The Internet Pioneers

SEAN

Tell me about your progress.

EDUARDO

Well… we’re in 29 schools now and we have over

75,000 members–

SEAN

(ignoring EDUARDO and going For MARK)

Iell me about the strategy you’re using.

MARK

Okay. For instance, we wanted Baylor in Texas but Baylor already had a social network on campus…

That last sentence may have mentioned Baylor, but the lines before it account for its early appearance in our story. You might recognize them as dialogue from the Oscar-winning The Social Network, widely considered the “origins story” of social media. The scene is a history-making “meet-cute” between Napster creator and notorious tech-disruptor Sean Parker, a Harvard frat boy and budding entrepreneur named Eduardo Saverin, and his partner: a computer nerd named Mark Zuckerberg.

We start here because this story is first and foremost a claim of history, and because today’s history – like the article you’re reading — is written on-screen more than in-print these days.

But most of all, because it launches a core question. Was Baylor actually some kind of early-adopting pioneer, with a unique place in the history of social-media, maybe even the Internet itself?

Few within the Baylor Family know the story behind this unlikely reference, let alone the answer to that question.

Fewer still realize how far its answer’s roots actually stretch. And only someone reading from our vantage point – that of a post-COVID world – can truly appreciate how profoundly it all matters today.

We’re going to travel back along those roots, but before reaching their earliest layer, let’s pause early for a spot of perspective. Namely, August 2019. A mere fifteen years after that conversation between The Facebook Three, and not long before this article was published, but remember: it’s also pre-COVID, which means that in practical terms, it’s a whole different era. To us, it’s in one sense ancient history – the dawn of the last Baylor semester Bears would recognize as “normal.”

The scene is a typical weekday morning on Fountain Mall. It’s early in the fall semester, and the sidewalks between Moody Library and the Rosenbaum Fountain teem with students. There’s not a mask in sight. That’s not until next year. And while these Bears are clearly diverse in every sense of the word – gender, ethnicity, dress, emotional state, you name it – they share one glaring, common denominator: nearly everyone holds a smartphone. Those who aren’t chattering into earpieces are listening with heads cocked, nodding to music and conversation. No one is using laptops – not out here; these students aren’t working or studying; just crossing campus. 

Yet nearly everybody is online. 

The sight is so familiar that we already take it for granted, but it’s actually quite remarkable if you stop and take it all in from a historical perspective. Try to picture, were it actually visible, the sea of information floating around their heads. Although it’s unseen and inaudible and intangible, imagine all that data as if it were an actual stream of ones and zeros pouring out of those devices and churning above them in a vast, grey cloud. The world’s largest swarm of bees, buzzing over a parade of oblivious victims. Gigabytes of bandwidth fill the air above this scattering of human souls; a space crammed with digital impulses yet so physically open that only days from now, it will hold tens of thousands for the Homecoming Pep Rally and Bonfire.

Now picture the roomfuls of technology and equipment needed to power all that information. Beyond network towers and fiber-optics required to host voice calls and cellular data, consider Baylor’s own link in the chain: campus servers and routers nestled across every corner of campus. In this year alone – 2019 – Information and Technology Services (ITS) will spend millions and deploy technicians to every corner of the Baylor world in support of all the web-equipped devices brought to school by its student body. 

This year, each student arrives with an average of five internet-connected devices: everything from computers and phones to tablets, watches and assorted consumer devices in dorm rooms and even cars. During every single second of this autumn day, five gigabytes of data flood in and out of the Baylor campus.

 “In 2019, bandwidth and internet access are the university’s ultimate unfunded liability: a hugely expensive yet nonnegotiable burden to bear. A burdensome cost-of-living expense, yet essential for viability in the Internet Age”. 

(Put a pin in that point and remember it, because later in our story – yet chronologically right around the corner – this will all change dramatically.)

