Before the Gold Rush

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

—E. M. FORSTER, HOWARDS END

Al Gore did invent the Internet. Kind of.

As most probably know, the former vice president was widely pilloried for claiming this distinction in a 1999 interview on CNN. His exact words were: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Absolutely true. As a senator from Tennessee, Gore crafted and pushed through the “High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991,” aka the “Gore Bill.” This legislation funded initiatives like the game-changing Mosaic browser and was critical to the commercialization of the now indispensable medium.

I met Gore in 1989 while reporting a story about his efforts to limit the use of chlorofluorocarbons that were depleting the ozone levels. He was right about climate change, too. Really, even though he sounded like an idiot when he said he invented the Internet, we should probably thank the guy for all he’s done and for being one of the few in D.C. who took an interest in the tech at all.

The other person who oddly enough deserves some credit is then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who blocked a dunderheaded amendment by then Nevada senator James Exon to the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Although Gingrich has since morphed into one of the more ghoulish political figures in the Republican Party, he was an important character in pushing back early and aggressive political attempts to stifle an open and free Internet. Mother Jones even credits Gingrich with saving porn, which feels apt these days since he now defends the most porny president in American history. Well played, Newt!

With access to federal support, the first Internet companies started forming in the early 1990s. The Washington Post gave me the space to report on a broad range of digital topics, largely because no one else would, and having just turned thirty, I was the “young” person in the newsroom. In fact, I was also already hooked. During a short fellowship at Duke University, I’d had a revelation. I was sitting in front of a computer and logged into the nascent World Wide Web and experienced firsthand its awesome power to deliver content. So, what was the first thing I did?

I downloaded a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon collection. Did I care even slightly that I managed to jam up the computer network doing it? I did not. But the system administrator—a young man already sporting a proto-techie-slash-seventh-grader look—was pissed.

“You clogged up everything,” he said, chastising me.

“But I downloaded a whole book, pretty much by just pushing a button,” I said to him. “A whole book, for fuck’s sake!”

“Big deal,” he said, flashing me that girls-can’t-code scowl I would come to know so well. I definitely could not code, but I knew something that this geek did not seem to grok: A book could be all the books, and a song could be all the songs, and a movie could be all the movies. It was right then and there that I came up with the concept that would carry me for decades hence and still does to this day:

Everything that can be digitized will be digitized.

If “God said, let there be light: and there was light” is the most important tech concept ever—and let’s be clear, no golden geek, however much they think so, has topped that one as yet—this idea of being able to turn the analog into the digital is at the heart of the promise and the challenges we still face today.

That day in the cramped computer lab in Durham, I realized that we were at yet another critical turn in history, when technology ushers in a new age. I was witnessing the dawn of the printing press, electricity, the light bulb, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, or the television. It was obvious to me that this innovation was the next great content and communications delivery system. Most of all, I knew I had struck gold. I was fully on board for the Internet age, and however it evolved, I wanted to cover it.

And why wouldn’t I be riveted? I happened to be in the same state where the first powered flight had taken place ninety years earlier, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, piloted by Orville Wright. The Wright Flyer was aloft for just 12 seconds, during which it traveled 120 feet at 6.8 miles per hour.

Was I going to be the person standing on the beach who looked on, underwhelmed and unimpressed, complaining that the flight should have been longer and higher and faster? Would I have been the one to catcall the Wright Brothers, taunting them that their plane was lame and needed better wings? Can you imagine me there on my big-wheeled bicycle, screaming into the wind at the handlebar-mustached tech bros (some things never change), “Can’t you get it up?” Someone might have done that, but I would not, because of one important fact: A man flew.

Once I had downloaded Calvin and Hobbes, I was eager to see how much more this new technology would revolutionize media. Early content was far from world-shaking. A university in England set up a coffeemaker and those who were interested could dial into the web site and watch an electronic photo of the percolator updated every second. It was also the first time that coffee could put you to sleep. Another web page offered instructions on how to explode a grape. In this new world, the “cybercast” of Pope John Paul II’s Mass at Camden Yards in Baltimore—which I chronicled as if it were the moon landing—passed for exciting.

