Chapter 160: Mind Explosion!

Su Mu walked in the direction where the motorcade was heading. Because his attire was reasonably proper and he wore a Yale University lapel pin on his chest, no security personnel gave him a hard time.

In his mind, he was still pondering the future development direction of the IT industry, a question he had contemplated more than any other over the recent period.

Although by 1988 internet protocols had been around for a few years, the primary functions of personal computers remained word processing and numerical calculation; apart from that, they served little major purpose. In the eyes of many, the PC was still a lifeless, enclosed, and isolated "large box."

Having spent over twenty million dollars on publicity and promotion, Spider mail had accumulated more than four hundred thousand registered users.

Yet only Su Mu and a handful of Spider employees knew that the number of people who logged into their mailboxes at least once a week was not even one-thirtieth of the registered users... and even that figure was already quite impressive.

This was primarily because very few people were willing to go online. Although over four million personal computers were distributed across the globe, more than half of those machines had never connected to a network. One could only say that the owners of those computers possessed a personal computer; they could not truly be called netizens.

The internet was still fumbling its way forward. Ever since ARPANET split in two—with one part shifting to military use and the other handed over to scientific research organizations—

hundreds of different networks of all sizes had emerged by now. Different netizens were distributed across different networks, remaining independent of one another, and the scale was still pathetically small.

In 1982, the National Science Foundation released CSNET. Any research institution could log onto this network as long as they paid an annual fee and agreed to prohibit commercial use. Numerous local networks sprang up and connected to the NSFNET, such as the Bay Area Network in northern California and the NEREN network in the northeastern United States.

Computer networking technology was no longer the exclusive preserve of a tiny minority. Many large corporations began developing their own internal networks, which were known as local area networks, further contributing to the growth and expansion of the internet.

For anyone outside the circle of experts, logging onto the internet was an arduous chore. In order to remotely retrieve files from a certain computer via the internet, a user had to operate one program to interact with the machine on the other side of the network, use a second program to locate the desired files, and employ a third program to translate those files into a format that their own computer could understand.

Elites in Wall Street and Silicon Valley vied with one another to convince people that the most revolutionary technological development of the twentieth century was the internet. This mindset led to a stampede of people founding online companies, which rushed to launch IPOs on NASDAQ upon achieving the slightest success, driving internet stock prices ever higher.

Even though many people did not understand what the "internet" actually was, it still could not stop them from waving their cash to buy stocks. Su Mu doubling his investment profits on Microsoft was the best proof of this.

Su Mu felt lost and could not figure out how the internet would develop in the future. This was the main reason why, after founding Spider mail, he stopped starting new businesses and felt that the past few years had been rather dull.

The entire industry currently looked like a massive hoax concocted by Wall Street elites in collusion with Silicon Valley businessmen. It was hard to imagine such an internet ever being popularized worldwide.

Countless elites in Silicon Valley had failed to come up with a solution, and Su Mu could not think of one either.

At this moment, he pondered that if he wanted netizens to visit his company's online news pages, access their email, or enter the online chat rooms he was about to create, he had to make users on different networks aware that his company possessed these things.

A single Spider had cost over twenty million dollars; advertising was too expensive, and the company could not afford it for the time being. Su Mu immediately began considering combining them together. All he needed to do was promote their combination and let users freely choose the items they wanted through hypertext, which could save a considerable amount of money.

In 1981, Mr. Ted Nelson used the term "hypertext" in his book to describe an idea: creating a global large document where various parts of the document were distributed across different servers, and by activating hypertext items known as links—such as bibliographies in research papers—one could jump directly to the cited papers.

Su Mu had not only read that book, but also many other books on the IT industry. A flash of inspiration struck his mind, and his pupils instantly contracted! So excited was he that goosebumps broke out all over his body; he even forgot how to walk and stood frozen in place!

At that very instant, he suddenly realized that since his company could combine several web pages through hypertext, why not take it a step larger and encompass all the content within the entire internet?

Just as Mr. Ted Nelson had envisioned, turning the entire internet into one massive document, controlling that document himself, and allowing every internet user to use it to navigate the internet and find whatever they were looking for!

In this way, all the problems regarding the promotion of the internet would be effortlessly solved, because everyone could simply find everything across the entire network through him, adding bibliographies to every resource before presenting them to the users.

If this could truly be achieved, then never mind hundreds or thousands of networks—even millions of networks wouldn't matter, because they would all be within his own document!

"Protocols! First, establish a certain hypertext transfer protocol, letting users agree to let me use their resources and present them to other users...

Don't panic, it's doable, it's doable!"

Feeling as though he had discovered the greatest treasure in existence on the internet, Su Mu was so excited that his breathing grew rapid and his facial expression turned solemn!

Spotting a female student holding a notebook, he reached out and snatched it directly from her hands, sat cross-legged on the pavement, lowered his head to take out the fountain pen from his pocket, and began scribbling line after line of text, terrified that a momentary lapse in attention would make him forget anything.

He muttered under his breath: "If all information stored on computers around the world were interconnected, if I could program my computer to create a space where every computer in Silicon Valley and every computer on this planet could open themselves up in this space to me and anyone else, that would be a... global information space!"

His expression and actions were like those of a madman, nearly startling the female student into a scream. Just as she was about to flare up in anger, she recognized this billionaire alumnus.

There were very few Chinese students at Yale University, and even fewer billionaires. Ever since the news reports about him surfaced, virtually everyone recognized him.

She was still furious, but even more curious. She craned her neck to look at her notebook, only to see Su Mu sketching—inside a large circle were densely packed small dots, resembling a vast starry sky...