Just about the only place you could get something to eat at 4 in the morning in Champaign, Ill., in early 1993 was a convenience store called the White Hen Pantry. “It’s kind of a Midwest 7-Eleven,” says Marc Andreessen, who would often stumble out of his workspace at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at ungodly hours in search of sustenance.
ANDREESSEN, 21 YEARS OLD at the time, and fellow NCSA worker Eric Bina were working on a program they called Mosaic. One night at the White Hen, Andreessen scanned the newsstand and saw the first issue of a magazine called Wired. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is pretty interesting stuff’,” he recalls of the magazine that promised to treat technology as a cultural breakthrough. “But you know what? The magazine didn’t mention the Internet once.”
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