Interview with Dale Dougherty

In anticipation of the upcoming Maker Faire, The Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran a nice interview with Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE.

200705071230 PRESS DEMOCRAT: In 1993, you developed the first commercial Web site — known as the Global Network Navigator. How did you come up with the idea?

DOUGHERTY: Late in 1991, I saw a demonstration of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee, its founder, and I became a believer. I began showing it to others and watched as they were amazed by its power — that you could use a single program to access information on servers around the world. I remember saying: "That page just came from Italy. Just like that." You'd have to remind everyone that it wasn't coming from a local hard disk. I knew this was the future for publishing. I set out to organize a team to build a site but it was never clear how we could make money on it. Before Yahoo, GNN was an early attempt to create a directory of links to what you could find on the World Wide Web; it was also a magazine with some articles on how to explore this new world. We sold GNN to AOL in 1995 for millions, although AOL didn't deliver on the promise to scale it up. (Editor's note: the site is viewable at www.oreilly.com/gnn)

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