John S. Quarterman

John S. Quarterman’s first memory of the Internet is from 1974, when a classmate at Harvard explained they could send something called an email to their peers at MIT. But his favorite memory of early tech is going down the street to MIT and playing Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer with his peers—in person. By the 1990s, before email and graphic computer games became readily available to most, he’d already written the book on the Internet. And he’d begun to map it, earning himself the nickname of Internet Cartographer.

In The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide, Quarterman helped explain the networks and protocols that became the Internet. Up until its publication in 1989, books about the Internet were rare. Afterwards, publishing houses couldn’t print them fast enough. That same year, he co-authored The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System, which became the textbook for teaching generations of computer science students about the operating system that made TCP/IP widely available.

On the heels of his groundbreaking books, he launched a research consultancy, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS), and began to not just write about the Internet, but to map it in detail. Despite quickly becoming the go-to source for understanding the Internet, in 1994, he was still wrapping his own head around it: “I was busily mapping the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. Not only geographical maps but also graphs of growth. I could see it growing faster than anything else by far,” said Quarterman. “But meanwhile, we weren’t really using the World Wide Web. It didn’t look that good to me.”

Little did he know at the time that one of his “Matrix Maps” charts, published in 1994, caught the eye of a young Jeff Bezos who saw something in them that Quarterman had not: an immediate huge business opportunity on the World Wide Web. According to Bezos’ biographer, the chart is what inspired Bezos to launch Amazon, as he saw a business opportunity in the Internet’s rapid growth. It’s impossible to know all the ways in which the Matrix Maps have shaped decisions by engineers, governments, and investors. Quarterman himself used his own growth graphs to help persuade the US State of Georgia’s utility regulator to require Georgia Power to double its solar power capacity to accommodate for the Internet’s growth.

These days, Quarterman tends more to the okra crops on his farm in Georgia that his grandfather bought in 1921 than to mapping. But he’s as passionate about technology as ever. And if he could change one thing about the Internet as we know it today, it would be to break up Big Tech, through anti-trust legislation. Because having followed every twist, turn, and growth spurt of the Internet, when he looks to its future, Quarterman finds there’s a lot to be learned from those early days, when many of the people with the most influence over the Internet understood more about the underlying technology than about how to turn a profit.