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 (Comments).