The late Steve Jobs has been credited with decisively influencing the development and course of several industries. More accurately, he even invented entire industries. But not much has been said about Job’s contribution to the creation of the World Wide Web.

Recently, based on a statement from World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, some blogs tried to draw traffic with a post on how the concept of ‘inter-personal computing’ advocated by NeXT computer, a creation of Steve Jobs,  inspired Berners-Lee. Truly a very tenuous link.

But those who have researched the origins of the Web know that Jobs’ influence goes beyond a mere slogan. More than Berners-Lee, his colleague and co-founder of the Web, Robert Cailliau, has been forthright on the role played by the NeXT computer.

As he recalled later, “Mike Sendall buys a NeXT cube for evaluation, and gives it to Tim. His prototype implementation on NeXTStep is made in the space of a few months, thanks to the qualities of the NeXTStep software development system. This prototype offers WYSIWYG browsing/authoring!”

WYSIWYG refers to what you see is what you get, used to describe html editors which display content while editing in the exact format in which it would appear to the end-user. Astonishing to know that a WYSIWYG editor found a place in NeXT, which was released in 1988.

Those of us who have taken the Internet History course at Coursera are familiar with a 1999 interview of Robert Cailliau by Prof. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan, which is available in YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2GylLq59rI). In it, Cailliau explains at length how the NeXT computer (created by Steve Jobs after he was kicked out of Apple), which was then considered ahead of its time, provided the right environment for the creation of the Web:

• Every time you clicked, you had another window.
  
• Every time you clicked on a diagram, you had the diagram in another window.
  
• When you clicked on a map, you found it in postscript, scalable, perfectly printable format. 
  
• You try to port that to another system, it went berserk.
  
• In Mosaic (an early browser with graphical interface) you had only one window, and every time you clicked you had to replace the content of that window, which is not what we wanted.
• In Mosaic, every time you got a page, you found the images inline...It was easier to do it on the NeXT system.
• There's a big difference between making an editor, and something that just puts up a page. 
  
• There was already supplied as part of the NeXT library, an editable text object. Tim used it to make the first browser...
  

Cailliau was frank enough to admit that he started learning HTML in all seriousness, even though he helped develop and write its standards, only after the company discontinued making NeXT! “Before, we produced the documents, but we never saw any HTML or URLs. Because you just said link this to that...not by typing in a URL. If you needed to there was a special window you could call up to type the URL, but it wasn't the usual thing. I learned the navigation bar and all that the hard way afterwards,” the Web co-founder said in the interview.

To place things in context, the World Wide Web was made possible by the internet protocols already set up by the US defence establishment for electronic communication. Berners-Lee and Cailliau invented the Web as a system of connected hypertext documents accessed via the internet.

CAILLIAU  ENSURED THAT THE WEB PREVAILED OVER GOPHER

Today, in retelling the story of the creation of the World Wide Web, one senses a tendency to diminish the role of Cailliau. He may have played a supporting role to Berners-Lee in the development of HTML, the first Web server, and the first Web browser, but in one crucial aspect, the Web owes its success to a far-reaching decision taken by Cailliau.

It should be remembered that the Web was not the only protocol for distributing and retrieving documents over the internet. For a while at least, it had a serious competitor in Gopher. In fact, Mosaic, the first browser with graphical user interface, provided access to both Gopher as well as the Web. Many Gopher supporters considered it faster, efficient, and much more organised than the Web. Initially, its simplicity and ease of use ensured it was more popular than the Web. Why then did the Web end up as the dominant protocol? There are no easy answers. But some think that the announcement in 1993 by the University of Minnesota to charge licensing fees for use of the Gopher server spooked users and affected its adoption. Gopher, incidentally, was created by researchers at the university. In contrast, Cailliau, who worked with the legal service of CERN —where both he and Berners-Lee worked — played a role in persuading the institute to release the Web technology into the public domain the same year. This move proved decisive in the rapid worldwide adoption of the Web.

So we salute Robert Cailliau for all his great contributions towards the advancement of human progress. And we also acknowledge that Jobs had indeed played an indirect role in the creation of the World Wide Web.

The price per click (PPC) offering AdWords is Google’s most successful product to date and its largest revenue earner. Google’s revenues from advertising for the full year in 2013 were $50 billion. AdWords was initially started by aping the successful model of the then competing search engine GoTo. But the engineers at Google, under the directions of Larry and Sergey, quickly took it to another level with plenty of value-adds. In his book I’m Feeling Lucky, former Google consumer marketing head Douglas Edwards has given insights on how the founders settled on the name AdWords for their new offering.

IT SHOULDN’T SOUND FUNNY WHEN REPEATED FIVE TIMES
Edwards says the new ad serving system began in late 2000 with the working title ‘AdsToo’, although no one wanted it to become the permanent name of the offering. Larry Page left the field open saying all suggestions are welcome except those which sounded funny when repeated five times fast. Omid Kordestani, the sales head, did not want a combination word which started with Google. Within this broad framework, suggestions started pouring in. ‘PrestoAds’ and ‘Self-serve Ads’were two names which earned the support of Salar Kamangar. Susan Wojcicki veered around to choosing ‘AdsDirect’ as the name for the offering. But they were not done yet.

