Tangan-tangan Yahudi Dibalik Internet

The Jewish hand behind Internet

Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MySpace, eBay...

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Bagian Keenam

OMG, A Jewish History of the Internet

Did you know that the internet is Jewish? Yeah...Moses got the Torah from HaShem on Mt. Sinai and HaShem told Moses that his brother Aaron and his descendants would be Kohenim forever. Now a "Kohen" is a priest and the story of the internet involves a Jewish priest, a Jewish painter, a Jewish Scotsman and a Jewish sugar merchant living high in the mountains...well sort of...

In 1972, at the International Computer Communication Conference, Robert Kahn (a kohen) was able to connect 40 different computers revealing his work to the public for the first time. Just three years later David Farber (whose Yiddish family name means "painter") worked to create a primitive kind of email system. Within the next twenty years the internet that we now know and love was born. In 2003 MySpace was launched and by 2006 it had become the largest social networking site in the United States. MySpace added a new dimension to how we communicate and share information with our friends, family and even religious communities. The website was co-founded by Tom Anderson. Although Tom's last name reflects his father's Scottish heritage, he and his mother are Jewish and he was raised in a messianic Jewish household. At the age of 14 Tom was a computer hacker working his mischief under the tag name Lord Flathead (not a Jewish name). He lead a team of hackers that were able to brake in to Chase Manhattan Bank computers, he tampered with banking records and left a message saying that unless he was given free use of the system he would wipeout the records. He must have been praying because he was never charged with the crime :) The website Tom would later become famous for inspired a 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (a Jewish name meaning "sugar mountain") to create another social networking site called Facebook. Things are looking sweeter then a pile of sugar for Zuckerberg because Facebook has made him over a billion dollars and more people can be found on his networking site then in the entire country of Japan.

...So we see that many key players in the field of computer technologies are our fellow tribesmen. The internet itself has even been compared to the Talmud...layers upon layers of commentary dealing with issues from personal hygiene to oven construction. However the internet is only truly comparable to the Talmud if it's dialogue eventually returns to G-dly matters. The Talmud finds a way to elevate even mundane and seemingly secular matters to a level of Torah. We should do the same with our technologies, only then do they become truly Jewish.

And finally yet another Jewish boasting article on the same topic (from http://kupe.joeuser.com/article/158970/Jews_On_The_Internet):

Jews On The Internet

By Larry Kuperman

July 29, 2007

The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of "What is a Jew?" and also "Who is a Jew?" Questions that have been asked many a time.....mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes....well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world's population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.

Not so, bubbala. (A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.) The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers. Lets look at "Who's A Yid?"

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. Larry Page's mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.

Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University. It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students, but expanded quickly. Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital. He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish. Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale. How much is Facebook worth? Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel: "Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015." Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.

Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30. He is best known for founding Digg.com. Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers He began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV. On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS into arguably the premier tech news site. Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.

Scott Blum has been referred to as the "Sam Walton of e-commerce." Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers. Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash. He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father. Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com. He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.

RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product. But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential. When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft. He has had a major impact on the Internet.

Certainly also worth mentioning are Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago; and Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland.

What would the Internet be like with Google, PayPal, Facebook, Digg.com, Buy.com? It would be very, very different.