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He showed the Web browsers to Hardin and talked with Andreessen, then one of the students at the center. As part of a class project, Andreessen was working on something called Epoch, a limited hypertext editor that allowed the user to flip through directories.
“I thought if Marc could apply this World Wide Web stuff to what he was working on, it would be a really cool addition... it would give the editor the ability to browse the Internet,” said Thompson. “I showed this to Marc because I wanted him to see how he could expand the technology, from just looking at directories to being able to grab documents throughout the entire Internet.”
After discussing the project with Andreessen, Thompson left for an out-of-town conference. By the time he returned a week later, Andreessen had already hacked out a crude prototype of a Web browser with Eric Bina, who, like Thompson, was employed full-time at the center and was generally regarded as one of its most brilliant programmers.
“Marc had gotten pretty excited about this Web stuff,” said Thompson. So the two met with Hardin and talked mostly about what kind of browser technology was already available. A week later, Hardin, Bina, Andreessen, and Thompson gathered in a circular meeting room known as the Fishbowl to discuss whether the center should develop a Web browser that would display pictures as well as text, and would be easier to use. “We decided it would be a good idea, that this could be another big hit for the university,” said Thompson. “We figured we could do a better job of building something | that was better | than anything that was already out there.”
Andreessen would later tell Newsweek the apocryphal story wherein the idea for Mosaic came to him when he was eating a pastry with Bina at the Espresso Royale Cafe in Champaign- Urbana. “The culture of hanging out at the Espresso Royale did not develop until several months later,” said Thompson, who was 25 years old in late 1992. Andreessen was four years younger. “The start of the browser project came during that second meeting.”
Hardin agreed with Thompson. “Marc is no fun to work with. He tries very hard to make sure that anything he touches he gets credit for,” Hardin told writer Alan Deutschman for a January 1997 article in GQ about Andreessen. The hardhitting piece, titled “Imposter Boy,” was the first to investigate what really happened behind the scenes during the development of Mosaic, and painted Andreessen as a semiliterate programmer who all but stole Thompson’s idea.
But Thompson said the GQ article went too far. “I have never claimed I came up with the idea of working on a browser,” he said. “The idea came out of the meeting with Hardin.” Thompson also felt that the GQ article, while otherwise fairly accurate, was too negative toward Andreessen and his skills as a programmer. “Marc was always very focused on what he was working on,” recalled Thompson. “He was one of those guys who always spent all his time in front of the computer at work. He was either at class, or in front of the computer, or asleep. He had absolutely no social life outside of going out to eat. So he produced a lot of code. He was a perfectionist. He had very little tolerance for bugs in his code. His coding style was better than your average sophomore college programmer. Nothing outstanding, but better than the average sophomore.”
After the second meeting in the Fishbowl, Hardin freed up Andreessen and Bina to begin working on the browser with Thompson. Hut Thompson soon found himself out of the loop. “I did feel a little left out,” he said, “but it was pretty much my own doing. They went off and started coding, and I take some of the blame for not inserting myself more than I did.”
The first version of Mosaic by Andreessen and Bina was for UNIX-based machines, not the PC or Mac. Much of the coding was done by Bina, though he also borrowed from the software written by Tim Berners-Lee, which was available free on the Internet. But once Andreessen and Bina had come up with the initial UNIX-based Mosaic browser, Hardin assigned others to the project and they produced versions for the PC and Mac, a move Hardin claimed Andreessen was opposed to because he was concerned that the machines were not powerful enough to display graphics with the same clarity as the more powerful UNIX computers. But Bina disputes Hardin’s recollection of the events and says that Andreessen came up with the idea to develop Mosaic for the PC and Mac.
Whatever the truth, one point is undisputed: there was dissension in the ranks of the Mosaic development team. “There was always a problem managing the group,” said Thompson. “Marc was sort of the leader without a title. Joseph Hardin was manager of all software development, which included several other groups. So there was a big gap there. The browser group needed some management, which wasn’t there. It caused a lot of friction.” By the time Andreessen left, near the end of 1993, morale was very low and there was a lot of tension among members of the browser team. “They had split into factions,” said Thompson. “People were no longer talking to other people. It was pretty sad.” Four months into 1994, those programmers who supported Andreessen would join him and Jim Clark in California at their newly founded company, Mosaic Communications.
The soft-spoken, mild-mannered Thompson ended up at Spyglass. “It’s great those guys got the rewards,” Thompson
said of Hina and Andreessen. “They really worked hard. For me, it was a missed opportunity.”
Mosaic Communications had rushed its browser to market in order to stay ahead of its principal competitor, Spyglass. “We don’t think Mosaic Communications will be able to set a standard,” Bob Rybicki, a marketing vice president at Spyglass, was quoted as saying a few days after Mosaic Netscape was posted on the Internet in October 1994.
But behind the scenes at Spyglass, the company’s executives were deeply worried about Mosaic Communications. They were also mad as hell. Two months earlier, in August, Spyglass had obtained exclusive rights from the University of Illinois and the NCSA to license Mosaic. Now, another browser by the same name, developed by some of the same people, was being given away for free by a company that had never obtained a license from either Spyglass or the NCSA. Spyglass and the university were soon talking with lawyers about possible legal action to stop Mosaic Communications from distributing its browser.
