Mark Nichols

The following are excerpts from my book, which details how I co-founded Digital Island, an international telecommunications company, in 1996. In this role, I was responsible for acquiring the network infrastructure that connected 95% of the world’s ISPs and internet-accessible users together, seamlessly over one autonomous worldwide network, for the effective globalization of the internet.

This book explains how our new global network enabled:

1. 1. The globalization of eCommerce with Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and E*Trade
   2. The first internet peering connectivity with the People’s Republic of China, which I contracted for during my travels to Beijing to negotiate the terms of service with the Minister of Telecom, Professor Xing Li of Tsinghua University
   3. The largest media streaming network in the world with Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq
   4. The globalization of eLearning and ePublishing with Stanford University
   5. The first global Content Delivery Network (CDN), aka Local Content Manager
   6. The first on-demand allocation of bandwidth over the internet, aka Reservation Resource Protocol (RSVP)
   7. In 1996, when I negotiated and signed a service contract with Cisco Systems to host Cisco.com, they were the 587th largest company in the USA. Three years later, in 1999, they became the most valuable company in the world, just 15 years after their inception and while employing our network to scale and support their meteoric growth.
   8. The award and recognition as the world’s first Cisco Powered Network, which became the worldwide internetworking industry benchmark
   9. The internet access platform that the Google’s founders used for their upstream ISP connections to build the first repository of Google search results while they were graduate school students at Stanford University in 1998 (google.stanford.edu)

The genesis network diagram to globalize the internet drawn by Mark Nichols, June 1996. This rendering precedes the application filing for our company business license by 4 months.

This image above conceptualizes the figurative Points of Presence (POPs) representing the discussion points for the first internet-centric, global wide-area networking of AsiaPac, the Americas, and Western Europe, with the unnamed POPs representing the Rest of the World.

The image below is my CAD network drawing from July 1996, drafted with Adobe Pagemaker on my MacIIcx that I acquired in 1990. This conceptual diagram shows that I have specified California as the network hub rather than Hawaii, as was originally envisioned.

On August 5, 1996, I contractually joined together with Ron & Sanne Higgins to create Digital Island; we were now a company of 3 people. Anecdotally, we had not yet met each other in person, as up to this time our 2 months of business development interactions had been initiated, progressed, and matured using only the phone and email. A month later we would meet together in person for the first time in Honolulu, specifically to discuss the product direction and evolution for the company.

At this time I was working without being paid an income. Though we had an employment contract, in lieu of cash compensation, I accrued a future “prorated stock equivalent” in a company that did not yet have municipal legality, corporate registration, or securities assets. For the record, though there was talk of investors, at this time there was no existent company business license or ficticious business name filing, and thus, there was no way to open a business bank account to deposit such funds, nor was there a stock instrument in place to securitize an investor.

Subsequently, we received investor money three months later, but only after we had acquired our first customer, Cisco Systems. Within days of acquiring our first customer, ComVentures wrote us a check for $300K in angel financing, indicating their intention to lead the upcoming first round of $3.5M in our Series A. Two weeks later, our newly oboarded CFO initiated to provide our now 4 person team with company paychecks and employee benefits for the first time.

The network illustration below I created as an evolution of the one above, and I attached this as an addendum to the service agreement with Cisco Systems for our hosting the cisco.com website that I negotiated and signed on November 7, 1996—you can see that contract a few pages down.

 

Note to peers: The frame relay (aka frame) network was swapped out to clear channel (aka international private line circuits, or IPLCs) after our proof of concept in Q4 1996. The inherent vice of frame is that it doesn’t offer quality of service (QOS) for latency or security. We made the decision in mid-September of 1996 that we would modify our mission statement and attempt to globalize eCommerce with secure transactional services that I referred to as “Merchant Transport” (more about this in the paragraphs below).

On November 7th, 1996, I contracted with Cisco Systems to host the Cisco.com website as our first customer for our proposed global network. When I signed the contract, we were a 90-day-old, three-person company, and we now needed to hire many highly qualified and talented people to support our commitment to Cisco in acquiring and managing the network infrastructure to globalize the internet.