Most of this river of information comes via the seamless and ubiquitous interface known as The World Wide Web. These days, the Web is the primary form of Internet most people experience, even if they only notice it as the “www” at the start of online addresses. And one huge and rapidly growing sector of the Web is dedicated to interpersonal interaction: otherwise known as social media. Catapulted by Facebook in 2004, social media now includes an ever-expanding array of applications which comprise the Internet’s touch-and-feel – the tip of its relational iceberg.

It’s what most of the Bears crisscrossing Fountain Mall are actually using right now.

What they don’t know, however, is that within a few yards of where they’re walking, Internet and social-media history was actually made. Some of those who made it are still here, largely unsung, and others are no longer physically at Baylor but still around – quite happy to share their thread in the tale.

To reach the story’s deepest roots, the true dawn of this history, we travel back to 1967: before the Rosenbaum Fountain, when Moody Library was still a construction site and, those sidewalks were still a working street along which you could park and drive beyond Fifth Street to a turnaround within a stone’s throw of Pat Neff.

In that year, when newly-hired physics professor Donald Hardcastle first arrived at Baylor, none of the university’s support functions utilized a single computer. (Ponder that for a moment. Not a single digital device for registration, grades, records, payroll, classroom instruction – anything. Most administrative tasks were performed by hand on Machine Record Equipment in the Pat Neff basement.)

In fact, the lone computing device on campus that year was a huge IBM 1620 housed in the business school’s “Casey Computing Center.” (Computers back then were so bulky and formidable that a single unit often justified its own dedicated infrastructure; often its own staff.) Bought with a $50,000 gift from the Casey Family for the educational needs of Baylor’s business students, the behemoth used a compiler loaded onto decks of punch-cards, its applications entered through still more decks, its output on yet another, final stack of punch cards for operators to decipher.

The 1620’s processing capacity? 20K. Twenty thousand bytes. By contrast, today’s thumb drives sold shrink-wrapped beside pencils and erasers in the Baylor bookstore hold over 20GB – one-million times as much – yet retrieve it in milliseconds, with a fingertip command. And of course, sell for around ten bucks. (That’s 0.02% the cost of IBM’s 1620.)

Hardcastle wasn’t a computer scientist, but his rapidly expanding field of physics required access to computing, and his determination to excel earned him a spot on a newly coined Baylor Computer Committee.

“I wanted Baylor to be as close to the leading-edge, sometimes called the bleeding-edge, as it could afford and still survive,” – Donald Hardcastle

The 1620’s processing capacity? 20K. Twenty-thousand bytes. By contrast, today’s thumb drives sold shrink-wrapped beside pencils and erasers in the Baylor bookstore hold over 20GB – one-million times as much – yet retrieve it in milliseconds, with a fingertip command. And of course, sell for around ten bucks. (That’s 0.02% the cost of IBM’s 1620.)

Hardcastle wasn’t a computer scientist, but his rapidly-expanding field of physic equired access to computing, and his determination to excel earned him a spot o a newly-coined Baylor Computer Committee.

“I wanted Baylor to be as close to the leading-edge, sometimes called the bleeding-edge as it could afford and still survive,” he said.

That desire spurred him to start meeting with officials of schools like Stanford, Cornell, Dartmouth, UC Berkeley, and MIT. His efforts quickly earned him the nickname of “Baylor Computing Czar” –  an unofficial title whose only real similarity to the Russian monarchy, according to one observer, was reasonable odds of assassination. Yes, in predictable Baylor fashion, the affair had quickly become contentious – complete with turf wars between champions of various companies, their respective platforms, and their visions of computing’s future.

That future, thanks to a convergence of largely covert events, was about to explode.

Several of those who lit the fuse for that detonation arrived on campus in the early 1980’s, but the one with the most fascinating personal history was Bill Poucher, a man who could well be described as having the Internet in his DNA – although you might just as easily claim the reverse: that the Internet has Bill Poucher in its DNA.

