Comm , the Economist 's Web-based newsletter, at the end of 1995, I figured I was probably in the first fifty. This complete reinvention of the Web brought with it a new set of clashes. Things may be different when Web-based services have been around longer and people know what they'd be buying, but in general there are too many unknown quantities for people to be willing to fork out for a subscription. Over time, actual sales sites have an advantage here, since you can't really order a new anorak from L. L. Bean without giving them at least some information about yourself, such as color preference, size, and shipping address. Cue another major cultural shift.
Most humans like to count things.
Since the people using the Net in the early days were computer people, what they counted was primarily machines. The famous 1988 Internet Worm, which temporarily paralyzed part of the Internet and inspired a wave of computer crime legislation and hacker crackdowns, was a botched attempt to map this spread. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without written permission of New York University Press is prohibited.