To realize this agreement with Cisco proposing to trust us with their website, I first had to productize and articulate the hosting services, calculate the financial modeling, negotiate the terms of service for the QOS metrics, and then personally endorse the document at the Cisco Systems HQ campus. We used this contract, which formalized our agreement as a proof of concept, to secure our angel financing and over $779 million in subsequent rounds of investment.

At the start of 1996, Cisco ranked #587 in the US Fortune 1000 for capitalization value. Three years later, in 1999, Cisco became the world’s most valuable company. Founded in 1984, Cisco achieved this level of success for the first time in history that an internet company ranked as the #1 most valuable company in the USA and the world, and they accomplished it in just 15 years from startup. During this time, we were the web hosting contractor and ISP for Cisco, which provided that global scalability.

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As noted in the renderings above, to enable our change in mission statement to enable eCommerce, in Q1 of 1997 we pivoted to swapping out the frame relay ports in Hawaii to all new IPLCs demarcated to the Stanford University data center, as Stanford was our second customer (you can see the press release a few pages down), and I contracted with them to install our first California-based network hub within their campus data center premises.

Though, at this moment in time, it is important to note that on September 6, 1996, the business was originally defined as a “Digital Publisher…service in the Pacific Rim”, and that business model changed significantly within weeks of this municipal filing. See the filing with the Hawaii Department of Commerce below.

For the business application originally conceived above, the initial use of frame was preferred due to lower costs from the shared customer utility of line capacity; as frame is managed by the carrier, not the customer, and frame has an inherent burstable-capable design. Thus, for the digital publishing services company that Digital Island originally aspired to become, frame was the fastest way to market, the least expensive, has an immediately scalable architecture, and there is no engineering requirement for us to create our own team of network engineering and management–but, this plan was very short lived.

During my visit to Hawaii during the second week of September with Ron and Sanne, we expanded the network design, expense, and degree of difficulty to build and manage our own network with the intensified goal of enabling the globalization of eCommerce.

In the image below is the email that Sanne addressed to me on September 18, 1996. Sanne mentions and requests a copy of my proposed “Merchant Transport” idea to incorporate into her marketing materials that I had previously shared with Ron during our dinner conversation a few nights earlier at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Waikiki. The email below memorializes the providence of my initiation to pioneer the globalization of eCommerce, and it pivots the company away from the original concept of “Digital Publisher…service in the Pacific Rim.”

Note that this email is dated just 12 days after the business license filing above. Subsequently, just 6 months after this email, we signed Visa International as our 3rd customer in Q2 1997. By enabling Visa on our secure IPLC network, together we realized the financial services potential of global eCommerce, and it happened effectively overnight with a DNS update.

Immediately after activating Visa, if a merchant had a website and their consumer had internet access, by them choosing to use the financial settlement services of Visa, their real-time financial transaction could be completed securely in under 1/3 of a second, 24 hours a day, available to 95% of the world’s online users, and was accessible exclusively on our global network.

Shortly thereafter, we onboarded E*Trade, Charles Schwab Online, and MasterCard to join the services of Visa. Now anyone, at anytime, using a PC from anywhere in the world with internet access could transact eCommerce and invest their money worldwide. The global benefit was that all financial institutions and online vendors became available and accessible to the majority of the world’s population for financial settlements.

From my initiation, productization, and financial proforma of merchant transport, together with the critical contributions from the others on our team, we began experiencing the genesis of an internet-centric worldwide financial revolution.

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Now take a look at the illustration below and envision yourself going back in time to 1996. The blue lines are the areas of service for regional internet service providers (e.g., France Telecom, Japan Telecom, Singapore Telecom, Deutsche Telekom). And the red lines are the oceanic and terrestrial fiber optics of international private line circuits (IPLCs) that I contracted for and put into service, spanning all continents and to all major metros and connected them to 95% of the world’s ISPs and internet users, altogether, seamlessly, for the world’s first internet protocol-based and autonomous global wide area network.

How did the caterpillar become a butterfly? Now visualize:

1. Take away the red lines—that’s the “internet caterpillar” of 1996. This is before the first global network to facilitate seamless end-to-end internet access to all major metros and internet-available service areas around the world.

