Should have inched over to the left a bit… that’s the Empire State Building in the background.

As some of you know, if you follow on twitter, I went to the library for a research day today. Deep dive into Fortune Mag, 1994-2000.

Usually when I do this, I share old ads for you guys, and some of you asked for that. Unfortunately, Fortunes this old are only on Microfilm. No pics. 🙁

But, I did want to share an article I found fascinating. From April of 1994. Netscape is just being formulated. Windows 95 is still a year away…

If you listened to the early chapter episodes, you’ll know the pains I took to explain how the “Information Superhighway” that people were dreaming of in this period was NOT the Internet as we know it today.

And I found this Fortune article that basically sums up what people were thinking at the time. I think, makes the case for me.

I’m gonna share the PDF below (can’t take pics of microfilm, but can save PDFs) so hopefully you can read what I read. It’s fascinating… they DO eventually mention the Internet about 2/3 of the way through, but just like I’ve argued, prior to that, it’s all about shopping on your TV with your handy remote.

Interesting to note: this article DOES exist online. Read it here. And yet, there is no way for me to FIND that. Fortune’s searchable archives don’t got back that far. And I haven’t figured out a way to reverse engineer the URL string (if anyone can help, please get in touch!)

So, an interesting bit of history below, but also, a demonstration of the frustrations of research. I gotta go to the library to find this stuff, even though it exists online! Except, I don’t know it exists online, until I know it exists! A priori!

94guessingecommerce