Which is to say, Poucher’s computing roots run deep. His family associations and personal memory banks resonate with names like Howard Akin (builder of the first computer); Eckert and Mauchley, (creators of the first “stored-program machines” and founders of Sperry Rand, the very first computing company), Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s acknowledged fathers, and Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet – whom Bill would later befriend, work with and even bring to the Baylor campus. His brother-in-law developed telemetry that sent Apollo images back from the moon, and later charted the projected path of America’s nuclear missiles. Bill’s father, a career military-intelligence officer and instructor, taught at The Air Force’s intel school and rubbed shoulders with the likes of General Curtis LeMay, Cold War hawk and father of Strategic Air Command – while he wasn’t disappearing on clandestine missions around the world.

Young Billy, as it turned out, was something called a “super-genius,” a young boy with a brain so turbo-charged that his thoughts seemed incapable of pausing, even for a night’s sleep. In those days before targeted medications, the only solution apparent to his mother – a southern belle and savant who herself finished college at 19 – was music: positioning a record player beside Billy’s bed and playing classical symphonies until her boy fell asleep. The result? Billy’s brilliance, quite predictably, first emerged in the sphere of music. However, as with many similarly-gifted young people, that gifting soon morphed into an affinity for mathematics. And this, in turn, segued into an odd knack for electronics – which first reared its head when he was twelve years old.

The family was living in an antebellum home (a fixer upper that was never quite fixed, Poucher confessed), on the edges of Auburn University. Poucher’s father had returned nearly dead from a secret mission to Hungary during the Prague Spring of ’56, and barely recovered. His chronic pain and health issues prompted a transition into academia.

Billy, as he was known then, had an older sister with alluring girlfriends whom she had invited for a sleepover – and Billy had a plan to make the most of their stay. In the days prior, the mischievous little brother had saved-up his paper route money and secretly bought parts to build a transmitter, hide a microphone in her room, and string wire through the home’s existing radio antenna. At the appointed hour, Billy succeeded in capturing ten minutes of the teenagers’ pillow talk and eavesdropping on his radio before declaring his surveillance mission a success for all little-brotherkind.

A few days later, however, there came a knock at the door. It was dark-suited men from a federal agency, on a deadly-serious errand. It seemed young Billy had inadvertently managed to broadcast his sister’s bedroom chatter over Auburn’s on- campus radio station – and in the process, unwittingly commit an act of radio piracy.

Billy did not go to prison for his offense – although for a time, he certainly thought he might – but he did gain an early and sobering look at the intersection of electronics and government.

That memory would resurface years later, after his emerging aptitudes led Bill to major in both music and mathematics — and a required course in computer science. That subject, as it turned out, perfectly suited Poucher’s uncanny knack for something called pattern recognition; plunging him into the emerging specialty of “coding theory,” and an additional turn into the subspecialty of something called encryption.

To understand the context and importance of Poucher’s pursuits at that point in time, a history recap is in order. By now we’re in the late-sixties and seventies, the thick of the Cold War, when the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals were kept from vaporizing humanity by a perverse dilemma known as Mutually Assured Destruction. This terrifying face-off had one enormous catch: it absolutely depended on both sides functioning glitch-free. And that included flawless internal communications.

Unfortunately, just as Poucher was completing his education, a mishap took place, far from the public eye, which shattered the Pentagon’s confidence in that very function. During a series of critical DEFCON tests, a nuclear submarine captain suffered a nervous breakdown. misinterpreted an incomplete yet critical incoming message, and triggered a reluctant takeover by subordinates. The debacle inspired the movie Crimson Tide, but it was quite real and deadly serious – and its impact would shape the next era in human history. In its response, the military realized the urgent need for an overhaul of its communications: namely, the challenge of “talking” with dozens of far-flung but essential locations in a way that could survive disruption and remain uncorrupted no matter what happened to its physical means of transmission. Earlier connections, by contrast, required a live signal maintained and preserved in real-time, from beginning to end. That was no longer an option. The Pentagon needed messages that could be cut-off, separated and interrupted, yet still have a fighting chance of reaching their target and reassembling into a working whole.