Just as the gold prospectors had needed pans and pickaxes, web site builders also needed tools to get to the good stuff. Internet service providers (ISPs) popped up in the D.C. area, which was the site of one of the four big Internet hubs called MAE-East (another big hub, hahaha, MAE-West, was in Silicon Valley). That included PSINet and UUNet, which were run by prescient entrepreneurs. These services were different from the old-school database technology that had served the federal government for decades and was run by the so-called “Beltway bandits” who charged a lot and innovated nothing. The new guys were a much different breed.

I once interviewed PSINet’s Bill Schrader in his office as he munched on pretzels out of a big plastic barrel. Through bites, he energetically explained to me the seismic change we were witnessing. “Don’t you see that this is just beyond anything we have ever done?” he told me like a geek John the Baptist, after he had locked the door.

Wild-eyed, I thought to myself, Will he kill me and shove my remains in the plastic pretzel barrel? I didn’t use that in my story, but it was clear he was nearly religious about the Internet. The company Bill cofounded went public in mid-1995, and by July, he was worth $105 million. And, like all such fever dreams, there were also bad endings. By 2001, PSINet had declared bankruptcy.

I was riveted by that part, of total domination followed by utter collapse. (Babylon was, over and over again.) My colleagues thought I was crazy when I affixed my relatively new email address to the bottom of my stories to solicit ideas. “What do you want to do that for? Readers will be able to write you anytime,” one told me. Exactly. Instant communication would become my guiding light. Often, I had to explain what digital meant, as if I were trying to explain a tree to a child.

“The Web is like a landscaped subdivision on the wilder, more primitive Internet. It brings a semblance of order to a vast and unorganized mass of electronic information by dividing it into ‘home pages,’ each with customized data banks that can contain text, graphics, voices, music and even video,” I wrote in one story.

In another breathless one, I reported from the front lines of putting @ symbols on business cards. “At first, the symbols on the business card look like ancient hieroglyphics, difficult to decipher for the uninitiated” was my lede.

It was a big deal, for example, when I wrote that Discovery Communications, which was located in the D.C. area, had spent $10 million to… build a web site. As I observed then, “The new mantra: You’re nobody if you’re not somebody.com.”

For the first time, I pointed out issues that remain problematic today, including hacking, con jobs, satellite snafus, misinformation, and privacy violations. I covered the debut of the Sony PlayStation, which was exciting then but seems rote now. I was also chronicling the many come-and-gone technologies, like CD-ROMs (compact discs with Read Only Memory), that were heralded as the “multimedia killer” but would soon be killed themselves.

My prediction about the end of media through the decimation of classified ads in newspapers started to come true. In 1995, a quirky entrepreneur in San Francisco named Craig Newmark started emailing friends a list of local events, job opportunities, and things for sale. Less than a year later, he turned Craigslist into a Web-based service and started expanding all over the country and, eventually, the world.

Seeing that, I became convinced that newspapers were going to die off, and I told everyone who would listen to me at the Post that we needed to put all the money, all the people, and all the incentives into digital. I insisted that the bosses had to make readers feel like digital was the most important thing. Of course, the bosses never did because the game was always in newspaper. At the Post and later the Wall Street Journal, marketers would ask in endless meetings: “How can we get young people to make us a daily read?”

And I would respond, “You know what? I have an idea.”

And they were like, “Great, Kara has an idea.”

And I said, “Let’s tape a joint between every single page.”

I was definitely being a nuisance, but my point was that younger readers did not want to subscribe to an analog paper. They wanted another thing altogether. I had always advocated for the idea of offering people news in the way they wanted to digest it, even if it meant printing it on salami. Plus, I just could not ignore the importance of being able to download that first book. As prolific tech pioneer Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse, early iterations of the graphical user interface, and more, once mused: “The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.”

He was right, and even more so when he said: “The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.”

But where I was working, it was definitely not fast enough. It was glacial. I related my worries about the turtle pace of digital change many times to the Washington Post Company’s affable CEO Don Graham, the son of legendary publisher and surprisingly entertaining badass Katharine Graham. How much I loved these owners, I cannot underscore enough, for their bravery and steadfastness and decency and, really, their commitment to excellence in a less-than-excellent world.