Without seamless global connectivity, the internet protocol suite, which incorporates the World Wide Web application layer protocol software code, does not avail internetworking usage outside of local hosts, regional footprint, and limited peering relationships. Consequently, ISPs and enterprises that were using the internet and WWW software primarily applied it in use within their corporate or regional-wide networks, aka intranets.

Therefore, the potential and suggested usefulness of the Internet and World Wide Web software protocol applications, with only their regional or private corporate implementations, remained uncertain, and thus, the internet protocols were serving merely as a “World Wide Web” in software title only. At the time, worldwide utilization could have been achieved with the software protocols, but at the beginning of 1996, nobody had yet implemented the internet protocol software into service on a single, end-to-end, autonomous global network.

In 1996, when I began building this network, ISPs were territory-focused within their own regional network infrastructure. An example is France Telecom and Japan Telecom, which mostly service French and Japanese businesses and consumers, respectively. They offer services only for internet access to content within their sphere of influence and limited peering relationships, which physically limits their network footprint and electronically compromises the customers access to content beyond their network intranet. 

Imagine an “internet” where Rostelecom in Russia was not connected to Embratel in Brazil, Malaysia Telecom was not connected to Telefonica in Spain, Korea Telecom was not connected to NetVision in Israel, HiNet in Taiwan was not connected to Imaginet in France, Telstra in Australia was not connected to Telefonica in Spain, and China was not connected to anyone outside of their education intranet, and that was simply operating on a single 64kb network (64kb is a single telephone line of capacity) shared amongst their 300 member universities. The timing of user adoption rates was a key issue here, as the economies of scale for globalization had not yet been financially viable with a solution to generate shareholder return on such a large scale of a worldwide networking endeavor.

You could have a website or web-centric application anywhere in the world, but that does not mean everybody in the world could access or use it. By design, regional ISPs did not guarantee access to content outside of their networks, especially to content in other countries or stored in networks located on other continents. Prior to our network roll-out, QOS (quality of service) for the internet did not exist before we guaranteed 300 milliseconds (aka 3/10th of 1 second) round-trip to anywhere in the world, at anytime, for any volume of payload. Our network QOS guarantee is what enabled our ability to globalize eCommerce.

2. Now put the red lines back in—that’s the “internet butterfly” infrastructure metamorphosis of globalization that we started in 1996. These global private lines that I acquired spanned the world and created the first global ISP backbone, interconnecting all major regional ISPs within each metro, thus realizing the full capability of the internet suite of software protocols.

By January 1999, the Digital Island network had connected all the world’s major ISPs that were currently available for internet connectivity, including those in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Russia, Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Beijing, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Virginia, Seattle, Honolulu, Palo Alto, and Santa Clara.

From a historical perspective, the solutions introduced above were a new market opportunity because our global network services did not pre-exist prior to our company start-up, and thus, we were able to contract to host and broadcast the websites to 881 customers in under four years from our company’s inception.

These clients included Cisco Systems, Stanford University, Microsoft, Google, Visa, Intel, Compaq, Hewlett Packard, eTrade, Charles Schwab, Novell, National Semiconductor, MasterCard, Sun Microsystems, Sandpiper Networks, NetGravity, Canon, AristaSoft, Universal Music Group, ABN Amro, UBS Warburg, Digital River, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, EBSCO Publishing, Fox Broadcasting, ZDnet, Reuters, Kenneth Cole, MSNBC, Major League Baseball, Time Warner-Road Runner, AOL, CNBC, JP Morgan Chase, Sony, Bloomberg, and over 850 others.

Note that with 881 customers in four years and with 220 business days a year, our customer acquisition rate averaged more than one new customer every business day for four years.

With the above in mind, to accomplish our goals we would need to connect all of the Tier One ISPs around the world that were actively participating in internet services. By connecting all of the Tier 1 telecom ISPs worldwide, we would become the world’s first “Tier 0” carrier/ISP. Although the term “Tier 0” is not technically used by tradition, it serves conveniently to describe our efforts to organize the legacy Tier 1 incumbents worldwide. Therefore, our business statement and executive summary aimed to position us as the network services tier above them. It was also the foundation for acquiring customers, investors, service providers, and human collateral to make it materialize.

