AIM INTERVIEWS

Who are you?

My name is Rob and I try to make the world a slightly better place every day. I don't always succeed.

Why did you decide to join the NCSA as an undergrad? What was the inspiration to work on the original httpd web server while you were there?

In our senior year of high school one of my classmates named Dan Pape said he was going to write to Larry Smarr, the head of NCSA, and ask for a job. I thought there was no way they would give a freshman a job, but I wrote to him anyway and they called me for a system administrator position. I had experience with Solaris from high school and so I was hired.

I worked on NCSA httpd because Marc Andreessen asked me to. I wasn't very sure about the whole web thing but I wanted to write some code and the system administration tasks I had were pretty lightweight. Marc wanted a web server that was small and simple. The CERN httpd at the time was very functional but wasn't small or simple. It was a fun ride.

You later moved to Silicon Valley as a member of the early Netscape team with your NCSA colleagues in 1994. At the time, what did you find compelling about the idea to build a better, commercial browser to Mosaic?

Well to be clear, I was the first member of the team that wasn't building a browser, we were building what became known as the Netscape Enterprise Server. One of the product managers once joked that we had one, and later two, recent college grads as the only people working on the main revenue stream for the entire company. For the veterans it was kind of terrifying. But to answer the question, Marc and Jim Clark (the founder of SGI) wanted to take what we had done, and make it bigger and more influential and that was an exciting idea. I was young and capable and it felt like a good chance to really make a difference with my software skills.

What was something surprising that happened at Netscape during the period of fierce browser competition in the 90s? What did you learn?

When we started out, the web community was tiny and mostly hobbyists and researchers. You can still see the archives of our worldwide mailing list, which was called www-talk. It was very friendly and collaborative. When we started Netscape, one of the first things they told me was that I could not go back and fix the catastrophic security holes (stack overflows) I had accidentally left in NCSA httpd, because I needed to focus on the proprietary server we were building. My negligence directly led the community to create Apache. The first step of the browser wars was a lawsuit where a company named Spyglass and UIUC sued Netscape, and I learned that business interests were in charge now.

Then Netscape followed a strategy of selling packaged software, which made sense to all of us at the time, the attention economy didn't seem to exist. Except it did exist, and Yahoo knew that. Many years later I remember walking through the halls of Yahoo, where they used the same kind of cubicles as Netscape did, and realizing that Yahoo still existed and Netscape didn't because they recognized the value of a home page, and Netscape didn't wake up to that until it was too late.

These days there are still some companies selling things in a traditional way like Netscape wanted to, but the attention economy and consumer-as-a-product plays are dominant, and we can see both the good and bad of that especially for creative workers.

Are there any people or projects you particularly admire today?

More and more I admire the people doing utterly thankless jobs that are absolutely vital for our entire civilization. The people doing farming, retail, teaching, freight, health care, elderly care. We got a brief reminder of how important they are during COVID but we didn't change any of our systems and didn't learn the lesson.

If you had unlimited resources (time, money, etc.), how would you spend your time?

Probably about the same way that I do now. Also, having such resources would be very alienating and inhuman.

What's a message you have for the world?

Three of the most important pillars of human society are community, collaboration, and creation. These pillars are all being devalued and destroyed every day, especially by recent technology like social media and generative AI. We can't always make a difference in the wider world, but we can always strive to make the world around us a better place by focusing on these pillars.