Tiny Snippets of Code That Changed The World

Only a few short lines can have a massive, global impact

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

In 1997, Ethan Zuckerman broke the Internet — by inventing the pop-up ad.

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 not like this.

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?

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 any particular user page. It’d just be floating there onscreen.

Here’s the thing, though: Zuckerman’s bit of Javascript, that created the popup ad? It was incredibly short — a single line of code:

window.open('http://tripod.com/navbar.html'
"width=200, height=400, toolbar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no, target=_top");

Basically, the Javascript tells the browser to open a new window that’s 200 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall, with no scrollbar or toolbar on the top, positioned on top of whatever other web pages are currently open.

Simple, but pernicious! Pretty soon, commercial websites had copied Zuckerman’s innovation, and the Internet was positively infested with pop-up ads. A coder I knew in the early 00s who worked for a download site told me that the absolute vast majority of their revenue came from porn pop-up ads.

You’ve no doubt seen pop-up ads. You no doubt hate them. With luck you use a browser that now suppresses them.

As Zuckerman put it, he had written a single line of code “that made the world a measurably worse place.”