What we believed is that you can dream as much as you want, code as much protocol software as required, and raise as much money as you can, but eventually, highly qualified and valuable individuals must choose to join your company, perform the work that transforms emergent technology into a service, and then provide the ongoing and scalable support for all of it. It was the people who created the networking inventions, and those who made the investments, the installations, and the career commitments who are the people that sparked the revolution of information sharing and, in doing so, contributed to changing the way people communicate and transact.

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The following content on this site will provide a brief overview of how the financial and commercial sectors became involved in my team’s entrepreneurial journey, which started with the creation and assembly of a business case, network architecture, customer acquisitions, specialized human collateral, and a $779 million speculative venture capital investment. Beginning in 1996, we started making this investment to fully realize the potential of those software code protocols, originally written and intended for worldwide implementation twenty-two years prior for TCP/IP and seven years prior for WWW.

Below is our company’s first press release announcing the above services contract to host the Cisco Systems web site and the announcement of our “NEW GLOBAL NETWORK.” January 1997.

 

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We acquired our second customer, Stanford University, for the enablement and distribution of their e-Publication and e-Learning services. Prior to this press release, I had already initiated our first California network POP on the Stanford campus in January of 1997.

Stanford was one of the first two nodes of the internet, along with UCLA, in 1969, and we were now hosting and broadcasting their website on our global network in 1997. Consider the magnitude of the value proposition of our global network, such that Stanford and Cisco were our first two clients. Our services also included providing Stanford with the internet platform that the founders of Google used for upstream ISP connections to build the first repository of Google search results, while the founders were graduate school students at Stanford University in 1998 (google.stanford.edu).

With Cisco and Stanford on-boarded, the world of technology and finance began to take very serious notice.

 

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The press release for our E*Trade customer acquisition, investment, and board seat. Prior to this, we had Visa on-network since 1997, and it was only a few months later that we brought online Charles Schwab and MasterCard. Seamless and global eCommerce with Visa, MasterCard, Charles Schwab, and E*Trade were all simultaneously available on a six-continent scale, in effect for the first time in every major metro worldwide and only available on our network.

And thus, from these milestone achievements, we enabled the globalization of eCommerce.

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For a little trip down memory lane, the three images below are the original receipts for the first tranche of SunMicro servers we acquired to build our global network and make the web worldwide. The shipping dates are September and October 1996. Note that the shipping of the servers is addressed to my residence in Alamo, CA, because at this time our three-person start-up team doesn’t yet have an office space, a data center, or a customer (that’s all a month or more away).

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The following images are a sampling of the pages from my passport, which document my business development travels to acquire the infrastructure to build our global network.

The first image below, with the blue square outline on the right side, is from Beijing, is the date stamp of my travels to visit with the Minister of Telecom (Professor Xing Li, Tsinghua University) to negotiate and contract for the first internet access with the People’s Republic of China, and more specifically, to access the China Education and Research Network (CERNET).

 

 

 

 

 

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The following press releases are about the data centers I acquired around the world to add to the infrastructure required to build our global network and facilitate what became the world’s largest media streaming network.

 

 

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As introduced in the opening paragraphs, internet protocols are neither the physical internet nor the web. To realize the potential of such software authorship, somewhere, somehow, somebody has to raise the money to pay for network and telecommunications expenses. The following outlines what Digital Island’s finance team accomplished, which funded the acquisition elements that made the Digital Island global network infrastructure:

$300K Angel Investment, ComVentures, November 1996

$3.5M Series A, January 1997

$10.5M Series B, March 1998

$10.5M Series C, September 1998

$50M Series D, March 1999

$60M Initial Public Offering NASDAQ (ISLD). See the image supporting the S1 filing below.

$45M Private Equity investment from Microsoft, Intel, and Compaq Computers. See CMS MarketWatch article below.

$600M Private Secondary Offering, Goldman Sachs

$779.8M total equity raised

$12B publicly traded valuation at high water mark

 

 

 

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The following are excerpts from my book that share a bit of the historical perspective about the volume of use of internet protocols and why, in 1996, the opportunity still existed to build the first global TCP/IP/WWW network, 7 years after the creation of the WWW protocol, and 22 years after the creation of the TCP/IP protocols.

