When the Personal Publishing Empire began to emerge, when the continuance of Materialism reverted to dominance of single entities, there arose David Bohnett and his band of "communities" who planted a colony - The Foundation - to incubate art, science, music, graphics, love for animals, and other manner of individual effort, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire (adapted from The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov)
Events which led to the formation of GeoCities (The Foundation) are contained in the first section of our series. Although not intended to be an all inclusive list of the accomplishments of mankind in the developments which led to the establishment of GeoCities and the merger with Yahoo, they are none the less important in the development of the Second Foundation.
The world was stunned on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched a tiny satellite that went into orbit above the earth in the region beyond the atmosphere. That day marked the birth of the Space Age.
Since then there have been hundreds of launches, most of them unmanned. But the ones that have drawn the world's interest have been the manned flights, which were climaxed on July 20, 1969, when two U.S. astronauts became the first men to set foot on the moon. They were Eagle Scout Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, also a former Scout.
Dr. Vinton Cerf, who is shown on the right receiving the ITU Medal from Dr. Pekka Tarjanne.
ARPANET was formed in answer to the Russian satellite launch and in 1969 Vinton Cerf and Steve Crocker who were graduate students at UCLA became heavily involved in the internet development. The rest is history which would title Vinton Cerf - The Father of the Internet.
Another event which captured the imagination of the communication community was the launch of Telstar I on July 10, 1962. Telstar put to work what Courier had proved possible. In its first day in orbit, Telstar I made active-repeater communications history by relaying the first telecast from the United states to Europe. The next day (July 11) it reversed the process and relayed the first live telecast from England to the United States.
Events transpiring in the 1970's which would shape the Internet and the WWW included double digit interest rates, scarcity of goods and labor and the resulting inflation, and rapidly changing or escalating prices for goods and services. Main frame computers, the work horses of business, were strained to the limit in an effort to help maintain a competitive edge. In addition business colleges and universities began a shift from the evaluation of human resources and the "bottom line" or profit and began a parlance know as "the Harvard MBA mentality" in which profit was the primary objective of business which excluded human resources.
In 1982 the Commodore 64 was introduced. Then the Tandy Color Computer II emerged, followed by the Apple II in 1988. The world finally had a computer which was within its financial reach!
Marc Andressen realized that internet software was behind the hardware and approached his friend Bina, in November of 1992, with a proposal to write a more attractive program. Bina, then a salaried employee for NCSA, was the master programmer while Andressen, still an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, played the team leader. They completed the first version of Mosaic with 9,000 lines of code in six weeks. Marc's collaboration with Jim Clark is history - Netscape Communications.
"The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow, for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead, he has a telescope but he can't make anybody believe that he has it." Will Rogers (1879-1935).
With 'Pascal's wager' he uses probabilistic and mathematical arguments but his main conclusion is that " ...we are compelled to gamble..." Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).
The decade of the 1990's will begin our second section in our Foundation series and will feature David Bohnett and GeoCities
Our third section will feature David Filo and Jerry Yang our dynamic duo (no not Batman and Robin) who created Yahoo!
David Filo
Jerry Yang
Copyright: 1986-2010