Don Graham was also inexplicably humble and even sheepish about his power. He never once made me feel nervous, as I published story after story about the death of local retailers. I knew my work had upset big advertisers who had made him and the Post rich. But I never felt the pressure he was getting, even after I wrote this lede in 1990 about the bankruptcy of a local shopping institution:

First, an answer to the somewhat vulturous question on everybody’s mind yesterday after hearing about the closing of a longtime D.C. department store called Garfinckel’s: The sale starts Wednesday, as plans now stand. That means everything must go. But how do you get rid of pounds of Godiva chocolate? Dozens of Hermès scarves? A plenitude of pairs of panty hose with the name GARFINCKEL’S boldly printed on the package? Tons of French crystal? Boxes and boxes of bridal registry information?

The very worst thing that Graham—always apologetic for having interrupted me—would say to me was “ouch.” Then he would saunter away from my desk with a jaunty wave. What’s the opposite of publisher pressure? That was Don. And he displayed the same kind of patience when I started in on him on digital issues, suggesting that he dump AT&T’s Interchange—and its dopey publisher-heavy deal—and invest in a then-small online service called AOL instead. He argued that AT&T was tops in tech. I countered that just because they could run a giant bully of a telephone company didn’t mean they could be either nimble or innovative in digital media. Interchange, in fact, eventually shuttered as the telco giant shifted to just selling Internet access and the Post’s Digital Ink and other newspapers moved directly to the Web.

And while Graham was interested when I talked about what Craig Newmark was doing, he laughed when I told him that Craigslist would wipe out his classified business.

“You charge too much, the customer service sucks, it’s static, and most of all, it doesn’t work,” I lectured him about the business that was crucial to his bottom line. “It will disappear as an analog product since it is a perfect target for digital destruction. You’re going to die by the cell and not even know it until it’s over and you’re dead on the ground.”

Don smiled at me with a kindness I certainly did not deserve at that moment. “Ouch,” he said.

Years later, Graham would lean into tech and became an early and much-needed adviser to a young Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and even passed on a chance to grab Facebook shares in order to placate a VC who wanted more equity. “I offered Mark $6 million for 10 percent of Facebook in January of 2005,” Graham wrote me. “Unsurprisingly, Accel Partners offered (I think) $15 million. I thought of matching but knew [Accel’s Jim Breyer] would raise it; it was simply worth more to them than to us (since we would never be raising money for another round, and a big success would be priceless to them).”

Graham was not dumb, obviously, and his attitude was actually quite typical. In the early 1990s, part of the problem was that tech seemed far too techie and niche. Home computers were not yet household products. Laptops, such as the Apple PowerBook and IBM ThinkPad, were used largely for business, and the modems used to dial up these services were agonizingly slow. And Wi-Fi? It did not exist.

The difficulties of using the new online tech were clear from the moment I crashed Duke’s system. Fortunately, I was dating a woman named Lisa Dickey at the time and she was an early and savvy adopter. While working at an international organization in Washington, Lisa had used various chat and technically difficult text and bulletin board systems to communicate abroad. When she moved to Russia in the fall of 1994, I wanted to stay in touch via something other than snail mail and phone calls. That’s when Lisa introduced me to email, suggesting I sign up for an AOL account.

I had already dabbled in writing about the sector, starting in 1988 when the Library of Congress announced they would add software to their collection. “It does seem a little odd that the Library of Congress—the place where public relations officers answer the phone, ‘Hello, the library with the most books’—is going to start collecting software programs,” I wrote.

And while I was not yet on the tech beat then, I did hit the main theme perfectly, adding the analog keening of a librarian named Sandra Lawson who saw the revolution coming. “ ‘It would take a stack of books to achieve what this could do in a second,’ said Lawson about a research program loaded on a computer. Is the library of yesterday, with its piles of books, musty smells and never-ending aisles, on its way out? ‘I think people will always love the feel of books,’ she said wistfully.”

But I was not even slightly sentimental, and soon I was trying every service or gadget that I could get. In 1993, I tested an early version of virtual reality, writing a piece titled: “See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me.” It was the first substantive piece I would write on tech. And, it was, of course, about online sex.

I tried on the device at one of the least sexy locations on Earth—a Best Buy store in Shirlington, Virginia. The upbeat techie walking me through told me:

“This helmet could take you to Paris.” I said, so could Air France, and it throws in cocktails. He told me I could “float through space.” That sounded nauseating. Obliquely, we were approaching a certain tantalizing truth, circling it warily, each waiting for the other to strike first. He caved. “Well,” he said, conspiratorially, “there is adult entertainment.” Ahhh. Cyborgasm. The dirty secret of tech’s real potential.

