Internet History Podcast

By Brian McCulloughTechnology History

Internet History Podcast episodes

June 05, 2016 109. The History of Sierra Online with Laine Nooney
Summary
Ken and Roberta Williams were the founders of the legendary PC gaming company Sierra Online. Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at Georgia Tech, Laine Nooney, joins the show to discuss the history and legacy of Sierra Online. You can find out more about Laine's work at her website, LaineNooney.com and by following her on Twitter at Sierra_OffLine.
Pictures of Ken and Roberta Williams:
Picture 1
Picture 2
A screencap from King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne
A screencap from Kings Quest V
A screencap from Leisure Suit Larry
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1 hr 13 min
May 30, 2016 108. BabyCenter.com Founders Mark Selcow and Matt Glickman
Mark Selcow and Matt Glickman were the founders of BabyCenter.com. The story of BabyCenter is a combination of several themes we've discussed on this show: creating community as a strategy for building a sustainable audience, attempting e-commerce in the 1990s, and, most interestingly, we get into an in-depth discussion of their experiences of the DotCom bubble.
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1 hr 2 min
May 22, 2016 107. Founder of Marketwatch, Larry Kramer @lkramer
Summary
Larry Kramer was the founder of MarketWatch.com. He’s also been the President and Publisher of USA Today and he’s currently interim CEO of TheStreet.com. We talk to him about creating a brand like MarketWatch in a space dominated by powerful incumbents like The Wall Street Journal, CNBC and others. But we also hear what it was like to work in the legendary Washington Post newsroom in the 1970s and 80s, as well as what it takes to bring success to modern media properties like USA Today in the digital era. If you want a first hand primer of when digital and old-world media collided, you couldn’t do better than to listen to the career path of Larry Kramer.
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1 hr 26 min
May 15, 2016 106. Co-Founder of Tesla, Marc Tarpenning
Summary
Marc Tarpenning, along with Martin Eberhard, was the cofounder of Tesla Motors back in 2003. But before that, Tarpenning and Eberhard were also the cofounders of NuvoMedia, which produced one of the world's first ebook devices, the rocket eBook. So, for the first part of the episode, Mark recounts the story of NuvoMedia and then about 25 minutes in we begin the founding of Tesla, in my opinion, perhaps the most amazing startup story of the last 20 years.
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1 hr 24 min
May 09, 2016 105. Tom Rielly, Founder of PlanetOut
Summary
Tom Rielly was the founder of PlanetOut, the largest LGBT website and community of the 1990s. Tom recounts the unique impact the web and online technology had on the LGBT community and, prior to that, remembers the early days of the Mac industry. But of course, Tom is best known today for his work at TED, where he is director of Community as well as the TED Fellows program. So we get some interesting TED history as well, especially how posting TED Talks online has transformed the organization.
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1 hr 24 min
May 02, 2016 104. Suck Again! Joey Anuff And Carl Steadman Return!
Summary
What more do I need to say? Joey and Carl are back for round two.
You can visit the Suck archives here.

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1 hr 25 min
April 25, 2016 103. Rafat Ali @rafat of PaidContent and Skift
Summary
I can't be sure about this exactly, but I would hazard to say Rafat Ali is possibly patient zero when it comes to taking a blog and turning it into a real, 21st century media company. Before the Huffington Post, before TechCrunch, even, maybe, kind of, before Gawker, Rafat founded PaidContent in 2002. He later sold it to the Guardian Media Group in 2008. Today he is the CEO of Skift.com, a media vertical in the travel industry space. Rafat has such an amazing story: an immigrant's story, an accidental entrepreneur's story, and, basically, the first-hand story of how blogging morphed into "professional," modern digital media.
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1 hr 32 min
April 10, 2016 102. Analysis Ep. 5 - The History and Future of Automotive Tech with Mike Dushane
I know it’s a bit beyond our usual chronology of 90s-era technology, but car tech has come up so much in recent episodes, that I thought it was high time to learn more about the history and future of automotive tech. Electronic vehicles, Tesla, autonomous vehicles, but also, basic recent car tech advances like navigation systems and the like. So, to help me with that, I spoke with Mike Dushane, a 20 year web veteran, like myself, but also a veteran of Automobile Magazine, Car and Driver and, generally, an observer of and participant in the automotive industry over the last couple of decades as digital technology and cars have collided.
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1 hr 19 min
March 21, 2016 101. Matt Kursh on Pen Computing, Sidewalk and MSN
Summary
Matt Kursh was a part of the pre-web Silicon Valley frenzy for pen computing that we’ve spoken about several times on this show. Matt is kind enough to give us an in depth look at that mini-bubble and explains how it happened and how it paved the way, in a roundabout way, for modern handheld devices. Matt was also involved in several Microsoft initiatives in the 1990s, including the pioneering local site Sidewalk and MSN.com at the height of the portal era.
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1 hr 8 min
March 13, 2016 100. The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates? The Gary Kildall Story
Summary
To celebrate our 100th episode, we’re taking a special look at one of the foundational legends of the technology industry. It’s about the man who invented the modern disc operating system (the OS) and the concept of the software platform. That man was Gary Kildall. And the question we examine in this episode is, why is Bill Gates the richest man in the world, and not Gary Kildall? Could things have turned out differently?
In this episode we use audio from the following documentaries:
Triumph of the Nerds
and
Computer Chronicles
Special thanks to Justin Schwinghamer for the original score and the voice acting.
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1 hr 39 min