On the global scale of internet use at the end of 1995, there were 23,000 websites throughout the entire world available to 7 billion people, and only 7,000 of those were not “adult-themed” content, which I will refer to specifically hereafter. I personally owned and operated one of those 7,000 websites, perfectwheels.com (see screen capture below) which made me a 1-in-a-million person on earth who owned and operated a website at the beginning of 1996. Additionally, those same metrics numerically invert to only 1 website per 1,000,000 people. Now, in 2023, there’s 1 website for every 8 people, for a growth rate of 43,500 times the increase in websites in just 28 years.

In the screen captures above, you can see that the website was image centric by showing pictures of the product. These images required a very long time to download with dial-up connections, as broadband was still a pipe dream (pun intended) at this time. The industry colloquialism for this was, “Trying to use the internet was like trying to suck a grapefruit through a straw.”

Anecdote: My website (perfectwheels.com) was a case study by Smart Valley, an association funded by Silicon Valley companies working to coordinate people and technology with projects that enhance their quality of life. They featured Perfect Wheels as an example of how to launch an eCommerce business using internet and web browser technology.

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The number of internet users at the end of 1995 was 16 million worldwide; that’s only 1/5 of 1% (.002%) of the world’s population. The geographic distribution of those users was 2/3rds were located within the USA, and the rest of the world was cumulatively 1/3% of .002% of the population at .00075%. Now, at the time of this writing in 2023, there are 6 billion people using the internet worldwide, or 65% of the population, which represents a 375-fold increase in internet user participation in just 28 years.

Clearly, with the adoption metrics at 43,500-times more websites and 375-times more users in 28 years, the market opportunity for advancements in human communications and eCommerce was pre-existing. But, prior to 1996, the globalization opportunity had not yet been manifested with infrastructure and peering investments by the incumbent and monopolistic telcos in cooperation with governments. The incumbent telcos could have done it, but they, together with governments, strategized not to.

Further detail of the legacy telcos and government depravity and corruptness is beyond the scope of this introduction, but I address the Presidential Order that initiated the change in the vulnerability of human communications and the government-sanctioned retardation of such by the telecom monopolies in Chapter 1 of my book. Though, for sake of topic continuity and clarity, the following indented six paragraphs will discuss the above in condensed detail.

It’s not widely known that, from 1989, when WWW software was initially created, the WWW software was reserved for government-only use for the first three years and was not available for public use. This changed in 1994, when the WWW was made available for public use at no charge. Despite this new availability, government suppression of global networking persisted in tandem with incumbent telcos until US President Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 into law. This act was the first in the world to strike down an important legal protection for telecommunications monopolies and oligopolies to solely provide telecommunication services. This made it legal for new service providers, such as Digital Island, to enter the internet and telecommunications services sector.

Thankfully, President Clinton and Vice President Gore brought into law the opportunity to “Let anyone enter any communications business—to let any communications business compete in any market against any other.”  Thus, the statute is often described as an attempt to deregulate the American broadcasting and telecommunications markets due to technological convergence. The act was the first significant overhaul of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years. The president signed the bill to revolutionize the way Americans get telephone and computer networking services. This act will be memorialized as one of the most profoundly impactful acts of any president by enabling private enterprise to enter a former government-controlled and restricted field of utility. In a few short years, the act would change how globally diverse societies would proliferate their ability to communicate and trade forever.

Thus, for this market timing opportunity in 1996 to present itself in the USA, it took an act of legislation at the highest levels of government. The act is actually a cancellation of the monopolies for telecommunications that have been in effect in the United States since 1934, and it ignited our entrepreneurial spirit to seize the opportunity. Anecdotally, I created the global wide-area network diagrams shared above on this site as early as 90 days after the law’s enactment.

Note that throughout the rest of the world, there were still heavily regulated and protected monopolies existing for telecom. It’s an interesting fact that every IPLC and internet access port that I acquired around the world was technically illegal. Many of my initial inquiries to foreign Tier One telcos and ISPs went unanswered or rejected because Digital Island was not a federally licensed telecommunications carrier. In those countries, pre-existing laws prevented us from connecting to their networks. In those cases, we only received special permissions, approvals, waivers, or amendments to the terms of service to interconnect with their networks after I traveled to their foreign offices and made an in-person presentation of our proposed network’s opportunities. These legality and government compliance issues with the rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were of paramount importance due to the financial and legal sensitivities we would have in eventually selling our stock to the public.

