Reflections on the 20th anniversary of the dot-com

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Date: June 7, 2009 7:34:00 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Reflections on the 20th anniversary of the dot-com

For IP:

Twenty years ago (Monday) on June 8th, 1989, I did the public launch of
ClariNet.com, my electronic newspaper business, which would be delivered
using USENET protocols (there was no HTTP yet) over the internet.

ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its  
platform
for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of
the "dot-com" concept which so affected the world in the two intervening
decades. There are other definitions and other contenders which I  
discuss
in the article below.

In those days, the internet consisted of regional networks,
who were mostly non-profit cooperatives, and the government
funded "NSFNet" backbone which linked them up. That backbone had a
no-commercial-use policy, but I found a way around it. In addition, a
nascent commercial internet was arising with companies like UUNet and
PSINet, and the seeds of internet-based business were growing. There
was no web, of course. The internet's community lived in e-Mail and
USENET. Those, and FTP file transfer were the means of publishing. When
Tim Berners-Lee would coin the term "the web" a few years later, he
would call all these the web, and HTML/HTTP a new addition and glue
connecting them.

I decided I should write a history of those early days, where the seeds
of the company came from and what it was like before most of the world
had even heard of the internet. It is a story of the origins and early
perils and successes, and not so much of the boom times that came in the
mid-90s. It also contains a few standalone anecdotes, such as the  
story of
how I accidentally implemented a system so reliable, even those  
authorized
to do so failed to shut it down (which I call "M5 reliability" after
the Star Trek computer), stories of too-early eBook publishing and more.

There's also a little bit about some of the other early internet and
e-publishing businesses such as BBN, UUNet, Stargate, public access  
unix,
Netcom, Comtex and the first Internet World trade show.

Extra, extra, read all about it: The history of ClariNet.com and the
dawn of the dot-coms.

Article at:
   http://www.templetons.com/brad/clarinet-history.html

Comments at:
   http://ideas.4brad.com/clarinet-history-and-20th-anniversary-dot-com




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