The solution? Something called packet switching: individual nuggets of information capable of finding multiple paths to their destination, yet to assume the correct order once there, and validate each other’s authenticity. And that demanded cutting-edge encryption.

The new backbone for these encrypted packets was ARPANET, after its primary developer the Defense Advanced Research Agency – perennial home of the military’s wildest and most exotic experiments, and source of its wildest rumors. The newly-minted operating language driving these encrypted packets would be called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) – a label that would soon be married to another protocol, bearing a new and deceptively humdrum name.

Internet.

This radical new template started as a classified command-and-control project, but soon spread like a kudzu vine into every aspect of military activity. Bill’s second brush with the confluence of electronics and government would drive this reality home. In 1975, he received a letter from a government agency whose name he had only heard whispered about; whose very existence was then a classified secret: the National Security Agency. Bill’s post-graduate encryption research had, as it turned out, crept into the dark and nebulous province of military intelligence; to such a sensitive level that he now had to gain agency approval before publishing his work.

Those men in the dark suits were back – knocking once again at his door.

At this point, Poucher’s professional narrative grows deliberately fuzzy for a time; for reasons which he remembers well but still, all these years, can’t disclose. It is known that the “Crimson Tide incident” directly led to his being recruited to work in the field. The name Los Alamos makes a cryptic but noteworthy appearance, alongside shadowy names like SAGE, another proprietary Pentagon network, and the Mitre Corporation: a CIA-owned subsidiary running global communications or the nation’s clandestine services. Poucher would have early encounters with Vint Cerf, inventor of TCP and one of the Internet’s acknowledged fathers, with a baby-faced Harvard wunderkind named Bill Gates, and a bushy-bearded and poorly-hygiened hippie named Steve Jobs –  whom he would encounter years later in a suite at San Francisco’s finest hotel, reinvented as a tech mogul in Tom Cruise haircut and pressed suit.

But the reason why Poucher’s narrative doesn’t vanish forever in that haze is that around this time, his life took a radical detour – a path as distant as you can imagine from the technical and mathematical sciences which he had excelled. Bill Poucher had a religious conversion; or at least a deepening of spiritual yearnings he had always felt but until then, not fully grappled with.

“I was always pulled towards Christianity, but this now was a major change in my life,” he said. For Poucher, that meant a turn away from its present course. “I decided to focus on building a better world rather than enhancing the capability to destroy the one we’re in,” he continued.

He is quick to point out, however, that he is not joining ranks with those who indiscriminately throw flames at the “military-industrial complex.”

“Those who protect the perimeter of civilization have a very difficult job,” he pointed out. “I’m not diminishing at all that they do. That was my father’s job. But there has to be something in the center of that vessel that’s worth the cost of protection.”

For Poucher, this radical detour only led in one direction. The core of the “vessel” he spoke of was young people – the future – and that meant education. Christian education, to put a fine point on it. And because a mind and an expertise like Poucher’s required a top-tier university in which to flourish, he soon found himself at Baylor.

Poucher joined a university which, thanks to ongoing efforts of Hardcastle and Data Communications Manager Bob Lemley, was fast earning a national reputation as a top “networking school.” A Lemley-ordered re-wiring of campus, initially meant to accommodate a new telephone carrier, combined with the installation of a new 56 kilobyte server to position Baylor for a major opportunity. Arpanet was on the wane, and focus was transitioning instead to BitNet: a civilian, university-centered offspring whose fiber-optic backbone followed IH-35 from Austin to Dallas. Hardcastle’s respect among Baylor leadership, along with a proposal written by Lemley to the exacting standards of President Herbert Reynolds, prompted Baylor to invest in a BitNet hub. As a result, the university joined the braintrust of early-adopting schools which quite literally brought the Internet to Texas.

