The programmers and the ABCDEFG problem

Fri, 25 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Steve Sellers and John Hanke were pinching themselves as they drove from
Berkeley to San Mateo on that October evening. "It was like we turned the
light switch on," Steve said.

Sellers' and Hanke's The Big Network was a year-old game site where
Internet users can play simple board games like chess and card games like
poker against other users. No sooner had they started putting feelers out
about their transition to Java than, suddenly, it was happening. Suddenly,
every big Web site had decided they wanted to offer their users simple board
games. Yahoo had bought one company, Classic Games, and Excite had arranged a
licensing deal with another game provider, TEN, the Total Entertainment
Network. Infoseek and Netscape's Netcenter followed Excite's suit. Steve
Sellers got a hold of a producer at Snap, the fastest growing search directory
on the Web, who stepped up and offered The Big Network a contract.

There was only one problem ...

Snap's representative, Dan Burkhart, had come to The Big Network's
tiny little underground virtual office in Berkeley, and Dan had to ask -- where
were the programmers?

Salon.com > Po Bronson

The programmers and the ABCDEFG problem