"RADIO TECHNOLOGY FOR MANKIND" NEW YORK TIMES, 1994

With the radio metaphor sort of taking root in the Internet, we kicked off New Year's Day in 1994 with the first 24-hour/day audio feeds on the net. We hooked up a live feeds from the floor of the House and Senate (and did some fun work with our colleagues Deb Roy at the MIT Media Lab to build a speaker recognition system and a search engine tied to the congressional record), and got Internet broadcast rights from several satellite-based channels.

With the "channel" off and running, we turned our attention to live broadcasts. We ran live audio and video out of the IETF, INET, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and did the first live Internet congressional hearing with the Joint Economic Committee, complete with questions for witnesses from the net.

Our biggest production was a 3-day "cyberstation" that broadcast live from Interop. We brought in several dozen volunteers, drove a half-dozen U-Haul trucks to Vegas, and borrowed some high-tech "OctMods" from ARPA and 50 workstations from Sun. Our broadcast schedule included live rock-and-roll, live interviews over the net with Senators and Cabinet Members, and a nightly talk show hosted by John Gage. And, we had the dubious honor of opening the first casino on the Internet with real prizes.

Of historical note, IMS also became the first entity on the Internet to accept money from a stranger in 1994. Marshall Rose was a founder of First Virtual, the first of the e-commerce companies to go live with a secure payment system. When he needed a merchant to go live, we installed his software, and even got a few donations.

URL: http://museum.media.org/radio