I looked down again and saw the hundreds of Netheads who were bouncing around there in a whole new light. A kind of virtual organism, if you will, brought together from around the world through the unifying diversity of the Web. Not only were these geeks acting like they'd just inherited the earth, they were also getting free T-shirts, beer and buffet. This digital epiphany of mine that night was foreshadowed a couple of days earlier by conference keynote speaker Irving Wladawsky-Berger , general manager of IBM's Internet Division. And the Internet has had much to do with this change of attitude.
Stocks rise and fall according to the ebb and flow of that intangible quality.
Pricey cars are bought or rust. TV series flourish or bomb. In the field of cyberspace, the high priest of cool eschews a flowing robe in favor of a dark business suit. In 1981, his claim to fame was to have just authored something sounding as quintessentially uncool as Scholarly Micropublishing in America 1900-1980 . A keen historian's instinct for trends led the publisher of niche library newsletters to become one of the first to recognize the world-transforming potential of the Internet.