The intent and result of this presidential order was that in just a few short years, the above would change how globally diverse societies would proliferate their ability to communicate and trade by revolutionizing how Americans get telephone and computer services and allowing new service providers, like Digital Island, to enter the internet and telecommunications services industry. 

Anecdotally, within 90 days of the law’s enactment, I started creating the global wide area network diagrams shared in this book, and less than nine months after the bill’s passage, I signed the Cisco Systems Web Hosting Remote Data Services contract that started our globalization of the internet. 

Thus, if the aggregation and scalability of global telecom circuits had to originate and start in the USA in 1996 first, if it was going to happen at all, and this is based on the assumption that anywhere else in the world, there would be the necessary legality, financial resources, vision, and human resources to facilitate it, however, prior to 1996, these resources were only available in the USA.

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Additional Reading about the History of the Internet Protocols and the World Wide Web Information system:

What actually is the internet and web?

What actually constitutes the making of the internet and web?

Who actually made the internet and web?

For a common understanding of what the internet is actually made of, we must first clarify that the software codes of the:

1. Internet protocol suite, also known as TCP/IP (largely attributed to Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Gerard Le Lann, Yogen Dalal, Carl Sunshine, Louis Pouzin, Donald Davies, Hubert Zimmerman, et al, c. 1974), organizes the set of communication protocols to ensure reliable transmission of data by establishing a connection between sender and receiver and confirming that packets are received, and for addressing and routing packets to their destination.
2. World Wide Web protocol, also known as WWW (largely attributed to Timothy Berners-Lee, Paul Mockapetris, International Engineering Task Force, Dan Connolly, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, et al, c. 1989), allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for transferring web pages on the internet. Note that WWW operates incorporating the technology of the following protocols:
   • Domain Name System (DNS): Converts domain names into IP addresses (created by Dr. Paul Mockapetris in 1983s)
   • Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP): Request webpage contents from IP addresses (created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989)
   • Transport Layer Security (TLS and formerly SSL): Serves websites over secure, encrypted connections (established by the Internet Engineering Task Force, IETF, in 1999 for TLS, and 1993 for SSL by National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA)
   • HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language): Represents hypertext documents (created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989)
   • URL (Uniform Resource Locator): Identifies web resources (co-created by the IETF,  and Tim Berners-Lee in 1982)
   • HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol): Facilitates communication between browsers and servers (created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989)
   • HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language, influenced by Standard Generalized Markup Language, SGML): Defines the structure and content of web pages (co-created by the IETF in 1986 for SGML, and Dan Connolly and Tim Berners-Lee for HTML in 1993)

TCP/IP Code sample

WWW/HTTP Code sample

For the TCP/IP and WWW/HTTP protocols to function, there are many other dependencies on physical equipment and many more software applications, each representing a different step of the transmission chain. When we transfer information from one device to another, it travels figuratively through 7 layers of OSI model. First data travels down through 7 layers from the sender’s end and then it climbs back 7 layers on the receiver’s end.

Data flows through the OSI model in a step-by-step process:

• Application Layer: Applications create the data (HTTP resides here)
• Presentation Layer: Data is formatted and encrypted.
• Session Layer: Connections are established and managed.
• Transport Layer: Data is broken into segments for reliable delivery (TCP/IP resides here)
• Network Layer : Segments are packaged into packets and routed.
• Data Link Layer: Packets are framed and sent to the next device.
• Physical Layer: Frames are converted into bits and transmitted physically.

 

As you can see illustrated above, TCP/IP and WWW software protocols are a small part of what is required for a collaborative transmission to perform from one person to another, or across the globe, in what became in name synonymous and colloquially called the “internet” and “web”. Clearly, a portion of software protocols running on a website server or displayed in a desktop browser application do not physically constitute the internet nor web. Furthermore, the actual realization of the internet as a functioning global network is a totally separate endeavor, costing billions of dollars in capital investment and requiring many different and entirely distinct areas of physical network, software contributions, infrastructure specialization, and vast amounts of expert human collateral.

