Incoming links: Larry Page
Larry Page's father.
Carl is mentioned in The Google Story Chapter 2 "When Larry Met Sergey".
He divorced from Larry's mother Gloria in 1980 or 1981, "when he [Page] was eight years old" according to The Google Story. He then moved on to Joyce Wildenthal, another MSU professor. Larry had a good relation with both Gloria and Joyce:
Larry came to feel that he was showered with love and wisdom from two mothers: his real mom, and Joyce Wildenthal, a Michigan State professor who had a long-term relationship with his dad.
His obituary on the website of the Michigan State University, where he taught most of his life: www.cse.msu.edu/Alumni_Friends/Alumni/PageMemorial.php:
Page served as CSE’s [MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering] first graduate director and had a critical role in promoting the department’s research mission. In 1967, when he joined MSU, the computer science program consisted of only undergraduate courses. Just three years later, the department offered eighteen graduate courses in computer science.[...]Page taught courses in Automata and Formal language theory and Artificial intelligence. He was a beloved teacher and mentor to innumerable students until his death in 1996.
Carl Victor Page's obituary by Matt Collar
. Source. Presumably printed on the The State News, student newspaper of the Michigan State University.
Found by Googling into his Wikidata entry: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15791098 which cites this random German Wikipedia page: de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Victor_Page which cites the obituary from this WordPress blog: tao221.wordpress.com/ TODO find the page of the blog that uses that image.
Carl Victor Page Memorial World Wide Web Page
. Source. Another useful hit from tao221.wordpress.com found by... Googling! Contains the best photo of Carl we've found so far. The screenshot seems to be a Ctrl + P of some website, if only the author knew about Wayback Machine! The links on that screenshot would be of interest. The screenshot also mentions other family members:
- Carl B. Page, with a cpsr.org/ email. A brother maybe? www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/detroitnews/name/carl-page-obituary?pid=182235576%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dobitsharebeta mentions a Carl B. Page from Michigan who died in 2010.
- Joyce Wildenthal, Carl's partner, with a pilot.msu.edu email. TODO what is
pilot?
Larry Pages's older brother.
It is hard to find information on this little bugger! Not a single photo online!
As suggested by the "Jr.", he is named after Larry's father, Carl Victor Page.
Carl Jr. is mentioned in a few places in the book The Google Story. The full name "Carl Victor Page Jr." is never given in that source, only "Carl Page Jr." is used. These crazy Anglo-Saxons and their semi-optional middle names!
The Google Story does not cite its sources, but it likely got much of its insider information through interviews, e.g. Chapter 2. "When Larry Met Sergey":which suggests the authors actually interviewed Carl Jr., since interviews with Carl Jr. cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. It would be interesting to know more how they got that level of access.
Carl Jr. recalls Larry as an inquisitive younger brother with wide-ranging interests
Chapter 2 mentions that Carl Jr. is nine years older than Larry. Therefore, he must have been born in 1963 or 1964. It also states that Carl studied at the University of Michigan, like his father and like Larry would also do later on:
He also enjoyed helping Carl Jr. - who was nine years older - with his college computer homework when Carl came home from the University of Michigan during breaks.Their father was a professor at the Michigan State University, which is a different university from the University of Michigan, and not in the same city, so by breaks they mean term breaks.
Chapter 2 also mentions that he was working in Silicon Valley by the time their father died in 1996:
Despite his grief [for the death of their father at the early age of 58], Larry remained enrolled at Stanford. It helped that his older brother, Carl Jr., lived and worked in Silicon Valley. They had each other, so Larry wasn't left to bear the loss alone, and the two spent time together, fondly recalling their dad and reflecting on their childhood memories.
In 1997, Carl co-founded the mailing list management website eGroups together with Scott Hassan, programmer of an early version of Google when he was a research assistant at Stanford University. Carl and Scott presumably met through Larry, but we don't have a source. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 2000. The Google Story Chapter 8. "A Trickle" mentions:Carl is listed as a co-founder in the SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt as "Carl Page". He does not appear on the 5% stockholders however, poor Carl.
Google's deal with Yahoo!] had special significance for Larry Page, since his brother, Carl Jr., also was in serious negotiations with Yahoo! over a major business transaction. The following day, June 27, Yahoo announced plans to buy eGroups, a technology firm that Carl Page had co-founded, for $413 million.
In 2006, he brought a company he founded called "Handheld Entertainment" public through a reverse merger with a shell company: archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/brother-of-google-co-founder-uses-shell-company-for-handheld-start-up/. "Handheld Entertainment" made an iPod competitor apparently. SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1309710/000095013606009480/file1.htm.
September 27, 2023 marked Google's 25 th aniversary and the page cirosantilli.com/carl-victor-page-jr had a small surge of views according to Google Analytics. On that day, this page was one of the top Google search results for "Carl Victor Page, Jr."[ref]. Wikipedia also had a large bump in searches for "Larry Page" on the same day: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page which must be the root cause, Larry actually managed to beat "Cat" and "Dog" on that day.
