🎧 32:45 - 35:25 (02:40)

The internet revolution was initially seen as finished, but then the potential of the internet for mainstream consumer use became apparent. This pattern of feeling late to the game has repeated in the tech industry over time, with new opportunities emerging such as machine learning and crypto. Despite concerns about reaching the limits of technological advancement, the industry has continually found ways to expand, driven by the potential of computing and software innovation.

David Rosenthal: Valentine about it. And Don was like, it's always going to be bigger. As long as Moore's law continues, then just the number and scale of industries that computing technology can address is always going to grow as long as that is happening. So the next generation is always going to be an order of magnitude bigger than this generation. That has played out time and time and time again.

Ben Gilbert: And of course, Moore's Law technically didn't continue. But the number of cores for the same price that you can put on a single system on a chip has sort of followed the same trajectory as Moore's Law. So even when we hit the upper limit on certain things in physics, the industry seems to figure out a way to continue to have the spirit of Moore's law and the sort of price and power of compute continues such that, and this is another Andreessen saying, but at some point, the hardware limitations go away and compute becomes free. And then it's really all about with an infinite and free resource of compute, what can you do with software?

David Rosenthal: Yep. So,

Ben Gilbert: okay, back to Mark. He can't even get a job

David Rosenthal: at like a big respected PC or software company. He moves out to Palo Alto and he gets a job at Enterprise Integration Technologies, which I think was a tech like implementation consulting firm, like doing like PeopleSoft installations for companies. You can imagine Marc Andreessen's fit with an environment like this. So of course, but as this is happening, this is when Mosaic is rocketing up this adoption curve. So he kind of, it's this weird thing where he's this kid out of school working a no-name job, but he's kind of a celebrity. And

Ben Gilbert: he's gotten kind of shoved out. And there's two sides of the story. I think the folks at NCSA would say that Mosaic was an official project. Mark says they sort of self-organized. It became very clear to him that the sort of bureaucratic leadership at the NCSA was going to sort of take the lead on this and start doing the press interviews. And they did own the license to the source code. And so they, you know an employee and it became NCSA's thing, not Mark Andreessen's

David Rosenthal: thing. Yep. Oh boy, is that going to come back? So enter Jim Clark. Of course, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, SGI, Utah, mafia alumni. He had just left SGI. He had been feuding with the board and he's out. He's looking for his next thing, but he has a non solicit from SGI. So he can't take any of his people with him, but he knows he wants to start a new thing. He's got a chip on his shoulder. He's like, I got another act. I'm going to prove all these people wrong. He needs to go find new blood. He hears about mosaic.

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