Poucher would go on to become a legendary professor in Baylor’s vaunted Computer Science Department, and an elite fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. But along the way, he found another outlet for that passion to help “the center of the vessel” – programming competition. Starting as a coach, Poucher reinvented the way students pit their computer problem-solving prowess against each other. In the process, he built the infrastructure that became its oldest and largest event: the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Even here, his previous brushes with the Internet had an impact, as he used his prior knowledge of TCP/IP to give it a proprietary dial-up service, well before the emergence of America Online (or AOL).

Poucher became the organization’s founder, its executive director, and eventually brought both its competitions and its headquarters to the Baylor campus.

The events and their participants have since brought millions of dollars to Baylor, along with thousands of future computing leaders – including the very first tech officers of Google and Facebook, the Computer Science Chair of Georgia Tech, and scores of others. Thanks to Bill Poucher, the top echelon of today’s tech world is seeded with individuals who bear positive and vivid memories of Baylor, as well as fond recollections of a man whose warm persona belie a formidable place in Internet history.

Those same early 80’s brought another arrival – two, in fact – that would change that history in ways that they defy easy summary, yet are so major, and so unrecognized, that they demand recounting.

First came Michael Korpi, with an easygoing, soft-spoken demeanor that contradict both his maverick nature and a visionary agenda for Baylor’s unsettled Film and Digital Media department. One of his first moves was to bring in graduate school friend Corey Carbonara, a contrastingly vivacious Italian who had yet to complete his Ph.D, yet brought something even more impressive: a just-completed stint at Sony Electronics as its youngest-ever brand manager and corporate evangelist for a potentially world-changing new technology called High Definition Television. While Korpi was firmly grounded in academic pursuits – his Aesthetics class would become legendary among Baylor students – his addition of Carbonara confirmed that his head was firmly planted in the digital future.

That agenda began with an early decision: to seize the cutting-edge of new technology by not only teaching and contributing to its latest discoveries, but pro-actively seeking out the Hollywood and New York institutions, industry groups, and blue-ribbon committees where they were being made. No other university had adopted such a real-world strategy, and it worked to perfection. Korpi and Carbonara quickly forged relationships and partnerships that broadened and deepened over the decades, making not only a name for Baylor but countless openings for its future graduates.

As Korpi stated, frankly but without a trace of hubris, “Baylor has had a place in the industry, internationally, since the 1980’s.” As a result, so have Baylor students and alumni.

Early on, both men realized that the personal computer was the simplest, easiest and cheapest way to achieve their goals. Despite IBM’s then-recent release of the iconic PC, the notion of ordinary people having their own dedicated digital machine was still formany a radical one – and for some a downright laughingstock. ITS wanted none of it. Korpi and Carbonara found themselves fighting the group over giving their students personal computers instead of the more conventional set-up of a terminal hard-wired to a central, mainframe computer. The conflict became the first of many adversarial stances with Baylor’s administration.

But the pair had serious reasons for their iconoclastic positions, and soon validated them in spades. When the introduction of Apple’s Macintosh offered them a personal computer with a creativity-oriented, user-friendly interface, they were able to pursue an innovation they’d long dreamed of: video and film editing on the desktop. Again, no school had ever attempted this before, let alone taught it to students. And again, their app met with official disapproval. Once more they by-passed it by fle rules and “creatively-wiring” their computers with Macs at th School. Korpi chronicled their advances in a groundbreaking jou for the Society of Editing Engineers, and inquiries poured in fr the world. The status of Baylor Communications soared, for a time.

Carbonara further cemented Baylor’s tech leadership by doubling-down on High Definition research. Even as he taught the first university courses ever offered on the subject, he launched the Digital Communication Technologies Project: a high-tech lab that would become respected around the world. Carbonara was soon tapped by the White House and the State Department to represent America in delicate, fractious, and deceptively important negotiations over global high-definition standards. Japan and Europe were promoting competing line-resolution and technical schemes. configured to favor their own entertainment industries and disadvantage the others’. In other words: the future of Hollywood, along with that of global entertainment hung in the balance. The resulting disputes would delay high-def’s full implementation – and a public validation of Carbonara’s efforts – until the 2000’s.

