How did James Gleick, famous science writer, come to be a franchiser of Internet service?
James Gleick is best known for his illuminating books probing the minds and issues raised by science and technology. Chaos: Making a New Science and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman are required reading for any lay person interested in the course of modern-day science. While he considers himself an author at heart, Gleick couldn't resist the chance to become part of the telephonic world that he was scrutinizing for his next book. In the summer of 1993, he founded The Pipeline Network Inc., an innovative Manhattan-based online service that offers a direct connection to the Internet as well as to a local "scene." Its seamless, painless interface, complete with what may be the first World Wide Web browser requiring only a modem, quickly caught on, and as of early fall, Gleick had licensed The Pipeline's core software to more than 15 independent and corporate service providers. Wired Managing Editor John Battelle caught up with Gleick in his Brooklyn Heights home.
Wired: How did you, a book writer, turn into a telecommunications entrepreneur?
Gleick:
My first plunge into the Internet came when I was working on a piece last year for The New York Times Magazine about the future of telecommunications. Like so many other people, I made my way onto the Net through one of those horrifying raw Unix sites - you know, dollar-sign prompt, incomprehensible command-line parameters, snotty error message if you were so gauche as to type "dir" instead of "ls." It was a serious cold shower. I'm not a complete idiot - I can do a little bit of programming if you hold a gun to my head - but Unix was a shock. The Internet was a magnificent new world, and I could see that amid a lot of bravado, people were feeling a bit lost. I remember a characteristic posting from a new user begging for help: "Well, here I am - but where's the Internet?" That's how it still is for most Internet users. You're in the dark.
But everyone complains about the Internet. So why you, and why now in your life?
A combination of things. One was that I happened to know a brilliant programmer - just how brilliant I found out later - who was in exactly the same boat I was in. His name is Uday Ivatury. He was discovering the Internet and had the same feeling about it. We started calling up access providers and telephone companies, and we realized that we could just do it. From my point of view, the worst thing that could happen would be that I'd blow six months and then go back to writing a book. I really didn't look too closely at the other end of the range of possibilities, didn't think I'd end up a sort of accidental entrepreneur.
Wasn't it difficult to make the Pipeline interface, especially the Web browser, within the parameters of Windows and a dial-up line? How was it done?
What was difficult was realizing how much could be done. I remember standing late one night on the roof of the Manhattan Bridge Club with Uday, working out the software's architecture. He was pacing back and forth, so I was pacing back and forth to keep up, and I realized that he was talking about managing simultaneous communications sessions in different windows - real Internet multitasking. Absurd! I told him: "Now wait a second - you can't do that in Windows." No one had, anyway. We tell people that we have multitasking communications software that runs under Windows, and they don't believe it.
Well, you did it, so why now are you licensing it instead of just becoming the service everyone wants to subscribe to?
I believe the magic of the Internet is its multifarious, noncentralized, democratic, and even anarchic quality. I think it's already clear that the era of the giant private online service has come and gone. Personally I have no ambition to create an online empire - I'd rather see what can be done with a gateway that retains a sense of its local roots. We're also taking the view that no one, certainly not us, is smart enough to know what's the "right" kind of online service. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Who you do consider your competition?
We can provide things here in New York City that are of interest to New York users. I expect us to be delivering pizzas and videos in New York and helping New York public interest groups get their stuff online, and all sorts of things that national services can't do.
So you're the local station?
I believe in things that are local, even on the Internet, which is so majestically global. In a sense, the answer to your question is that all of us together are competing against places like CompuServe and America Online, which are dinosaurs. As large as they've grown, I just don't think that kind of service represents the future.
How much have you grown since starting out?
At the moment we're doubling every two or three months. About 3,000 people joined us in our first six months - a tiny number, of course, and we expect that to double, then double again.
Everyone is spinning these information superhighway dreams. Do you really think that we're going to be talking about real-time video mail and the like in the next decade?
It's going to be a while before we have that much bandwidth. All you have to do to get drenched with a bucket of cold water is call your local telephone company and try to order an ISDN line. I do think that those things are going to come. But I don't think they're going to come because they're being planned from the top down by the giant entertainment companies.
Do you have any really good horror stories about installing phone lines for your services?
The local telephone companies have the right technology for a business like mine, and they have smart people who understand what the right technology is. But they don't have a bureaucracy that's capable of delivering that technology to your office. New York Telephone could bring into our office any capacity digital service we wanted. Instead, the only solution they can come up with is individual old-fashioned business lines. So we've got walls covered with them. We have fancy state-of-the-art modem racks that will take a T1 directly, and we have ISDN routers, but instead here's Nynex giving us two copper wires for every line. It's insane. They're wasting telephone numbers - not an insignificant resource in New York City.
What do you make of the Time-Warner Orlando video tests and the like?
It's not a surprise to me that these experiments are having so much trouble. There are so many things that have to be grappled with at the same time. I've visited the telephone company laboratories and seen the video servers and the digital network applications - the demonstrations are great - but the reality is no one has yet solved the human problems, how you channel surf through 500 channels instead of 30 channels. Technologies are hard to impose on people - even people who are desperately eager for them.