Edwards says he started off on a bad note by pushing for GIDYAP (Google Interactive Do-It-Yourself Ad Program) which was received with great derision. To retrieve lost ground, he had to come up with something better. So he tried ‘BuyWords’, a play between ‘bywords’ and ‘buy words’. It met with the approval of the sales team. And even Larry found it acceptable. But just when Edwards thought the matter was settled, he sensed that a new round of lobbying had just begun.

So he went home that day and worked on a new set of names for about an hour. The next day morning, he sent out the fresh list of possibilities:

Promote Control

Ad-O-Mat

Ad Commander

Impulse Ads

AdWords

He liked the last one the best, and spent considerable time selling it. “It’s new, and improved. It’s like ‘BuyWords’ without the ‘Buy’,” he pleaded.

Redemption at last. Salar liked it. Omid liked it. Larry liked it. Sergey cast the final vote. He told the engineering team that the new ad serving system would be called AdWords. And so it came to be.

e.o.m.

Serendipity, or happy chance finding, has been the basis for many inventions and discoveries. After all Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas when he was sailing in search of the wealth of India. Before him, Archimedes got the crucial insight regarding his principle while taking a bath, as the famous anecdote tells us.

Random searches on the Web often turn out to be adventures in happy chance findings. While search engines are investing extraordinary resources to make search results more accurate, to bring to the searcher a result closer to exactly what he had in mind, the internet often reveals nuggets of information when searchers start following links at random. So never discount the power of serendipity since many inventions which upended established ways of thinking and acting had their origins in happy chance findings.

SERENDIPITY HELPED MIYAMOTO OVERTURN INDUSTRY DOGMA
Let’s take an example from the world of gaming. Shigeru Miyamoto is a legend in the world of video gaming. Starting from Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros, and The Legend of Zelda, Miyamoto had re-defined video gaming and made Nintendo a major force in the industry. But by the early years of the aughts, Miyamoto was considered past his prime, and the creator of some of the most critically acclaimed and successful games and franchises of all time was regarding by some as past his best.

The gaming industry itself had by then switched on to a period when power, and the intensity of the graphics embedded in the consoles, were considered everything. As Joshua Cooper Ramo narrates in his book The Age of the Unthinkable, “Sony and Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to custom-build graphics processors capable of performing several trillion calculations per second. These chips were so expensive that Sony and Microsoft lost money on each gaming console.”

What’s more, both the companies, which were by then leading their market with their PlayStation and Xbox consoles respectively, started investing millions more in new chips and hardware, anticipating the arrival of hi-definition television and more intense power computing. But at his lab in Kyoto, Miyamoto remained unimpressed. “Too many powerful consoles can’t co-exist,” he had concluded. “It’s like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction.”

When word leaked about Miyamoto’s shift in thinking, the gaming press started bombarding him with questions. All he would say was a cryptic comment: “We are kind of in a strange period where power is the crux of whether something is going to be successful,” he said. “That seems a little bit odd. If we rely solely on the power of the console to dictate what we are going with games, I think that tends to suppress the creativity of the designers.” Enough said. Many of the listeners thought the gaming veteran had finally lost his grip on the industry.

Wii SCORED WITH TECHNOLOGY SOURCED FROM AIR-BAGS
As it happened, Miyamoto had the last laugh. Nintendo’s new console called the Wii, released in 2006, used graphics technology two generations behind PS3 and Xbox 360. But it just came out of nowhere to turn the industry upside down. What distinguished it was its motion control element which transformed gaming, till then an experience enjoyed by couch potatoes, into a much more physical sport. As Ramo says in his book, “In homes in Japan, the United States, and Europe, owners cleared space in front of their TVs, pushed their couches out of the way instead of sitting on them, then jumped, crawled and flailed around with their Wiimotes. Wii killed the idea that a video game was something you played without breaking a sweat.”

Powering all this action was an innovative chip inside the Nintendo Wii. It had rather interesting origins. Ramo says, “It hadn’t come from some geek-stuffed gaming chip design house. It had come, instead, from inside an automobile air-bag system, very similar to what you have in your car. The chip was a small silicon tab called accelerometer, a breakthrough device that could measure the most minute changes in direction and speed. In your car, the chip is programmed to notice the sort of changes that could be associated with an accident — sudden jerks, wild skids, the instant snap of collision. When it senses these radical changes, it fires off the air-bags in a carefully planned sequence. But the best of these chips, the most advanced, could measure smaller and more nuanced movements.”

Miyamoto was struck by its possibilities. How about combining these chips with the hand-held controllers of video game consoles, he wondered? Nintendo, ever ready to invest resources into transforming Miyamoto’s every new idea into reality, worked hard at it. Still it took them four years to get the accelerometer to work in a gaming console. Nintendo’ software engineers developed new ways to translate human movement into virtual action. In the end, the efforts were worth it. Sony and Microsoft were soon forced to play catch-up with their PlayStation Move and Kinect, respectively. Gaming was never the same after Wii. So who says random searches and enquiries have no value?
e.o.m.