HAVING
just taken up a new assignment in California in the early 1990s,
following a five-year hiatus covering the financial roller-coaster of
Japan, your correspondent was embarrassed to be asked each time he
interviewed sources in Silicon Valley what was his employer’s web
address—ie, its Universal Resource Locator or URL. For the first few months, he mumbled something about the core competency of newspapers and magazines being their well-honed ability to spread the word around the world overnight via print, not bits and bytes. When he could take the cajoling no longer, he got permission (though no money) from the higher-ups in London to create The Economist’s first web presence in his spare time.
Not counting those evenings and weekends, the total cost of building The Economist’s first website came to $120—mostly spent on getting graphics scanned at Kinko’s. Hosting the site, on EarthLink, cost $20 a month. To your correspondent’s amazement, AOL subsequently ranked his botch-up as one of the top ten news sites in the world, ahead of Time Warner’s “Pathfinder” website, which reputedly cost $140m to build.
What your correspondent learned from hand-coding the fledgling website was that it had better start loading within three or four seconds and have finished in less than 20 seconds—otherwise visitors would not hang around. With the majority of users relying in those days on dial-up modems, each web page could therefore offer no more than 50 kilobytes or so of content.
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