The emergence of the Netscape browser and Netscape's IPO are highly significant but in different ways. The second was a financial first, but the first literally changed the world by giving every person with an Internet connection the ability to participate in the creation and spread of knowledge, not only to consume it. Although early media executives and some other scoffed at the Internet and the Web, all have changed their tunes and the Web continues to evolve from a world ruled by mass media and mass audiences to one ruled by messy media and messy participation. In time, because everyone will be uploading and downloading, there will be no consumers, which is a good thing. However, there is even a more important role for the Web: that of the realization of something like John Gages network as computer. The Machine that is the Web is highly complex, as is the human brain, but the Machine is fractal and in a decade will have hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking billions of smart chips embedded in practically everything, and people will live inside It. The machine is always on, and has been called the only machine that has run somewhere between 10 and 30 years without downtime. Eventually, the tagging and posting done every day by millions of people will constitute the software that has been written for the Web. Each time a links is forged between words, an idea has been taught. There has been only one time in the history of each planet when inhabitants first wire up many parts to birth one large machine, and that time is now. This is a true marvel, and the Netscape IPO was probably not worthy of the moment, but the machine has been born, and it is on.