So WHICH COMPANIES, PEOPLE made the rapid Internet DEPLOYMENT

My twenty focus groups were each essentially groups of eight to twelve folk, 195 in all

Virtually all of them were professionals--half were designers in the high-tech sector, a quarter are or were executives in high-tech circles, and the final quarter are business people or academics very familiar with our technological age.

In other words, not a David Letterman "man on the street" interview set

The companies they named included a potpourri:

The clear winners were BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman), CERN, Netscape, RAND, and XeroxPARC

A second group included IBM, Microsoft, Synoptics, WorldCom, Adobe, 3Com, Apple and DEC

Universities and societies got named a lot: UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, MN, Utah, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Illinois

A third group was AT&T, A/OL, CompuServe, Telenet, Bridge Networks, Vitalink, and Equatorial Communications (I had not heard that name in years!)

Companies with single mentions included Cisco, Cray, Disney, and HP

The people named were almost a 'who's who':

Vint Cerf was a clear winner; Doug Engelbart was 2nd; Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Metcalfe, and Larry Roberts tied for third, just ahead of Bob Kahn.  All of these are well-known inventors of the infrastructure, but 'deployment'?

Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, Michael Eisner, Paul Baran, J.C.Lickliter, and Ivan Sutherland each drew several votes.

Al Gore got mentioned, as did Len Kleinrock, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, Irwin Jacobs, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Ed Teller, and Bill Gates.

No one from HP was named.  The lone person who cited it had no name to go with it.

No one from Cisco was named.  The lone person who cited Cisco as a company was asked "who" at Cisco.  The answer: "Cisco was headed by a man and a woman; I don't know their names, but she was always grumpy.”