Santa Clara Valley Historical Association

The Internet caught the public's fancy in 1993-94.

Originally noncommercial in nature and without much funding or central management, it was simply a linkup of diverse computer networks based at academic or research centers. Then software companies introduced products to make the Internet easier to use, on-line services opened gateways into it, and personal computer users became able to sign on.

As people began to grasp the Internet's possibilities -- spurred by a Washington champion, Vice President Al Gore -- the user count expanded phenomenally. Intrigued by all the activities they could carry on in cyberspace, computer buffs spent hours exploring the Net just for fun.

Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape voiced the wonder of it: "The Internet is the de facto standard communications network. We think of it today as a data communications network, but voice is data, video is data, images are data, text are data- all of these things are just data-and so the Internet is going to be the super highway that we all have been looking for."

Although companies in many parts of North America, Europe, and Asia were racing to capitalize on the Internet, a good deal of the activity was concentrated in Silicon Valley in companies large and small. Installations of fiberoptic cables, high-speed switches, and wireless transmitters were in progress around the San Francisco Bay, and Cupertino and Palo Alto were among the cities gaining an early place on the Net. Smart Valley, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit consortium, aimed to spur development of a regional infrastructure in order to revitalize education, reduce health care costs, create jobs, and make local government more responsive.

In 1993, ultrasmall computing systems equipped with wireless networking systems came into vogue. Both they and home and office computers were offered the promise of networking with other computers on a data superhighway.

At the movies, meanwhile, fans' eyes were popping. Silicon Graphics' 3-D imaging was behind many of the extraordinary technical effects that seemed to bring prehistoric animals to life in Steven Spielberg's 1993 movie, Jurassic Park, a box office record-setter. Then came Forrest Gump, with scenes of its slow-witted hero in action with dead presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

The same year saw the debut of a new product promoting connections between PC users: PCMCIA cards. Named for its designer, the Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association, the device, about the size of a business card, but thicker, could be inserted in a slot in a pocket-size computer to give it special functions such as extra memory.

Handheld personal digital assistants -- PDAs -- also bowed in. The palm-size computers had no keyboards; instead, users wrote on a plastic grid with a special pen. There was no standard operating system, and a consortium called General Magic formed to try to develop the proper software.

Two computer giants' marketplace skids led to ousters of John Sculley at Apple Computer and John Akers at IBM. At NExT Computer, Steve Jobs decided to focus on software and quit hardware. Borland International of Scotts Valley, once seen as a major PC software player, entered deep decline.

A new Cray Y-MP C90 supercomputer -- the world's fastest -- was added to Ames Research Center's NAS (Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation) program equipment. It upped Ames's computing power more than sixfold. The C90 can do more than 6 billion calculations per second, and can hold 1 billion words in memory.

Space shuttle Endeavour's crew successfully repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit. Many rated the fix-it mission NASA's biggest test since the 1969 moon landings.

On July 1, 1994, the Navy disestablished Moffett Field Naval Air Station, and NASA's Ames Research Center began managing the facility as Moffett Federal Base. Since 1987, Ames had operated its 14th wind tunnel -- the largest wind tunnel on earth for aerodynamic testing.

Computer and telecommunications firms were converging, as evidenced by AT&T bidding to merge with McCaw Cellular, the largest U.S. independent cellular company, and Bell Atlantic seeking to buy cable television conglomerate TCI, Inc., so as to use TCI lines outside its own service area to carry telephone calls. (The Bell Atlantic-TCI deal later fell through.) Cable TV companies could compete with telephone companies, which in turn wanted to enter the cable TV business to finance laying of fiber optic cable to homes.

Intel Corp. in 1993 unveiled its fifth-generation microprocessor, the Pentium, packing 3.1 million transistors and capable of executing more than 1 million instructions per second (MIPS). Motorola brought out a rival chip family, the PowerPC microprocessors, developed jointly in conjunction with IBM Corp. and Apple Computer.

Late in '94, the Internet became the medium carrying harsh consumer criticism of Intel for its reluctance to replace Pentiums after a flaw affecting complicated division problems was revealed. At length the company bowed to public opinion and offered a replacement to any owner who asked for it, at a cost estimated at $475 million.

In early 1995 Intel and Advanced Micro Devices settled their legal battle, begun in 1987 after Intel declined to share its 386 microprocessor technology with AMD, which then cloned the chip. During the litigation, Intel had brought out its i486 and the Pentium; AMD had brought out a 486 and was at work on K-5, a fifth-generation microprocessor of its own design.

Read about Silicon Valley's Vintage Year: 1995

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