“We were trying to build as much value as possible in the Mosaic name,” said Tim Krauskopf, founder of Spyglass. “But the name was being diluted by a company that was pursuing a different path and that certainly was not in any agreement to pay royalties to the university.”
The university was as upset as Spyglass. It felt that those former NCSA students and employees who now worked at Mosaic Communications had made use of university trade secrets in developing their version of the Mosaic browser. Said Mike Tyrrell, vice president of business development at Spyglass: “We had an agreement that if anyone infringed upon the university’s intellectual property, and the university did not pursue such infringement, then we had the right to pursue such infringement. We were basically building a business around Mosaic, and we felt that if any other company started infringing upon the university’s technology, we wanted to make sure that the university’s technology was protected.”
Hoping to resolve the dispute without litigation, Jim Clark telephoned Spyglass CEO Doug Colbeth, and they agreed to meet at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where Clark told Colbeth that Mosaic Communications had done nothing wrong. It was a short meeting.
Eventually, the university, Spyglass, and Mosaic Communications had more productive talks, although usually through their lawyers and over the phone. Drafts of the proposed settlement were exchanged by fax daily, or, more accurately, nightly. “We were turning around drafts every day for more than a month,” said Marcia Rotunda, the associate in-house counsel for the university who participated in the settlement negotiations. “Once the business minds took over, progress was made in terms of getting this thing settled,” she said. “Originally, a lot of egos were involved. It was about who’s right and who’s wrong. Later on, we got the sense that they [Mosaic Communications] decided this was business and they needed to pay the least they could and get on with their business. And we were not all that anxious to have this hanging on either, especially since a former student was involved.”
Clark was especially interested in getting the legal dispute settled so he could get the company moving. He had recruited a top gun, James Barksdale, to be CEO. Barksdale had been president and chief operating officer of McCaw Cellular Communications, a Seattle-based cellular phone business. Although Barksdale quietly joined the board of Mosaic Communications, he told Clark he would not agree to take over as CEO until the legal dispute with Spyglass and the university was settled. “Jim did not want to join the company with this potential legal infringement hanging over it,” said an executive familiar with the situation, "So for Netscape, getting this thing settled with the university and with Spyglass became paramount.”
Early in the talks, Clark agreed to change the name of his company to Netscape Communications Corporation. The name change occurred in late November 1994, although the final settlement was not reached for another month. At the insistence of Clark, terms were to be kept confidential. The parties agreed to say only that Netscape could continue to distribute its browser and did not have to obtain a license from either Spyglass or the university.
The settlement had not come cheap. Although it was not disclosed as part of the confidentiality clause, Netscape agreed to pay the university $2.2 million in damages, plus an additional payment of up to $1.4 million depending on certain licensing deals it might make with other companies for its browser. Netscape ended up paying the university a total of $2.7 million. (The final installment was made in December 1996, two years after the settlement.)
The university split the settlement money with Spyglass, though that deal was never publicly disclosed. “Jim Clark knows this and it really burns his ass,” said one Spyglass executive. “We were his main competitor and he actually helped to fund us.”
When Netscape announced in December that it had reached a settlement with the university and with Spyglass, Marc Andreessen told reporter David Bank of the San Jose Mercury News that the legal fight had left him with bitter feelings toward the university. “You go to school, you do research, you leave, and they try and cripple your business,” Andreessen said, “Is this the way you want to be treated? Had I known this would happen, I would have gone to Stanford.”
If Stanford would have had him. Rotunda, the University of Illinois lawyer, did not know Andreessen personally while he was at the NCSA, but she had heard about him, and knew his reputation. “We just knew the people here didn’t like him, that he had trouble getting along with people,” she said.
In early December 1994, Time named the 23-year-old Andreessen one of the country’s 50 most important young leaders. Wrote Time:
Big, blond, and thoroughly unpretentious, Marc Andreessen had barely come of age when he co-wrote the program that is helping tame the Internet—the vast chaotic web of interconnected computers that is the closest thing today to an information superhighway. In the democratic spirit of cyberspace, Andreessen made the program—NCSA Mosaic—freely available on the Net.
Another of the young leaders named by Time was a fellow 16 years Andreessen’s senior—Bill Gates. Time wrote:
The people who are closest to Bill Gates (those who feel comfortable enough to pull his smudged glasses off his face and polish them for him) thought his marriage early this year might finally slow him down. If so, there is no outward sign of it... he seems intent on extending Microsoft’s hegemony into every new medium, from CD-ROMs to digital banking to online services to interactive television. No aspect of life in the information age, it seems, will escape his influence. He’s even buying digital reproduction rights to the world’s greatest works of art.
It was not just the electronic rights to the world’s artworks that Gates was buying to be displayed on giant TV screens on the walls of his mansion that was under construction on the shores of Lake Washington. Shortly before the Time top-50 article appeared, Gates bought the Codex Hammer, an original 72-page manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci’s diagrams and notes. Through a representative who bid by telephone during an auction at famed Christie’s in New York City, Gates paid $30.8 million for his first significant artwork purchase, a record for any manuscript ever sold at auction. (The previous record was $11.8 million.) Before the auction, the manuscript had been expected to fetch about $10 million.