Korpi’s improvements in editing, meanwhile, were far less far-flung; directly impacting the campus itself. With Ethernet still in its infancy, he developed for Castellaw a network running at an unprecedented full gigabit per second – the world’s fastest such system. This provoked more opposition from ITS, which intensified when he and Carbonara took the later step of promoting a wireless network: something ITS announced that, for security reasons, would never happen at Baylor – and ordered him to shut down. This prompted an in-person appeal to the President’s office, touting the results of an on-campus demonstration in which AT&T field-tested their latest from a plug outside Korpi’s door, all the way to a site adjacent to Pat Neff.

Then came the Web. In the early nineties, Baylor’s Information Systems group had collaborated with MIT on research towards a campus network capable of manipulating graphics and addresses; seemingly on the verge of a milestone innovation. However, a scientist at Switzerland’s futuristic CERN lab stole their thunder by writing the code that would perfect those same functions – creating the World Wide Web as we know it. Baylor and MIT’s pioneering efforts were abandoned.

Korpi, however, spotted the platform’s usefulness early on and used it to build an odd new online presence called a “website” for one of his classes – one of the very first course sites in existence.

The next notch in the history books came almost by accident. Carbonara’s Ph.D dissertation at the University of Texas came in as not only brilliant but gargantuan; clocking in at 768 pages. As no one could be expected to type and re-type separate a hard copy of that length, his mentor, the University of Texas computing legend George Kozmetsky, called for not only desperate but advanced measures. Corey Carbonara became, as a result, the first doctoral student ever allowed to submit a dissertation in electronic form.

In 1996, continuing efforts brought both men to Dallas’ InfoMart in search of partners for an unusuall project: helping the Baylor Alumni Association (now Baylor Line Foundation) broadcast football thousands of far-flung members across the globe – over the Internet. No one had ever carried a live play-by-play and distributed it worldwide using the Web instead of radio. On that day in Dallas, the most promising symposium was a presentation entitled “The Internet and How to Use It” by an obscure entrepreneur. Korpi and Carbonara wandered into the venue, a cavernous room capable of holding hundreds, to find a single attendee sitting before one, sheepish-looking presenter. Moments after the man began speaking, the other listener shook his head, rolled his eyes, whispered “I’m out of here,” and unceremoniously walked out. The ensuing pause was so mortifyingly awkward that to this day, Korpi and Carbonara cringe at the memory. The two felt so sorry for the presenter that they introduced themselves and invited him for a cup of coffee. He promptly agreed, and gave them his name. Mark Cuban.

Cuban liked their idea but wasn’t sure of whether he could help, as he’d recorded sporting events but never streamed them. The Baylor emissaries made him a proposal: they had amazing students to staff the effort, and extensive tech expertise of their own. Working together, they might just pull it off.

That’s how an additional layer of history was made. Mark Cuban, future tech billionaire, NBA owner, and Shark Tank personality, signed his company’s first contract with Baylor University in a project that went on to set a notable Internet precedent. Frank Fallon came back out of his recent and lamented retirement to broadcast a Baylor football game – and promptly crashed the Internet for the entire, southwestern United States. Baylor alumni had flocked from every corner of the globe to witness the first athletic event ever streamed by a university. Missionaries in Kenya had trekked-in to Nairobi simply to catch a broadcast on this suddenly accessible platform. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Chicago Tribune contacted Korpi and Carbonara with questions about what was happening in Waco Texas, of all places.

The success led to a campus Internet radio-station which consistently ranked among the world’s Top 20 until being brought down by licensing and copyright issues – the aftermath, ironically, of industry turmoil stirred-up by the work of a pre-Facebook Sean Parker.

As for the previously addressed Facebook incident, this is around the time when Baylor staff did indeed develop an on-campus network community, significant enough that Zuckerberg and his colleagues considered it a rival to their own. As The Social Network dialogue attests, Facebook answered with a strategy called a “Little Big Horn” – targeting less-advanced schools within a hundred mile radius of Waco (die-hard Baylor fans may note that this “lesser list” includes The University of Texas and Texas A&M).

