Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web

Abstract

In August 1995 Netscape Communications Corporation went public at $28 a share; that fall, it briefly reached a peak of $174an incredible figure for a company making no real profits and whose best-known product was essentially free. Even at year's end, when the share price settled around $130, its market capitalization was more than $5 billion -greater than the combined market value of the New York Times Corporation and United Airlines. Netscape's skyrocketing stock price reflected the sudden discovery by investors and the general public of the Internet, the global network of connected computers that communicate with each other by following a common set of protocols. In November 1969 the Internet's predecessor, the Arpanet (named after its funder, the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency), consisted of just two specially designed communications computers located in Los Angeles and Palo Alto, California. Its initial users were scientists and technical people, particularly those with Defense Department connections. But in the 1980s and 1990s the Internet rapidly became a broadly accessed medium that began to rival the telephone and post office in importance.1 Even more responsible for the investor gold rush into Netscape stock was the still more recent emergence of the World Wide Web, whose origins go back to the efforts in the late 1980s of Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, to find a way for physicists to share information easily. The Web, as it is commonly called, uses the Internet's global network, but with a more specialized set of protocols. These protocols make it possible for computers connected to the Web to display pictures, sound, and film; for users to move very rapidly from one Web site to another; and for each Web page to have a single, distinct address (called a Universal Resource Locator or uRL). The