The Mistake That Killed Excite: The HomeNetwork

I traveled across the country promoting Comcast@home for the summer of 1998. We visited malls near major cities where the service initially rolled out -- places like the Irvine Spectrum and the Smith Haven Mall. For each mall, the local cable company (usually Comcast, sometimes it was Cox?) provided a cable drop that gave us an approx. 300kbps connection. In some cases, this was the first broadband internet connection the mall had ever received (with most stores using dial-up modems to transmit their sales to the corp. office at the time).

Our setup required a POTS connection as well so we could do races between the two. We used comically large jpegs to do the demonstration.

My most memorable experiences from that time were from interacting with older folks who had never even seen "the internet". Some people had traveled many hours just to see the internet for themselves — even crossing state lines to get to us. And we felt like the Oracle at Delphi. Folks not even knowing how to use a mouse asking us to find information about their army platoon or information on old friends who they lost touch with. Some just wanting to us to explain what the internet was and how they might be able to use it.

We traveled with an enormous rack we called the UBR (which they told us was a universal broadband router -- which we picked up in San Jose from Cisco Systems). Sidenote: Sorry Cisco for backing up into (and majorly damaging) the fence surrounding your dumpsters!! This device provided a network connection to each of the four kiosks we had spread over the small footprint we were allotted in whatever court they had set aside for our use.

I remember showing folks how fast the connection was by downloading Doom to the local machine. The UBR would cache large files so in some cases, files would download in what felt like an instant and we would have to explain what a cache is and why those kind of speeds are not representative of average use.

I was a very heavy internet user at the time and had only ever experienced a connection as fast in the dorms on campus at the state college I attended.

It was a blast.

To Patrick (from Toronto) from @Home: I never did read RFC 793 which you so thoughtfully printed out for us on what seemed like a ream of paper.

> According to Steven Levy in his book In The Plex, in early 1997 two graduate students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, decided that BackRub, the name of their research project that later became the search engine Google, was taking up time they should have been using to study. They went to Bell and offered it to him for $1 million, but Bell rejected the offer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite_(web_portal)