7 Tales of Bureaucracy
That 10-megabit link was fast enough that when the new Clinton administration took office, they asked to borrow it. Turns out the new tenants over at the White House were having trouble getting their routers cleared by the Secret Service and they wanted to do a "we know what the Internet" is event with the President, so ARPA helped us run an infra-red link from the roof of the National Press Building down to the White House lawn to get them hooked up.
About ninety days after the NSF grant came through, the server was up and running and raw EDGAR data was on the net. Remember rule 2, when the starter's pistol gets fired, run as fast as you can.
We ran the service for a year and a half, starting with FTP for tarballs, then Gopher for docs, then an HTTP server, then finally a WAIS database. By mid-1995, there were 50,000 people a day using the service. Some of those people were financial fat cats on Wall Street, but there were also students, journalists, government employees, senior citizen investment clubs, and others that were of insufficient means to afford $30 documents.
And this brings us to rule number 3, which is that eyeballs rule. Build up a user base, and you have much more leverage than if you're just blowing smoke.
Perhaps we should have used our "first-mover advantage" to—as they said in the .com days—"monetize the eyeballs." But, I didn't want to be the face of the SEC, I wanted the SEC to do their job, which was to make the