“Pretty soon,” according to Zuckerberg in the script, “all the Baylor kids were seeing their friends on our site. We were in.”

Not long afterwards, the Baylor platform suffered an ignominious fate when, according to one source, a student worker manning the site accessed user passwords in an “unauthorized manner” and forced the university to abruptly shut down the effort. The celebrated film remains one of few public confirmations that it even took place.

All these years later, the pioneers who notched Baylor’s mark on Internet history are all still standing; alive and still very much around. Many important names have been overlooked by this story, whose scope is far broader, and its cast actually larger, than space would allow.

Don Hardcastle is retired and living nearby. His colleague Bob Lemley left Baylor to launch a computer company, sold it to tech giant Diebold and remains in the Waco area, still active in the industry.

The others are still at Baylor, their work more relevant than ever. Poucher remains the smiling face of competitive excellence for generations of technology’s elite, and a legendary presence in the Computer Science Department. Korpi and Carbonara are today regarded as giants in their field; their resumes thick with awards, accolades, and credited innovations. The prestigious Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers awarded Korpi a medal for educational achievement at a recent, 100th-anniversary banquet alongside the likes of James Cameron. The society awarded Carbonara a medal for excellence in education only last year. More importantly to them, they’re still nurturing new media pioneers in the classroom and their lab, whose record of innovations and successful graduates now seems almost too long to list.

As for those earlier skirmishes with assorted Baylor institutions, Korpi in particular views them with the equanimity of hindsight.

“Anybody who’s really innovative is going to be an irritation,” he admitted. “It’s hard for an institution to accommodate someone always jumping ahead to the next thing. It disrupts things. It makes life more difficult.”

The men even speak of today’s ITS as valued allies and champions in their efforts.

As for all those new Bears out there, walking up and down Fountain Mall, their smartphones crammed with technologies these men helped pioneer? Korpi and Carbonara smile knowingly and concede, after some prompting, that they saw it all coming

“In the mid-nineties, we were talking about a form-factor about the size of a wallet, something that would certainly fit in your pocket, and no reason why that device couldn’t be connected to everything – any media I want, on any device I happen to have. And we knew it was going to happen way faster than people thought,” they said.

Today, in the heart of the COVID crisis, that prediction saw coming – not even Castellaw’s visionaries. That’s because the 2020 pandemic radically changed our 2019 picture of Fountain Mall. That grassy expanse is no longer physically uncrowded; no longer looming in a single stretch between fountain and library. It’s broken instead by the walls of white tents: not the open awnings of festive university gatherings. but fully enclosed, with plastic-lined windows sealed tight against the elements. The only thing escaping them is cables, trailing to nearby generators.

These tents are not for celebration or honorifics, but for socially-distanced study, and eating and work. It looks like a scene from a plague movie, but it’s actually the reality of university life during an all-too real pandemic.

And that grey cloud of digital data, hovering invisibly overhead? It has now tripled in size, and exploded in importance. The offspring of Hardcastle’s technological leadership, of Bill Poucher’s TCP transport protocol, of browsers and platforms created by his Competition alumni, of high-resolution, fast-streaming High-Definition video developed and championed by Michael Korpi and Corey Carbonara – all are being used for infinitely more than turning in the occasional paper, conducting a spot of research, or keeping up with friends and family Today, during the worst crisis to hit Baylor, higher-education, and the world in a century, they’re shouldering the weight of Baylor’s very existence as a university,

Today, Baylor simply would not be able to sustain its academic life without the advances its leading lights made in preceding decades. Today, that Internet presence and its supporting technology is no longer a necessary evil or a cumbersome add-on to university life, but its lifeblood. And that makes Baylor’s surprising online history a tale of how a university, through its best and brightest, not only seized bragging rights and a place in modern lore, but planted the seed for its own survival.

Photos Courtesy of the Texas Collection