From PC boom to dotcom crash



By the end of the 1980s, my teen programming proclivities had given way to more usual youthful pursuits like pubs, clubs, gigs and festivals. I’d decided to pursue a career in tech journalism and in 1991 started work at the IT trade weekly Computing.

Ironically, the magazine was still produced manually, with pages painstakingly laid out on pasteboards by scalpel-wielding typesetters, a laborious process involving the to-ing and fro-ing of page proofs by courier, which had to be manually edited and marked up at each stage. Having used desktop publishing software at college and home, I found this hugely frustrating and was itching for the introduction of new technology.

In 1992, the publisher finally rolled out Macs with DTP software, as well as individual PCs for reporters, sales and administrative staff. Many found the transition difficult or threatening, but for me it was liberating since I could get my work done faster and free up time to write features and columns in addition to my then sub-editing role. But the personal productivity benefits were set to be dwarfed by the arrival of the Internet on my work and home PCs in1993, via a ‘tenner a month’ Demon dial-up account.

Now working for maverick publisher Felix Dennis’s IT business magazines, I threw myself into the fledgling online social networks (though they weren’t called that back then) of bulletin boards, IRC and Usenet newsgroups, and subsequently watched the web blossom from the bottom up.

Search engines like AltaVista,Yahoo (and later Google) made it a doddle to find people and information that previously would have meant a chain of phone calls, meetings and library visits. The boundaries between my personal and work life began to blur as I found myself simultaneously researching, writing about, using and contributing to the burgeoning web.

Pioneering users began to build and share informational resources, entertainment and software, initiating conversations covering a multitude of disciplines, forging connections and online communities across the world. Many of us inherently understood the revolutionary potential of this global, interactive, social medium and our excitement spilled over into what we were writing and talking about. The enthusiasm spread, and by the mid-1990s many businesses too had caught the web bug and were scrambling to set up sites (and, soon after, shops) online.

Yet hype quickly overtook hope. The IT industry began cynically ‘e-positioning’ all its offerings, while the phenomenal valuations of Internet companies like Yahoo, Netscape, Amazon and eBay spurred investors and acquisitive corporations to throw money at anything Internet, inflating the bubble that burst with the dotcom crash at the turn of the millennium..
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Despite the vast transformation wrought by IT since the beginning of the decade, the web was now seen by most organisations pretty much as ‘just another channel to market’, rather than a fundamental challenge to their traditional business models. It would be several years into the noughties before a new wave of online Ninjas began to push the boundaries once again …