Happy Birthday mtv.com

VERY QUIETLY, the mtv.com domain name turns ten years old this summer. It is with some sadness that I tell this tale since the Mainstream Press has been brainwashed that the Internet = AOL and it is unlikely that M-TV parent Viacom wants to rehash the ugly fight they had with Adam Curry over the domain name.

Still, this is a romantic tale, a tale built on the remarkable vision of one man and implemented by a small crew of people working on a shoestring. When mtv.com was put on-line in the summer of 1993, few either inside or outside of the cliquish Internet community could have ever imagined how far and how quickly the world wide web and all of its bits would come into being.

Remember dear friends, back in '93, the only people who had 'Net e-mail addresses back in those days were academics and some government agencies, and Spam was still something you ate. The underlying technologies for the web - HTML, browsers - had only just emerged out of Switzerland and Microsoft hadn't even started work on a .Net strategy. Mosaic too was nothing more than a first-generation hack.

Our hero is Adam Curry, one-time M-TV "VJ" and closet techno-prophet, a '90s Cassandra that saw the potential of the Internet for entertainment and media, the fight over electronic music rights, and a whole bunch of other ideas I wish I could have written down at the time. At 6'3 or so and his good looks, Adam's claim to fame in those days of '93 was hosting the Top 20 Video Countdown on Friday afternoons. However, Adam had been tinkering with the Internet as a shell user (Yes, lads, he had some balls) and started posting his music-based "CyberSleaze" gossip column in his .finger file on the PANIX system in NYC.

When thousands of people "fingered" curry@panix.com to read the latest dish, it bought the UNIX box to its knees and resulted in some, shall we say, undiplomatic exchanges between Curry and PANIX's owners. Curry was pointed to a start-up outside of Washington DC that might be able to meet his expanding needs for bandwidth and computing resources, a tiny little place called DIGEX.

DIGEX in those days was staffed by a handful of people and the owner's cockatoo, Shiro Tori. It was, perhaps as a Hacker's deity intended, located in a small beat-up space above a Chinese restaurant. The technical staff of Ed Kern and Dave McGuire worked horribly long days to keep the network and supporting systems up and running, a battered lash-up of second-hand Sun hardware pumped into a T1 from ANS.

Curry purchased the services of a "private domain," what's called a dedicated web host these days, based on a Sun 3/60 with a whole 4 MB of RAM. After some haggling with Viacom, he obtained permission to use the mtv.com domain name. Viacom didn't see much usefulness in the item, since you couldn't charge money on a pay-per-view basis.

Another hurdle Curry faced was the existing Net community. Rumor had gotten out that Adam was going to do more than simply do a gossip column. Think about the slash.dot crowd ten years ago with comfy University jobs and their own private playground. Some were opposed to the pollution of their utopian paradise by "commercial" interests. Advertising! (Gasp). Others had a more pragmatic approach and started probing mtv.com for the user IDs of "Bevis" and "Butthead."

When mtv.com was "officially" launched in the summer of '93, it withstood a record 50,000 "hits" on the first day of operations (You! Stop laughing!) and quickly climbed to 75,000 hits/day in a few weeks of operation. Curry loaded the site with celebrity interviews, video clips from his show, and sound clips from artists, as well as the internationally popular "Cyber Sleaze" column. One of the more popular pages included a record commentary with a thumbnail sketch of CD cover, text describing the album, and a 30 second clip of one of the songs from the album.

As the Net grew, so did the popularity of mtv.com. Curry eventually switched it over to a Sun 4 before Viacom woke up and got into a legal battle demanding their property back. Ultimately, Adam returned mtv.com to Viacom and he won't talk about it. One of those sealed agreement things, but one that I suspect put some money in his pocket.

Don't feel sorry for Adam, however. He quit his job at mtv.com, rode dot.com to plenty of millions, bought a castle in Amsterdam, married a hot model and today continues to tinker around with the leading edge of technology. He also blogs like a fiend and has his own helicopter. You can check him out at www.curry.com and you are likely to learn a couple of things from his blogs.

DIGEX, the little company that I joined as employee #10 in Fall of '93, grew up, went public, got sold to Intermedia Communications, went public again in the dot.com boom, got sold again to WorldCom and is now trying to free themselves from WorldCom's shadow, both financially and in perception. In DIGEX's early years, it played host for a variety of interesting web sites, including cia.gov, but that's a story for another day... µ