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Appendix A: Where Science Meets Spirit: The Formula for MiraclesAppendix A: Where Science Meets
Shortly after arriving at MIT in 1989 I discovered something truly incredible: the
Internet! I had heard of the Internet only once before arriving at college, when the
first major Internet worm made the news. As a forward-leaning research
institution, MIT and sponsors from the computer industry had invested huge
sums in what was called Project Athena, with the goal of making high-powered
computer workstations with high-speed Internet connections available to all MIT
students. Hence, the campus was dotted with clusters of Internet-enabled
workstations that were free to use, though you sometimes had to wait a long time
to get on a machine, especially the night before a major project was due.
When I was at MIT, I remember being afraid that after I left school I would lose
access to the Internet. Widespread Internet access was still several years in the
future; in fact, an MIT alum that I practiced martial arts with used to trade free
software consulting to a local company in exchange for dial-up Internet access.
Of course, in those days we had no idea what the future of the Internet would be,
as at the time it was just an information sharing network for the government,
universities, and companies doing advanced research.
Despite the primitive state of the Internet, I was absolutely fascinated by the
online world, and I spent many late nights in chat rooms and on bulletin boards.
At the time, I did not see the Internet as a serious commercial opportunity, and I
expected that I would graduate from college and get a “normal” software job and
that the Internet and online world would remain just a hobby.
After four grueling years as an engineering major, I graduated at the top of my
class (Phi Beta Kappa) and received multiple letters of commendation for
exceptional academic performance from my professors. I then continued on to
graduate school where I joined the Telemedia, Networks, and Systems group at
the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. There I performed my graduate
research on sending audio and video over the Internet. To the best of my
knowledge, my research group was the first ever to send live audio and video
over the World Wide Web in 1994.
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