Talk:Marc Andreessen

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More information about this article... The following comments have been left for this page: good article, but he was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa (edit)

Contents 1 Cedar Falls Connection? 2 Andreessen bashing 3 Ning 4 That mess on the bottom of the page 5 Date of birth

[edit] Cedar Falls Connection?

Why is Marc Andreessen listed as a "notable native" of Cedar Falls? There is nothing in the article that demonstrates a link.

Tsaman 05:33, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Andreessen bashing

Interesting link : http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/14/1343256&from=rss

Interesting comment : Yeah, this Fortune article is definitely revisionist history, drawn up by some of the people that capitalized on a lot of hard work by others. I know, I was there. I spent a LOT of time in late '91 and most of 1992 corresponding with Robert Cailliau, who was responsible for much of the work on the CERN server/browser combo that predated anything done at NCSA. We at Univ. of Texas were interested in getting scientific papers on-line and had found Gopher to be a train wreck when it came to managing scientific notations, footnotes, and bibliographic references. The guys at CERN had solved the problem for text with the work Tim Berners-Lee had done with HTML and the networking code others at CERN had created for HTTP.

I originally contacted Robert and TB-L about writing a browser for the Mac. They said they'd rather see a server, which is how MacHTTP was born. Once the Mac server was running, I started working with Aleks Totic at NCSA to get the early versions of Mosaic on the Mac to work with the same server. Another prominent figure at NCSA at the time was Tom Redman, who if I recall correctly, was leading the Mosaic effort. At the time, Andressen was just another programmer on the Mosaic effort who had some glory because he hacked up the first working image tag in HTML. Until that time, everything had been text and hyperlinks

Long story short, everyone knew that Andressen snuck out of town with the Mosaic source code, and a few weeks later lured several of the developers like Aleks to go with him. There was a lot of ill-will engendered by that move and it wasn't all sweetness and light as the Fortune article would have you believe.

I remember speaking to the NCSA team (and then the SpyGlass team) many times afterwards, and no one ever really got over the fact that a junior programmer walked out the door with the IP created by dozens of other people and got filthy rich out of it while many of the people who built the original World Wide Web labored on in obscurity. At the time, the Internet culture wasn't about getting rich. It was about creating cool technology and sharing it with others, and almost all of the innovative stuff was still coming out of academia.

If anything, Netscape was the prototypical example of how to swipe someone elses' good ideas, rebrand them, and get rich. That was the company's real legacy to the Internet and the subsequent DotCom lunacy.

Imposter Boy, by Alan Deutschman, Gentleman's Quarterly, January 1997 The media and Wall Street believed Marc Andreessen was "the next Bill Gates" -- the singular genius behind the big high-tech breakthrough of the '90s. But his tale really was too good to be true.

Regarding the above comment culled from Slashdot. According to the Slashdot log, it was written by Chuck Shotton. Here's what Newsweek had to say about Chuck Shotton in their 12/25/95 article "The Net 50: 50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet":

 Chuck Shotton MAC PROGRAMMER

 Shotton is the Macintosh version of Marc Andreessen, without the personal fortune. He 
 makes an Internet browser for the Mac and writes Macintosh Web server software, 
 making him a hero in the Mac community.

So, I'm sure that his opinions on Marc are very objective. (I'm being sarcastic here, in case you can't tell.) Slashdot allows anyone with a keyboard & an opinion to pipe up, and shouldn't be used as a source of trusted information.

[edit] Ning

It looks from http://www.boingboing.net/2005/10/04/ning_roll_your_own_f.html that Ning is no longer just a "social/tagging site", but I'm not sure what to call it for an edit... -- Melissa Della 09:50, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] That mess on the bottom of the page

I don't really do much but fix small spelling errors on wikipedia, and don't really want to fuss around with this page at the moment, but all that stuff at the bottom of the page should be deleted... I'm not sure what needs to stay (for the appearance of the page) or not, so I'm afraid to touch it.

[edit] Date of birth

The article lists Marc's birthday as July 9, 1971. However on the web there are also several pages which list April 26, 1971 as his date of birth. Which one is right? --Arun 17:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Yes, when? For instance, both http://www.brainyhistory.com/events/1971/april_26_1971_393792.html and http://www.nndb.com/people/442/000022376/ tell on April 26, 1971 Pcworld 12:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)