). Scour shut down after multiple lawsuits from the music industry, but ostensibly hardened Travis to a degree necessary for Uber to disrupt the entire transportation industry a decade later.

I met Travis Kalanick several times at online music tradeshows in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. This is a picture of Travis and his Scour team.

Music – MP3.com & Michael Robertson

While MP3 technology was thoroughly covered by the book, the MP3.com website and its Founder/CEO Michael Robertson were not mentioned.

MP3.com went public on July 21, 1999, and raised over $370 million – at the time, the single largest technology IPO to date. :-O

Robertson was also the brilliant visionary behind the My.MP3.com service, which allowed users to unlock and release songs into their own personal streaming locker by proving ownership of the music via insertion of the physical CD into the computer’s CD-ROM drive for verification.

It was the perfect tech solution for a music industry caught in the perils of online piracy, but that didn’t stop the industry from shutting the service down via legal copyright loopholes regarding the building of the original song database without a license or permission – years prior to the launch of the iTunes store, which is significantly covered in the book.

I was one of the first 1,000 artists to upload my music compositions and songs to MP3.com, which ultimately became the inspiration for my ListenSmart.com startup in 1999.

At its peak, the influence of MP3.com on the music industry was enormous.

Advertising – Advertising.com & Scott/John Ferber

By and large, I thought that McCullough did a masterful job in covering advertising on the Internet as the key business model to fuel the “free” consumer Internet that so many users have come to expect (e.g. Google, Facebook Snapchat, etc.).

However, there was no mention of one of the biggest and most-influential Advertising companies of the early Internet era – Advertising.com.

Advertising.com was Founded by brothers Scott & John Ferber in Baltimore, MD and raised tens of millions of Venture Capital before being acquired by then-Tech-Titan AOL in 2004 (the year before the Google IPO which put Internet advertising in the spotlight) for half a billion dollars. :-O

Many industry veterans give credit to Advertising.com for giving birth to the concept of “Performance-based” advertising, but evolving the pricing model by which advertisers would pay for ads from cost-per-impression (CPM) to cost-per-click (CPC) out to cost-per-action or cost-per-lead (CPA/CPL).

AOL #2 Ted Leonsis noted this transaction in his book “The Business of Happiness”

I became friends with Scott & John Ferber and they both are ABOVO advisors as of today. :-)

Advertising – LendingTree & Doug Lebda

Speaking of performance-based advertising, an enormous amount of Internet advertising dollars is spent with the purpose of generating sales leads, aka Lead Generation or Lead Gen. Companies that slashed their clients’ marketing outlays by delivering qualified prospects at reasonable costs blossomed in the early days of the Internet. B2B or B2C, product or service, it made little difference.  The Internet was the supreme lead generator.

While Founder/CEO Doug Lebda may not have known it in 1998 when he began, LendingTree went on to be considered the SUPREME Internet Lead Gen company. The biggest name in Lead Gen… EVER. :-O

Where as most other Internet Lead Gen companies acquired users and drove traffic via online channels, the LendingTree brand was built in the early days mostly via offline channels (primarily TV) all the way to 70%+ consumer-brand-awareness.

The killer TV spots with the tagline “When Banks Compete You Win!” still resonates in the memory of most Gen-X’ers and Baby Boomers.

Today, LendingTree is a publicly-traded multi-vertical Lead Gen powerhouse with a market cap of $4.7 Billion. :-O

I became friends with Doug and he is an ABOVO advisors as of today. :-)

In summary, I should re-affirm that “How the Internet Happened” by Brian McCullough is an outstanding book, likely to be enjoyed by readers whether they lived as an adult through the times being documented or not.

However, Usenet Newsgroups, Jim Griffin, Travis Kalanick, MP3.com & Michael Robertson, Advertising.com & Scott/John Ferber, and LendingTree & Doug Lebda are all notable omissions, IMHO.

Perhaps they were part of the original draft but ended up on the editing room floor in order to get the page-count of the book below 400. We may never know.

I still LOVE the Internet and I am hoping that ABOVO and Social Email will be included in the Post-iPhone sequel of How the Internet Happened. :-)

SPF

p.s. I was VERY happy to see “Internet” properly capitalized throughout the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet -- not a fan of modern lower-case usages. :-)