How the World Got Wired · Routers and the People Who Built Them

Why I Am Telling You This

I am telling you this story for two reasons.

The first is that you should understand that routers — the little blinking boxes that move every packet of every internet message in your life — are not abstract. They were built by specific people. Bill Yeager. Len Bosack. Sandy Lerner. A small staff in a Stanford office and then in a small California town. Without them, or without somebody very much like them, the internet would not have been usable in the form it became. TCP/IP was the constitution. Cisco built the courthouses where the constitution was actually obeyed, one packet at a time.

The second reason is that Cisco is the first really clear example, in this book, of a pattern you are about to see over and over again.

The pattern is this: a piece of foundational technology gets paid for by the public — by ARPA, by the NSF, by universities funded by governments, by international laboratories like CERN. That technology is then released to the world, often for free. Then, a small group of clever people figures out how to build a company on top of that free foundation, and gets enormously rich.

Cerf and Kahn gave TCP/IP away. Cisco made many billions of dollars selling the routers that ran TCP/IP. Berners-Lee gave the web away. Other companies, very soon, will make many billions of dollars selling the things that run on the web. Each time, the gift at the bottom is what made the wealth at the top possible.

I do not think this is necessarily bad. Some of what these companies built is enormously useful. But you should see the pattern clearly. The internet you use is a layered cake. The bottom layers were paid for by your grandparents’ taxes and given away. The top layers are owned by some of the richest companies that have ever existed.

In the next chapter, we are going to meet a twenty-two-year-old who, in a public computer lab at the University of Illinois, wrote a piece of free software that anybody could use to read the web — and then, less than a year later, walked across the country and turned his free software into one of the most spectacular get-rich-quick stories in American history.

His name is Marc Andreessen. The free software is called Mosaic. What happened next is the moment everything tipped.

That’s Chapter 9.

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