Electronic Correspondents

Along with the computer revolution, another electronic revolution was brewing as computers around the world were beginning to be networked together.

The ability to send messages--"e-mail"--over the global network gained popularity, and by 1994, two-thirds of Harvard students were using e-mail accounts.

Reporters began using e-mail to contact sources as early as 1993, according to Andrew L. Wright '96, Crimson president in 1995.

"We had one computer in the sports office which had e-mail hooked up to it," says Stephen E. Frank '95, a former Crimson editorial chair now reporting for the Wall Street Journal. "You had to be careful because e-mail would get saved to the computer, and other people could read your mail."

In fact, several Faculty members began to insist on communicating with Crimson reporters over e-mail. One of them was Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68.

"E-mail combines the immediacy of the telephone with the precision and non-intrusiveness of hard copy mail," explains Lewis in a recent e-mail to The Crimson. "Thus it is perfect for asking questions of busy people and getting quick responses."

Lewis cites two incentives for relying on electronic mail: time-efficiency and accuracy.

"My schedule is so tightly packed that it is very hard to get me on the phone," Lewis writes."I can read and respond to e-mail at the earliest available opportunity, even if that is just a 10 minute break."

"It is much harder for The Crimson to misquotemy e-mail responses," adds Lewis, "though that has occurred, believe it or not!"

On-line Outpost

Along with electronic communication came electronic publishing. Tracing its roots back to defense research in the sixties, the Internet grew steadily--under the watchful eye of scientists--and exploded after the National Science Foundation's landmark decision in 1991 to open the Internet's gates to commercial use.

A year earlier, an enterprising researcher in Geneva had written the software that laid the foundation for what became the World Wide Web. The first Web "browser" was released in 1991, and the number of Web servers--the equivalent of printing presses in cyberspace--jumped from 50 in 1993, to four million in 1995, and over 16 million in 1997.

The Crimson went on-line in the spring of 1994 when former Managing Editor Joe Mathews '95 collaborated with the Harvard Computer Society to publish The Crimson's top four stories on the Internet each night using an early information distribution service called Gopher.

A Web site came soon afterward in the spring of 1995. Articles were inconsistently entered until the summer of 1997, when a revamped Web site was released with daily article postings and an archive search feature.