Leonardo da Vinci was one of Gates’s personal heroes. Gates greatly admired his scientific genius and vision. Although Gates took only one course in art history before dropping out of Harvard to found Microsoft, he had known the history of the Codex (Latin for book or bound manuscript) for some time, and had told friends that if it ever became available, he planned to buy it. “Going into the auction at Christie’s, Bill was determined that he was not going to be outbid,” said an acquaintance. “He ended up paying more than he thought he would have to pay, but he had been prepared to go much higher. It really wasn’t a question of money for Bill. This was something he wanted. And when Bill decides he wants something, look out.” In October, a month before the auction, Forbes had named Gates the country’s richest person, with a fortune of $9.3 billion.
The Codex Hammer was one of 20 extant da Vinci manuscripts, and the only one still in the United States. The others were in museums in Paris, London, and Milan. Made of just 18 sheets of cream-white linen paper, folded in half to produce 72 pages, the Codex Hammer contains Leonardo’s scientific thoughts and predictions, and includes more than 300 illustrations. The major theme of the manuscript is the behavior of water, but it also includes Leonardo’s thoughts on many other topics, including astronomy, geology, and meteorology. It offers advice on flood control, dams, and canals. The manuscript predicts the invention of the steam engine and the submarine, and explains the presence of marine shells and fossils on mountains and plains far from the sea. It also explains why waves curl and the sky is blue.
“Experience shows us that air must have darkness beyond it and hence it appears blue,” Leonardo wrote. He also wrote that the light of the moon is reflected sunlight—not a significant observation today, but Leonardo made it a century before Galileo proved that the moon does not produce its own light.
Leonardo wrote the text of the manuscript backwards, apparently to disguise his theories, and thus it is legible only when read in a mirror. The notes were composed between 1508 and 1510, when he was approaching 60 years of age.
Leonardo bequeathed the manuscript to a friend, but it did not surface publicly until the death of its second owner, a Milanese sculptor, in 1690. It was later purchased by an Englishman, Thomas Cook, the first earl of Leicester, on a visit to Italy in 1717. For the next 263 years, the manuscript was known as the Codex Leicester. In 1980, American industrialist Armand Hammer, chairman of Occidental Petroleum, bought the manuscript at a Christie’s sale in London for $5.6 million, and renamed it after himself. It was the last da Vinci manuscript in private hands; when Hammer died in 1990, it was left to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, which subsequently put it up for auction in late 1994 to raise money to fight a lawsuit brought by an heir to the Hammer fortune.
Long before the auction in November 1994, representatives of Christie’s contacted Gates’s friends and business associates as well as members of the Seattle Art Museum in an effort to pique the interest of the world’s richest person. The manuscript was aggressively marketed by Christie’s before the sale. By the time it went on the auction block, the manuscript had been shown in cities around the world, including Milan, Zurich, Seoul, and Tokyo.
The bidding war started at $5.5 million and rose quickly. The main competition came from the Cariplo Foundation, Italy’s largest bank, which wanted to return the Codex Hammer to Italy as part of its cultural heritage. A representative of the Cariplo Foundation was in a front-row seat at the auction, but had to pull out of the bidding when the price hit $27 million. A Gates representative was bidding by phone, as were several others.
Christopher Burge, chairman of Christie’s in New York, described the sale as “an extraordinary moment in auction history.” Christie’s did not immediately name the buyer, saying only that the person was a private art collector who wanted to remain anonymous. It did not take long for word to leak out that the new owner of the Codex Hammer was Bill Gates, theretofore known in the art world only for buying digital rights to great art treasures, not the real thing.
Gates soon announced that he would not name the Codex after himself, as Hammer had done. Instead, Gates said, it would be rechristened the Codex Leicester, its name for more than 200 years of its history. In a written statement, Gates explained:
While it has been known by a number of different names, in the nearly five centuries since it left Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, it first came to widespread public attention as the Codex Leicester. Much of the important scholarly literature refers to it by this name as well, and I feel strongly that for the sake of continuity and tradition, the name of Codex Leicester should be restored to this remarkable work of art and science.
Gates also promised to share the Codex with the world before permanently installing it at his mansion, by exhibiting it at museums in New York City, Paris, and finally Seattle. When the manuscript finally arrives at Gates’s high-tech mansion, it will be kept in a special case in his huge, custom-designed library. A laser light will keep track of how much exposure the da Vinci masterpiece receives. But even after its installation at Gates’s home, the prized notebook will still be available to the public—but only virtually. Corbis, the private company owned by Gates that was acquiring the electronic rights to photos and art collections from around the world, made plans to produce a CD-ROM of the Codex Leicester for sale to the public and for on-line viewing.
In 1450, two years before the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Gutenberg printed a copy of the Bible on a crude press. Five hundred years later, another revolutionary technology would turn da Vinci’s words and illustrations into tiny bits of digital information for viewing in cyberspace.
