eGroups Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
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Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.
They were an email list management website, and became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition.
The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.
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Nerds 2.0.1 Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
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Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Part 1 - Networking The Nerds talks about the TCP/IP and early machines implementing it:
  • 21:00: shows inside The Pentagon. The way the dude who works there opens a his locked office door with an electric switch is just amazing. Cringely also mentions that there's an actual official speed limit in the corridors as he rides a carrier bike slowly through them.
  • 21:45: the universities weren't enthusiastic, because people from other locations would be able to use your precious computer time. But finally ARPA forced the universities' hands, and they joined.
  • 24:24 mentions that some of the guys who created ARPANET were actually previously counting cards at Casinos in Las Vegas, just like in the 21 (2008) film
  • one of the centerpieces of development was at UCLA. The other was the BBN company. 33:55 shows the first router, then called them Interface Message Processor
  • the first message was from UCLA to Stanford University. He was trying to write "Login", and it crashed at the 'g'. Epic. They later debugged it.
  • towards the end talks about ALOHAnet, the first wireless computer communication done
Part 2 - Serving the Suits
  • Robert Metcalfe. He's nice. Xerox PARC. Ethernet.
  • Explains what is a "Workstation", notably showing one by Sun Microsystems. This is now an obscure "passé" thing in 2020 that young people like Ciro Santilli have only heard of in legend (or in outdated university computer labs!). Funny to think that so many people have had this idea before, including e.g. the Chromebook
  • 10:46 mentions that all of Cisco, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems and where founded at Margaret Jacks Hall, Building 460, at Stanford University.
  • he then talks a lot about Sun. Sun became dominant in Wall Street.
  • 19:05: Novell, from Utah. How they almost went bust, but were saved at the last moment by Ray Noorda, who refocused them to their NetWare product which was under recent development. It allowed file and printer sharing in IBM PCs. 22:55 shows how they had a live radio host for people waiting on customer support calls!
  • 33:56 mentions how The Grateful Dead had in impact on the Internet, as people wanted computers to be able to access The WELL online forum. They still own the domain as of 2022: www.well.com/. It is interesting how Larry Page also liked The Grateful Dead as mentioned at The Google Story, his dad would take him to shows. Larry is a bit younger of course than the people in this documentary.
  • 37 show McAfee
  • 43:56: fantastic portrait of Cisco
Part 3 - Wiring the World:
  • Berners-Lee at CERN and the invention of the URL.
  • 1992: US Government allow commerce on the Internet
  • Web browser history, Mosaic and Marc Andresseeen.
  • 20:45: America Online
  • 23:29: search engines and Excite. Google was a bit too small to be on his radar!
  • 25:50: porn
  • 27: The Motley Fool and advertising
  • 30: Planet U grocery shopping
  • 31:50: Amazon
  • 33:00: immigrant workers, Indians playing cricket, outsourcing, Wipro Systems
  • 41:25: Java
  • 46:30: Microsoft joins the Internet. The Internet Tidal Wave Internet memo. Pearl Harbour day talk.
  • 56:40: Excite Tour. If they had survived, they would have been Google with their quirky offices.
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Scott Hassan Updated 2025-01-29 +Created 1970-01-01
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The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?
In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.
As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].
Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife
Figure 1. Source.
In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.
In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.
In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.
Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom
To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.
The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first Edit war, how exciting:
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:
  • 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known fact
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
so it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.
Figure 2.
Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh posing with a green screen in 2001
. Source. Oh, to be young and feel love's keen sting.
Figure 3.
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source.
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