In the 1980s, pre-World Wide Web, the Internet was filled with software files hosted on remote machines. However, unlike today, where you can easily find and download pretty much any software you want, that infrastructure didn’t exist in the 1980s. Instead, if you wanted to download a piece of software from the Internet, you had to know it existed and know where and how to access it.

To solve this problem for himself, a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal named Alan Emtage built a script to crawl the Internet at night and compile a database of software. He could then search his database to find what he was looking for.

When other people saw Alan's database, they wanted access, too. So Alan built a public interface, and that became the first Internet search engine. However, rather than patenting his technology and licensing it -- something that could have made billions of dollars -- Alan made a different choice, and the Internet is a very different place than what it might have been.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.