Tiny Snippets of Code That Changed The World
<p>In 1997, Ethan Zuckerman broke the Internet — by inventing the pop-up ad.</p>
<p>He was working for Tripod.com, an online service that let people make little web pages for free. To make money, Tripod sold ads that ran alongside the pages. The problem was, ads would wind up running next to racy content — a user’s page devoted to anal sex, say — and advertisers did <em>not </em>like this.</p>
<p>Zuckerman’s boss asked him to figure out some solution. Wasn’t there some way to position the ads so they weren’t right next to sexytime user-generated stuff?</p>
<p>That’s when Zuckerman figured out a weird, hacky solution: When you visited a Tripod page, it would spawn an entirely new pop-up page with just the ad. That way the ad would not be, technically, associated with <em>any</em> particular user page. It’d just be floating there onscreen.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing, though: Zuckerman’s bit of Javascript, that created the popup ad? It was incredibly short — a single line of code</p>