It was fun to see a post about Legacy of The Whole Earth Catalog and its Internet derivative The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog. It was my first big break on starting my own business on the Net. I’ll always be indebted to Tim O’Reilly for giving me my chance to build on Ed Krol’s work in the creation of the Global Network Navigator, the predecessor to Yahoo. This was the first site to sell a banner ad to Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe. I’m sure I sold an ad to Nordic Track soon after that on the site. A little confused, though. The “official” wikipedia history has GNN starting in May of 93 but I thought it was later in the year and this announcement seems to support that.

According to Tim: “By the way, the very first person to cut a check for internet advertising was Dan Appelman of Silicon Valley law firm Heller, Ehrman, White and McAuliffe. He paid $5000 for the privilege of setting up the first company sponsored section on GNN.”