a bootstrap—doing the information system for the Perot campaign for the presidential
campaign of 1992. They could really use an information system that
leveraged some network. Of course, they didn’t know what network, but we
did. So we could build this Internet using modems and leased lines and all sorts
of things to be able to build this up. The Perot campaign collapsed, but we still
had enough money to make it through most of the first year to go and get our
products built.
One of the interesting ideas out of WAIS was its use of freeware and shareware.
This was a new idea, more or less. There had been some examples of
freeware like GNU, but there were also mixed models: Kermit, where people
basically would make source code available on the Net and sell something
related. We gave away the client version, the equivalent of a Web browser.
It was a WAIS browser and a server, so people could go and build their own
system.
During that free period, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of servers
were set up. We got up to about 10,000 servers—all this is before Gopher and
the Web came out—based on free software. Once people got really hooked on
the free software, they wanted upgrades, or they wanted services. So we were
there as a company to sell it to them. We made the free version, and there was
a for-pay version. It was the same idea that we’ve seen now with Netscape.
There’s a whole set of companies that also tried to give something away and sell
something else.
Brewster Kahle 269
Livingston: You were the first company to do that?
Kahle:Well, I think we may have been the first to think of the Internet as a distribution
system of software: to give something away and to sell it. I don’t know
of any examples before.
Livingston: That is so many companies’ business model these days; it’s interesting
to think it was the first.
Kahle: I don’t know if it was the first, but it was certainly early. We also found
that people—even if we sold them the software—often didn’t know what to do
with it. They wanted consulting services. We started what I think became the
first web studio, or web services business. We worked with big players, whether
they were newspapers or magazines, that wanted to publish on the Net. This
allowed us to work with the big boys very early on.
We tried very hard to work with the best of class. They were always more
difficult to deal with, but they were great to work with once you got working
with them: the Wall Street Journal, Encyclopedia Britannica, Government

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