Thread by @trengriffin

1/ 1994 was a pivotal year in technology. I had a ringside seat since Bill Gates and Craig McCaw were controlling shareholders in our startup. Part of that year I helped Bill write his book "The Road Ahead." Nathan Myhrvold was a co-author. Writing is an opportunity to think.

2/ One set up: In December 1992, John Malone announced TCI placed orders for 1M million digital set-tops. A story in the NYT predicted 500 channels of programming were on the horizon. In January 1993, Time Warner unveiled plans for a “full service network” to be built in Orlando.

3/ John Malone: ‘The arithmetic is pretty easy – if cable systems have got 50 analog channels, and you can do 10 to 1 compression, that wasn't a huge leap of mathematics to get you to 500 channels.” cablecenter.org/programs/the-h…

4/ Another set up for 1994 happened this next week in history.

Mosaic version 1.0 was released on November 11, 1993. ncsa.illinois.edu/enabling/mosai…

The arrival of the web set up the Information Highway business model for a fall. I'll think about how to tweetstorm 1994 on a walk now.

5/ For a sense of what people were thinking in tech in July of 1994 I suggest you watch or read jamesclear.com/great-speeches… “Roadkill on the Information Highway” by Nathan Myhrvold. I watched the talk on VHS tape at 3AM while working all night at our startup.

6/ That miraculous year I met Bill Gurley and Michael Mauboussin. Tom Alberg and Michael Larson were on our board. Michael gave me his copy of Alchemy of Finance when I talked about the complexity work being done at Sante Fe. Jerry St. Dennis gave me a copy of his Munger files.

7/ Sample events:

March 1994: FCC filing for a LEO satellite constellation (Teledesic).

Novell buys WordPerfect for $1.4B

April: Yahoo founded

August 1994 AOL reaches 1 million subscribers.

October: W3C organization was founded by Tim Berners-Lee

1st Internet banner ad.

8/ May: Microsoft introduces the "Tiger" server for continuous media

Phase 2 data/fax bearer GSM service

August: IBM's Simon smartphone

September: Mosaic Communications browser and Web server

December: Red Hat Software founded

Netscape Navigator 1.0

9/ Some in 1994 had a harder time than others grasping that the Internet wouldn't be controlled by businesses that owned existing video-based businesses. The Information Highway metaphor envisioned a business controlling on and off ramps. Businesses not seeing the shift: Ouch!

10/ Why was 1994 such an important year? I recall Bill Gates saying to me then: “Semiconductor engineers are still providing us with the magic to enable better software.”

Increasing bandwidth was enabled by the same magic. Instead of channels, people wanted their own streams.

11/ Bill Gates' "Tidal Wave" memo was sent on May 26, 1995, but the work on the shift to the Internet really began in 1994 well before that memo was leaked to the public. sriramk.com/memos/billgate… I suspect 2020 will be remembered like 1994 and other key years in tech (e.g. 1980).

12/ Some claim Zhou Enlai said" “Too early to say” in responding to questions about the impact of the French revolution (very likely an apocryphal story).

But I suspect Covid's pulling forward the adoption of digital services will make 2020 a more than typical year in tech.

13/ This Tweetstorm was popular enough that I might write a similar one for another year. What's the most interesting year in technology among:

14/ "Business @ the Speed of Thought" is a book written by Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway in 1999. I was involved as a collaborator in that book too.

1999 was fun mostly because of:

15/ The election to determine which year I tweet about next weekend was very close and is being disputed by some people.

In order to avoid expensive litigation I plan to combine the events and psychology of 1999 and 2001 into a single tweetstorm. The year 2000 will be featured.

16/ As for people who tweeted that today was "just like 1999," please note the peak for Internet stocks didn't happen until March 10, 2000 and telecom stocks didn't start their dramatic fall until early 2001. Today wasn't even remotely like 1999. I'm not guessing. I was there.