Earliest publication of a URL address in your newsprint

Just curious when that could be. I looked at old copies of the weekly newspaper I started with, and the earliest one I saw was the paper's AOL address in April 1996.

The earliest e-mail address I could find appeared in said paper's Sept. 6, 1995 edition (publisher's address, in ALL CAPS for some strange reason).

The earliest reference to the Internet in general in an ad occurred by early March 1996, without a URL. (Probably related in a trade-out with the start of the paper's web presence shortly thereafter.)

Whenever I find the first external URL in a purchased ad, I'll pass it along and we'll see who the real grunge hipsters were.

 

I went to work in a PR office in the spring/summer of 1995 and we were online.
Few of our clients got traction with it for at least another year, though.

 

What? No Prodigy account?

 

I once lost out on a job at AOL to a guy who was working at ... Compuserve.

 

In college, we did a story in 1993 about the other college in town and its student paper starting a web site.

None of us on staff knew how to get on the web. None of computers at the student newpaper had Internet access. Then the photo editor came in, with his bad ass bag phone in his backpack, and he had an AOL account. I. remember him dialing in and thinking it sounded sort of like a fax machine.

We all thought it was the dumbest thing ever.

The student editor at the other school who thought of the web site is now a masthead editor at the NY Times and of my college newspaper staff, I'm the only one who now works at a newspaper. Period. And my paper is not the New York Times.

 

I laughed. Sorry. Not that you missed out on the job, but because I haven't heard anyone say Compuserve in more than a decade ... aside from choosing output formats in Photoshop, that is.

And a funny thing about the all caps, case used to actually matter back in the day. Crazy world, those 90s. I miss it.