information and as a user base. So it was a test project. It ran about a year
and a half and was successful. Everybody loved it. Each one of the organizations
went forward to figure out how to make this all go. This was in 1989/90. So
we were all looking into the future.
Livingston: WAIS seems to have ideas that anticipated the Web.
Kahle: All these ideas were in the air. The Web came a bit later, but, as I understand,
Tim Berners-Lee was working on some of the same things, but doing
Brewster Kahle 267
them locally within CERN in Switzerland. We were doing them within a corporate
environment using supercomputers and the Internet as well.
Livingston: So Dow Jones, KPMG Peat Marwick, and Apple were all involved?
Kahle: Yes, everybody was working together. It was a project that had a project
team in each the companies, and I ran it. I moved out to the West Coast to try
and run it, because I knew I could run Thinking Machines remotely, but I
didn’t think I could run Apple remotely. So I moved out to the West Coast and
had a cubicle and a project team that I worked with at Apple.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the hard technical problems that WAIS
addressed.
Kahle: One of the difficult things was just using the computer networks at the
time. This is 1989, and the Internet hadn’t quite become easy in any real sense.
Trying to hook up to Dow Jones through X.25 networks and ISDN was all quite
challenging. KPMG Peat Marwick started to have an intranet then that we
could use, and fortunately they used Macintoshes. The Macintoshes were helpful
because they had TCP/IP for them, where Windows didn’t. It wasn’t until
Windows 95 came out 6 years later that Microsoft caught up.
What I loved about it was I got to work with four companies that were managed
very differently from each other. This was my bath of “How do companies
work?” Thinking Machines was a bottom-up company. In many ways, the ideas
and the people with power were the young engineers. They could see where
things were going better than the top level management, because everything
was so new.
Dow Jones was a top-down company. If you sold the top guy, he’d say, “OK,
we’re going to do this.” Then he’d issue a command, and the next-level guy
would say, “OK, sir, I’m going to do this.”
Apple Computer was explained to me to be a “beanbag chair.” You had to
push not only on the top, but on the bottom and the middle all at the same time
to try to get it to move. This was a time when John Sculley was running Apple,

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