For historical context, keep in mind that even though the software code for TCP/IP was written in 1974 and for WWW in 1989, at the beginning of 1992 there was only 1 website in the world because the WWW code was being restricted to government use only until 1994. Subsequently, after the public release of the software code in April 1994 by CERN (Conseil européen pour la Recherche nucléaire, the owners of the code where Tim Berners-Lee had been employed), that number of websites increased to 2,400 by the end of the year.

Consequently, and despite their conceptual importance, the internet and web, when described as a physical medium, had not experienced the investment to attain status as a worldwide internetworked platform prior to our company’s start-up. The following diagram charts the proliferation of websites from 1991 to 2019. The graph clearly shows that the internet got it’s “legs” after we started the private investment to globalize worldwide internetworking in 1996 and subsequently went public on the NASDAQ in 1999 raising additional capital to increase footprint, capacity, and redundancy.

The cause and effect are all quite simple: we enabled the globalization of internet connectivity and sharing around the world, and people and businesses alike rushed to use it. Clearly, the then pent-up demand was preexisting, as evidenced by the statistics. Subsequently, the exponential growth of the global participation of internet technologies and infrastructure validated our business plan and our role in the leadership as the first to market of physical worldwide network installations, which led to the realization of internet globalization and eCommerce.

Note the website traction “hockey stick” of market adoption that takes off three years after we started hosting and broadcasting our 881 customers content and services, facilitated by our internetworking 95% of the world’s ISPs, and thus 95% of the world’s internet accessible population together by the year 2000.

Keep in mind that websites are a very recent innovation and a communications phenomenon. The Mosaic web browser, the first to display images in line with text instead of in separate windows, deserves recognition for this proliferation. Two programmers, Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina, working at NCSA, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed the browser, which saw its first public release in 1993. The browser’s indispensable role in popularizing the use of the general internet through the integration of multimedia is impossible to quantify.

With the above in mind, prior to 1996, there wasn’t a business case for regional ISPs to subsidize the investment of infrastructure from the monopoly telcos and interconnect with the rest of the world’s ISPs. This means, from a user perspective, that not everyone could see my website because their ISP wasn’t connected to my ISP. Therefore, having a website and an ISP hosting and broadcasting your content using WWW code did not mean your website was worldwide, and in reality, it was quite the contrary.

Subsequently, the realization of the internet protocol suite and the World Wide Web information system, when combined as originally intended with the many facets of the physical global network infrastructure, triggered the explosive exponential growth of the internet and web, thereby fundamentally and profoundly revising our modern societies and civilization.

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And now, thirty years later, the globalization of internet-centric telecommunications technology is widely considered as one of the most transformational events in all of human history. In summary, by co-founding and creating the first global ISP and connecting 95% of the world’s internet-accessable users together into one seamless and autonomous global network, is “How I Made the Web World Wide.”

So much happened so fast, impacting so many people, with so many cultural and economic influences, and with so many resulting aftereffects. I now realize that what brought its members together was pure imagination, economic and market foresight, gumption, calculated risk-taking, good luck, and serendipity. It’s my hope that everyone appreciates the hard work by all those who chose to contribute to the internet for the collective benefit of us all; as it was an incredibly difficult, expensive, and unsecured endeavor with extraordinarily challenging goals.

“One of these days, this internet thing is really going to catch on.”

Mark Nichols

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If you found the above to be of interest, please consider reading the book, as there is much more information about the adventure of creating the enterprise. The book spans less than 80 pages, with approximately 20 of those pages dedicated to images. My aim was to create a narrative that incorporated various sources such as contracts, press releases, photos, email communications, diagrams, and more, using the written prose to contextualize the images. For time budgeting, I estimate it will take most people about two hours to read. I tried to employ a writing style for non-industry people to make the story interesting and the readability accessible to everyone, but there is enough information to keep those who are in the industry captivated and informed.

How to contact Mr. Nichols

My daughters initially encouraged me to write this book, suggesting that I use it to teach university-level business students about technology start-ups and entrepreneurialism, including the principles and concepts of potential Wall Street investments through initial public offerings (IPOs). If you would like to contact me for a discussion about a speaking invitation for your school or institution, an educational series for students or employees, or something else, you can text or call 1-775-600-3400, or use this email: [email protected]

My book, How I Made the Web World Wide, is now available on Amazon. Click here to go to my Amazon page.