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.
eGroups logo
. From the earliest archive of their "about" page: web.archive.org/web/19991004062653/http://www.egroups.com/info/top.html in 1999.The 1997 Wayback Machine archives are just priceless: web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/http://backrub.stanford.edu/backrub.html. I'm so glad that website exists and started so early. It is just another university research project demo website like any other. Priceless.
Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired, in 1998: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge
In August 1998 they had an their first investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems co-founder. Some sources say September 1998. This was an event of legend, the dude dropped by, tested the website for a few minutes, said I like it, and dropped a 100$ check with no paperwork. Google wasn't even incorporated, they had to incorporate to cash the check. They were apparently introduced by one of the teachers, TODO which. Some sources say he had to rush off to another meeting afterwards:
Tried to sell it for 1 million in early 1999... OMG the way the world is. It would be good to learn more about that story, and when they noticed it was fuckup.
One of Google's most interesting stories is how their startup garage owner became an important figure inside Google, and how Sergei married her sister. These were the best garage tenants ever!
Bibliography:
- Video "Anne Wojcicki interview by Talks at Google (2018)" has a few mentions, e.g. youtu.be/pDoALM0q1LA?t=173
- www.theverge.com/2019/12/4/20994361/google-alphabet-larry-page-sergey-brin-sundar-pichai-co-founders-ceo-timeline The rise, disappearance, and retirement of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Good timeline!
Google garage (1998)
Source. Description reads: "The company's sixth employee made this video tour of the office in 1998" so this should be Susan's garage, since the next office move was only in 1999 to 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto.Andy Bechtolsheim's 100.000 check by Discovery UK (2018)
Source. Contains interviews with Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton. The meeting happed in David Cheriton's porch. Andy showed up at 8AM, and he had a meeting at 9AM at Cisco where he worked, so he had to leav early. Andy worked at Cisco after having sold his company Granite Systems, which David co-founded, to Cisco. Particularly cool to see how Andy calculated expected revenue quickly on the back of his mind.Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.
As The Google Story puts it about Largey:
Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.Ciro Santilli likes that.
Very very good. Those nice pre-Dot-com bubble vibes.
Might be freely watchable? Wikipedia links to:
But they do start with an FBI warning about copyright. So... erm.
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.
When Ciro finally understood that this is a play on Larry Page's name (of course it is, typical programmer/academic humor stuff), his mind blew.
Cool tool that allows you to graphically visualize page viewc counts of specific pages. It offers somewhat similar insights to Google Trends.
Homepage: pageviews.wmcloud.org/
Documentation: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pageviews_Analysis#Massviews
The homepage shows views of selected pages, e.g. when Google had their 25th birthday: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page Larry Page briefly beat "Cat" and "Dog".
/topviews shows the most viewed pages for a given month: pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=2023-08&excludes= It is extremelly epic that XXX: Return of Xander Cage, a 2017 film, is on the top ten of the August 2023 month. The page was around 8th place on a Google search for "xxx": archive.ph/wip/giRY8 at the time. XXXX (beer) was also on the top 20, followed by Sex on 21.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: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
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].
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
The divorce is covered in several major outlets:
- www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9912929/Billionaire-investor-helped-launch-Google-accused-divorce-terrorism-bitter-break-up.html
- www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html
- www.cnbctv18.com/technology/who-is-scott-hassan-the-google-founder-accused-of-divorce-terrorism-10543641.htm
- www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2020/02/28/suitable-technologies-bankruptcy-filing-scott-hassan-allison-huynh/
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:
- December 2022: an anonymous user with IP from California removed divorce details and google share ownership details, both of which had a New York Times source: www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/Scott-Hassan-Allison-Huynh-divorce.html. Discussion at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scott_Hassan#Divorce_details_removed_as_%22poorly_sourced_material%22_by_anonymous_user_even_though_they_had_a_source_from_the_New_York_Times It feels exactly like the type of thing Scott would have done himself. And he possibly inadvertently exposed his real IP in doing so: 24.6.226.102. It is pingable, but Nmap analysis shows nothing of interest.
- June 2024: another partial revert removing the juicy divorce details by user named "ReversingWrongs". The username choice so incredibly cute and naive it makes Ciro wonder if this is from some woman that loves him (mother, child, new partner?) rather than just a Hassan sockpuppet. OK, perhaps with en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#People_who_are_relatively_unknown the divorce has to be left out? It's always impossible to decide with those wikipedia things. What you can say, is not necessarily what people want to read about, even when it is incredibly well source.
Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known factso 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.
- 24.234.111.66 is marked as being from Las Vegas online.
after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).
Screenshot of allisonhuynh.com by the Daily Mail
. Source.