5
Preface and acknowledgements
In late 1993, while I was part of the IBM corporate planning department, I began
to experiment with the Internet. I heard that a group of engineers in the company
had built a “gateway” that enabled access to the Net using an office PC. I got
connected and became captivated by the “gopher”, a program that allowed you
to browse through files in computers outside of IBM that were also connected to
the Internet. Most of these computers were at universities and government
laboratories. Being able to type the “dir” command on your PC and see what
directories (folders) and files were on your PC was no big deal but to be able to
do that on a computer thousands of miles away was amazing to me. A few
months later I installed a program called Mosaic that enable me to see the world
wide web for the first time; not just seeing the files on another computer but
seeing colorful and graphical documents that had links in them that allowed you
to click and “hyperlink” to a document in another computer somewhere
thousands of miles away It is hard to describe how amazing this was. I got very
excited about it. I saw it as revolutionary; something that would change
everything forever. I had been using online banking and proprietary online
services since sometime in the 1980s and I saw the web as something that
everyone would use instead.
Then along came Dave Grossman, a young IBM computer scientist at Cornell
University’s Theory Center, who was part of a team helping the university to
exploit their IBM supercomputer. The web intrigued Grossman also and he was
following its development intensively. One day during the Lilihammer Winter
Olympic Games he discovered that Sun Microsystems was creating web pages
showing game results on web pages. The data came from systems that IBM was
maintaining as part of its sponsorship of the Games! Grossman found out that
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, then head of IBM’s supercomputer business, Abby
Kohnstamm, new head of marketing, and I, among others were engaged in a
corporate strategy review in Armonk. He further found out that an IBM Research
team had setup a high-speed connection to the Internet in the same building
where the meeting was being held. He drove to Armonk from Cornell, hooked up
a large computer display, and gave all of us a demonstration of the web. It was
an eye opener.
I couldn’t spend enough time with Dave, learning more about the web. The more
I learned, the more excited I got. While many people saw the web as
entertaining, Dave saw it as making data universally accessible through the
browser. He convinced me that this would turn the world upside down – that the
web was going to redefine information technology. I soon found there was an
underground community of engineers and scientists in IBM engaged in many
product and research efforts based on the Internet. Together we formed a grass
roots effort and launched ibm.com in May 1994. In June two of my colleagues,
Jerry Waldbaum and Jane Harper, and I went to Internet World in San Jose,
California. Most of technology demonstrations were from little known companies.
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