In real life, tech was less exciting but more practical. For work, I was using a variety of connected computers, such as the “luggable” Kaypro with two double-sided floppy disks and WordStar, and the TRS-80 Model 100 (the Trash-80, as it was dubbed) that used phone couplers allowing it to fit over the mouth and ear parts of a public telephone.

But my biggest obsession, by far, was mobile phones. They were too expensive for individual use, but the Post had purchased one of the new Motorola bag phones for the newsroom. I borrowed it often despite its ungainliness and persistent lack of connectivity. No one else was interested in it, so I kept it for days at the time, lugging it to all kinds of places to try to make calls, with mixed success. Not long after, I got hold of a Motorola MicroTAC, which was the inspiration for “flip” phones, including the clamshell StarTAC, which hit the market in 1996. I bought dozens of modems, CD-ROMs, and drives to run the silvery discs and all manner of storage gadgets. Most of these devices would become extinct soon enough, due to the growing popularity of the World Wide Web.

W3 or www launched in 1990, introducing itself on the first web site at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” This was a convoluted geek way of saying: All of human knowledge is linked to each other in an endless and ever-evolving chain of everything. This critical concept and the terms that were coined by techie Ted Nelson were, as the very simple CERN page noted, “not constrained to be linear.”

Translation: It would be everything, everywhere, all at once. And, most importantly, always.

The ability to scale infinitely was unprecedented, and to those for whom this truly massive idea clicked, it was elegant and profound. Crucially, the Internet needed all kinds of new digital tools to make it work—suggesting an entirely new industry where none had existed before. These tools included browsers, a piece of software that would allow you to better ride this new “information superhighway,” as it was called often back then.

In 1993, I tried out the Mosaic browser, created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina while they were grad students at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I got to know Andreessen later, for better and worse (much worse as time went on and he became odder). His original browser was fast and able to display images and quickly made him a legend. He decamped to Silicon Valley, co-creating Netscape with a high-profile serial entrepreneur and frequent tech loudmouth named Jim Clark. The company went public in August of 1995, and the Netscape browser completely dominated the market, becoming the first Web company to make a fortune.

And why not? The technology was expanding drastically just as it was intended to do. In mid-1993, there were only 130 web sites, with only 1.5 percent having commercial “.com” designations. A year later, there were close to 3,000. And, by the time I met Steve Case at AOL in 1994, there were ten times that—and then a hundred times again soon enough.

As I sat in a bland office building behind a car dealership in Tysons Corner, Virginia, I took notes. Case was dressed in a button-down Oxford shirt and khakis and perched behind a cheap desk as he launched into his plans to “change the world.”

“We’re going to be bigger than Time Warner someday,” the moon-faced young man said grandly, as if taking down the most powerful media company on the globe was going to be as easy as all that. “This is going to be the next great revolution in technology, and we are going to be the most important company in the space.” What a lunatic, I thought. What he was saying was not a little crazy, but a lot, especially given the sketchy history of the company he now headed and its precarious grip on, well, existence. Case had started off as a marketer, figuring out popular toppings for pizza and whether dry shampoo towelettes were ever going to be a thing, so, this extravagant assertion—which he jokingly denies today—seemed like classic product hype.

It’s notable as the first, but definitely not the last, time that I would hear this “change the world” speech from a souped-up entrepreneur. And, as it would turn out for many of them, too, the young CEO of America Online was correct. He was going to change the world, and although I couldn’t have known it at the time, he was also going to change my life. And, in between his razzle-dazzle marketing pronouncements, Case managed to stick an earworm in my brain that day. He and all the AOL executives I met did so by repeating a version of the same word: “Connect.”

“Connect” is all over my early notes and seemed like such a simple and basic idea. But with the exponential nature of the medium, that take turned out to be naïve. As futurist Jaron Lanier would later tell me—the biggest experiment in human community also turned out to be the most disastrous. But I was already hopelessly all in on this world, even if switching to cover these nobodies making things no one understood was a backward step in my trajectory at the Post. Forget vaporware—a term for software that wasn’t all there—tech reporting was a backwater to a backwater, filled with dull geeks and technical who-cares. But, to me, the field was explosive and the possibilities felt infinite. That directionality of digitization domination was the point. It had first hit me at Duke, and then again when I heard Case waxing on.

