Weaving the World Wide Web - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 231

Fig. 11.16. View inside an Amazon ware-
house, which sorts products and packs
and sends out orders for the online
retailer.

an open API to link Windows to the Internet TCP/IP protocols. In the next year
or so, Microsoft led a collection of companies in defining this interface, called
the Windows sockets interface or “Winsock.” Microsoft officially endorsed the API
in January 1992. Peter Tattam from the University of Tasmania in Australia
released an open-source version. His software, called Trumpet Winsock, enabled
users to connect to the Internet from Windows 3.0, which had no built-in TCP/
IP support. Although few people paid Tattam for his software, Trumpet Winsock
helped fuel the growth of the Internet by allowing millions of PC users to con-
nect to the Internet for the first time.
Another step in Microsoft's conversion to the web was caused by a snow-
storm in Ithaca, New York. Steven Sinofsky, then Bill Gates's technical assis-
tant, was visiting Cornell University on a recruiting trip in February 1994. A
snowstorm shut the airport, and he was forced to return to the campus. Things
had changed since he had been a student there only seven years before. Many
students now had their own PCs or Macs and campus computing resources
could be accessed through the campus TCP/IP network. Students and staff rou-
tinely communicated by email, and use of the World Wide Web was growing
rapidly. Still trapped in Ithaca, Sinofsky sent an email to Gates headed “Cornell
is WIRED.”
Twice a year, Bill Gates used to take what he called a “Think Week,” spend-
ing several days in seclusion reading research papers and pondering the future
of technology. Sinofsky's email from Cornell triggered Gates's famous “Think
Week” memo in May 1995, which said, “The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes
the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge.” 16 It
was a long memo and in it, Gates made many prophetic comments:

B.11.8. Jeff Bezos, founder of
Amazon, built the company steadily
from its beginnings as a dot-com
start-up in 1994 to its current
position as the dominant, global,
online retailer. He was inspired to
resign from his job as an investment
analyst in New York after seeing
the explosive growth of the World
Wide Web.

In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial
to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single
development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981. It is
even more important than the arrival of the graphical user interface (GUI).
The Internet's unique position arises from a number of elements. TCP/IP
protocols that define its transport level support distributed computing and
scale incredibly well. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has defined
an evolutionary path that will avoid running into future problems even as