September 11, 2015
In 1996, when I was a young engineer working at Motorola, there were only a handful of employees - in a few hand-picked departments - who were allowed access to the Internet and external websites from their work computers.
I was not one of them, so I had to sneak to my friend’s cubicle after work hours to surf the Internet. I was living in Arizona at the time and searching for a job back east, and my dial-up connection at home was painfully slow.
Motorola, like many companies then, was treading very carefully and slowly toward the Internet era. The company feared that employee productivity would drop significantly if everyone were given access to the Web.