“Everyone will be able to reach everyone and say anything, know anything, be anything,” Case said in a later interview with me.

As I looked down at the cheap carpet the first time I met him, I remember that Case planted his shoes on the battered desk. Then he leaned back in his chair with arms behind his head, looking already like the mogul he’d become within a decade. The big talk, which seemed comical in that moment, wasn’t hype. Using AOL’s soaring stock, he would indeed manage to get control of Time Warner in the span of less than a decade in the so-called “deal of the century.” Case would eventually become the proverbial dog that caught the car. But in that dingy office, he was just a startup guy with a lot of confidence and a company made up of misfits and outsiders that I took to calling the “Bad News Bears,” after the 1976 movie.

I remember driving back from AOL to the Post that day, traveling down Route 66 in my VW Rabbit convertible and thinking that I could not wait to start covering Case and the rest of those supremely odd but compelling people. As soon as I got back to the newsroom, I went straight to David Ignatius, my boss at the time in the Business section. He had been the one to suggest the meeting to see if I wanted to focus on this sector. I told him I wanted to get in on this tech stuff, stat.

“You sure you don’t want to cover politics?” he said. “It’s how you get to the top here.” His extraordinarily bushy eyebrows arched in a way that made a reporter question themselves and their work (always a good thing). The canny Ignatius knew that getting to cover the White House and Congress was the inside track at the Post if you wanted to succeed. So why would I turn my back on all that? Why cover some guy who thought he could best the entrenched powers that be and own the world, when I could write about the people who actually did own the world?

What Ignatius correctly clocked was that I had exactly zero interest in that back-slapping mess of compromise for even the best journalists. As an assistant in the Style section, I had to buttonhole the grandees of D.C. to get quotes to make quick and tasty dishes of nothing that were lapped up by the chattering class on the Potomac. I hated it. More to the point, I hated their entitlement and certainty that the future belonged to them. In my heart of hearts, even just seeing the tiny flashes of what these techies were making, I couldn’t shake the idea that those who invented and innovated would be the ones who mattered. I thought of the quote from Mary Poppins, who when asked by the Banks children how long she would remain, answered, “I’ll stay till the wind changes.”

The wind had definitely changed, and to me, it was an easy choice between attending more soul-crushing D.C. parties or standing on that beach in Kitty Hawk, watching something remarkable glide by. Ignatius already knew what my decision would be and said what turned out to be the understatement of all time: “This Internet thing seems pretty cool.”

By 1996, I had spent months at AOL working on my first book, AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web. I had done some final interviews in New York, and as I walked out of a building on Park Avenue on a sparklingly blue-sky day, it all became clear: If I was really going to do this, I had to leave the suffocating East Coast. I needed to move to California.

Maybe I was like the people who wanted in on the Gold Rush. I always think about those who were content to stay on the East Coast or stopped in Pennsylvania or Ohio. They only went so far before settling. Not me. I had transformed into one of the nuts who kept going. I had to be there to fill a vacuum, since nobody who was there was really covering the business side. The reports mostly came from techies, who focused on chip speed, and the gadget fanboys who wanted free stuff. When I told people at the Post that I wanted to head west, they were confused because I didn’t know about engineering. I said to them: “Don’t you understand? This is not about technology. This is about everything else but the technology.”

Only one person fully supported my move. Walt Mossberg was already the most famous of tech reporters for his popular Wall Street Journal column, “Personal Technology,” which debuted in 1991 and opened with the single greatest lede about tech: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it isn’t your fault.” I had introduced myself to the goateed guru while writing my AOL book, and he graciously agreed to an interview. Walt and I instantly became close, bound by professional kismet and a tech mind meld.

I began asking him questions about everything and discovered that he knew everything and everyone. I loved hanging in his office at the Journal, which had a “computer museum” that included, as one profile of him enumerated, “a Timex Sinclair 1000 (his first computer), an Apple IIe, a portable Apple IIc, a first-gen Macintosh, a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100, a Palm Pilot, an Atari 800.” We spent hours geeking out together, and Walt could see me straining at the smallness of my little D.C. pond. At a basement lunch place on Connecticut Avenue NW where we were eating French dip sandwiches and talking tech, he could see that I was eager to swim in a larger ocean, the Pacific one. Walt looked me straight in the eye and said: “Go West, young woman.”

And that is exactly what I did.