Halt and Catch Fire (TV Series)

NeXT (2016)

Mark O'Brien: Tom Rendon

Photos 

Quotes 

• Joe MacMillan : Let's get started. Berners-Lee wrote HTML to view and edit the Web, HTTP so that it could talk to itself. The chatter could be cacophonous. It could be deafeningly silent. Big picture what will the World Wide Web become? Short answer who knows?

  Donna Emerson : Okay, so, what's your point?

  Joe MacMillan : It's a waste of time to try to figure out what the Web will become. We just don't know. Because right now, at the end of the day, it's just an online research catalogue running on NeXT computers on a small network in Europe.

  Cameron Rendon : So, you're saying everything we've talked about since we got here has been a waste of time?

  Joe MacMillan : I'm saying, let's take a step back. Literally, a step back.

  Gordon Clark : Yeah, but what is this on the board?

  Joe MacMillan : It's the code for the Web browser.

  Tom Rendon : And you wrote it all on the whiteboard.

  Donna Emerson : The online catalogue of research?

  Cameron Rendon : Full of Norwegian dudes, physics papers, and particle diagrams and stuff?

  Gordon Clark : Yeah, and we care about this because why?

  Joe MacMillan : How did we all get here today? The choices we made, the sheer force of our will, something like that? Here's another answer the winds of fate. Random coincidence, some unseen hand just pushing us along. Destiny. How did we all get here today? We walked through this door. We don't have to build a big white box or a stadium, or invent rock and roll. The moment we decide what the Web is, we've lost. The moment we try to tell people what to do with it, we've lost. All we have to do is build a door and let them inside. When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge. It was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending. This is the first Web browser, the rudimentary one CERN built to view and edit research. I wrote it up here for you to see how simple it is. It takes up one whiteboard that's basic concrete and steel. But we can take this and we can build a door, and we can be the first ones to do it. Because right now, everyone else sees this as.

  Donna Emerson : As an online research catalogue.

  Gordon Clark : Running on NeXT.

  Cameron Rendon : On a network in Europe.

  Joe MacMillan : And with this handful of code, we can build the Holland Tunnel.