First Days Of The Internet

A memoir of how a boy went from punk rock in the 1970s to art school in the 1980s to inventing parts of the Internet in the 1990s.

Everybody got the Internet in the end but I got it first.

In 1993, when there were fewer than one hundred web sites in existence, I started the first Web magazine in the world. Then I invented the Cybercafé, started a web agency, and created the domain name industry, all before most people knew there was an Internet.

My entrepreneurial life had started in the 1970s after the Sex Pistols lobbed a grenade into polite society. I became a teenage punk publisher. By the 1980s I was a Goldsmiths art student who did battle with Damien Hirst and the YBAs. Then I discovered the internet.

At the start of the new millennium the shares I had received for my Internet company were worth sixty million pounds. Then the roundabout stopped and the markets collapsed. Within a year the money was all gone.