IEEE Internet Computing, and why it was online first

A founding editor's argument with the paywall.

When Ted Lewis approached him in early 1996 about a magazine on the Internet, the Internet was not well understood even inside the IEEE Computer Society. In his own telling, prominent naysayers predicted ATM would replace packet switching, interactive TV was being pushed, and the press office wanted the magazine called Edgeware.

The Society had no digital library. So he converted every article by hand into HTML and posted it on the Society's server, along with interviews with Bob Metcalfe, Eric Schmidt, Len Kleinrock, Robert Cailliau and George Gilder. It was the first Computer Society magazine online, and it was free. When the Society later started a digital library and, without consulting the editorial board, pointed the magazine's URL at the paywalled version, he complained. The reply, he wrote, was that it was just a URL.

His first column in January 1997 asked whether the Internet was the CB radio of the 90s or the Los Angeles of the 40s: an urban frontier where anyone could make something new and fine. He predicted it would go the way of electric motors and microprocessors, so embedded in our lives that we would not notice it. His Peering column, which he wrote and edited from 2005 to 2017, kept the provocative register: Is Google Evil?, Will the Web Vanish?, The Internet vs The State, Protect Data, Not Algorithms.

On the magazine's twentieth anniversary he called it one of the initiatives he was most proud of taking in his professional life, and thanked the volunteers who kept it alive after him.

Sources: Internet Computing Begins, 2017; The New Engineering Computer, 1997; the Peering archive. Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his.