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  • Ken McCarthy organized and sponsored the first conference ever held on the subject of the commercial potential of the World Wide Web. His company Amacord Inc., formerly E-Media, was one of the first Internet-based businesses in the world.

    In addition to working with small and mid-sized business clients since 1993, McCarthy was a consultant to NEC's Biglobe, the largest online service in Japan, from 1996 to 2001. His book The Internet Business Manual was the first book on web entrepreneurship published in that country. He is also credited by Hotwired magazine with being one of the people responsible for the development and popularization of the banner ad, one of the key underpinnings of commercial Internet publishing.

    A graduate of Princeton University, McCarthy came to the Internet industry with a varied background which included technical consulting for two of New York's top investment banks, lecturing on educational psychology at MIT, Columbia, and NYU, and founding and operating a number of small businesses, including one that helped produce an Academy Award winning documentary.

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March 02, 2006

Let it snow

It's snowing in Tivoli right now which makes me think about a great DVD I just got.

It's called BBS: The Documentary and I highly recommend it.

It chronicles the wild and wooly age of computer bulletin boards (BBS), the "online world" that existed before the Internet. I found the film absolutely fascinating...

One of the things that jumped out at me was the story behind how the first BBS came to be.

What's a BBS? It's a long story if you don't already knowit, but to cut to the chase, before the web, there used to be over one hundred thousand of them. (AOL started out as a little BBS.)

Ward Christensen wrote the software and Randy Suess put together the hardware for the very first one.

What inspired their world-changing idea?

Snow.

On the evening of January 15, a storm dumped a ton of snow on Chicago and neither Ward nor Randy could get to work. To keep themselves from going stir crazy, they decided to start work on a project they'd been talking about for a while: making it possible for members of their computer club to 'upload' content directly to the club's computer.

A month later, on February 16, 1978, the first computer bulletin board was launched.

Let it snow!

The web site for BBS: The Documentary is here: http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

March 02, 2006 in Internet history |

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