Engineers invented the Internet, but it was entrepreneurs who brought it, along with its superabundance of content, to the world.

There are roughly four billion people living today who have no experience of the world before the Web and who, understandably, think that things like Facebook and Google just are, like the clouds and the trees. In many ways, this book is for them, to give them a picture of life before the Web and let them see how the media world they live in came to be. It will also be of interest to media historians and technology enthusiasts.

In 1989 when the Internet was formally liberated from its federally-enforced non-profit and fully subsidized status, no one had a clue how it would pay its way. That cluelessness persisted unbroken until 1994 when an auspicious series of unlikely and independent initiatives spontaneously came together and made the path forward “obvious”.

This book focuses on the Web’s critical formative years, 1993 to 1995, and does it in a comprehensive way that no other author has yet attempted. The narrative is animated by the previously untold story of how one man's flash of insight into the commercial value of clicks helped transform the Internet into the multi-trillion-dollar marketplace we know today.

Stories from the formative years of the Web rarely, if ever, told about Marc Andreessen and Netscape, Tim Bernes-Lee and CERN, Bill Gates and Microsoft, San Francisco's pioneering digital multimedia community, Wired, the pre-Internet BBS culture, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's early Apple days, and one of the world's most influential, and almost never discussed, tech incubators.

Fully indexed and accompanied by unique documents and other artifacts from the era.