we’d say, “Well, there are some alternatives out there.” In the early ’90s there
was AOL, there was Lexus Nexus from the ’80s, where they would lose the control
of the distribution of their work. We’d say, “Do you want that?” They’d say,
“No, we don’t want that. We want to control the distribution of our work.” So
we said, “Swing with us for a little while, while we build this Internet. Let’s
build this Internet together based on open systems.” So these business guys
were, in fact, wanting an open system.
We wanted to build this up before the monopolists got to town and said,
“Oh, you don’t want an open system. You want a closed system that belongs to
us, and we’ll do it really well.” So we worked very hard to get it to go in the early
’90s, to get an open system anchored. And it worked. By the time AOL
announced in ’94 they were going to support basically the Internet protocols
and when Microsoft said in August of 1995 that they were going to support the
World Wide Web, that meant that we won. We had gotten publishing on the
Net, and at that point I could graduate and do the thing that I wanted to do.
Livingston: Do you remember things that your clients totally misunderstood
about what you were trying to do?
Kahle: I learned to try not to make too many leaps at once. Most people have a
very difficult time imagining something they can’t see at least a demonstration
of. If you can get a demonstration—or, worst case, a video—it communicates an
idea better than hand-waving for hours. So get to a demo quickly.
This was difficult when the Internet hadn’t been deployed. Often the executives
didn’t have computers on their desks. They had secretaries that typed for
them. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that these things weren’t everywhere.
And they weren’t hooked up to anything. Maybe they had a modem, but that
was it. We had to demonstrate these things over modems. Trying to get clearance
so that they could dial out from a computer to the Internet to demonstrate
this system inside the CIA headquarters was actually a several-day process. So
it was difficult to go and explain very many jumps forward.
Whenever I went and said, “Really what I want to do—after we get this
publishing up and running, is build the library . . .” Because that’s always what I
wanted to do. I just thought I had to build these supercomputers first, then
I had to get the publishing going, and, once we got that, then we could build a
library. So it was not until ’96 that I got to the place where what we had

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