It All Began Here...

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The world as most of us know it now started here: in the unassuming form of a box with a torn label on it, proclaiming "This machine is a server - DO NOT POWER-DOWN!!" This was the computer upon which, [Sir] Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web and the HTML code with which we all still view its content. Millenials would most definitely not recognise 'The Internet' of the mid-nineties, as the whole thing took off at a gentle canter, becoming an exponential gallop by the end of the decade, and resulting in todays utter global social and economic dependence on was originally conceived of as a convenient means of sharing papers and documents among the worldwide community of academia.

What was in the beginning a playground for geeks (myself, friends and colleagues included) became the hunting-ground of corporate business, eventually spawning its very own 'native' corporations in the New Age of Digital Capitalism; created by the very geeks themselves, who realised early on that traditional business models were failing to keep pace with the growth of this new marketplace, and that they could monetise their knowledge and expertise independently of the old system.

As always, the corporate finance world caught up with and to a large extent absorbed the now über-successful upstart businesses: as more of them went public, the mechanics of shareholder capitalism took hold and drew them into the closed world of the stock markets. The 'club' had won out after all - something we early adopters of the Web predicted would happen, a quarter of a century ago. The mavericks are now safely corralled as part of a system that thought they were disrupting and replacing, becoming 'The New Establishment' under the wing of 'The Old Establishment', soon to be simply 'The Establishment.'




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