Internet History Keeper
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Era 11970–19932 stories
Before the web: tapes, catalogues and pay TV
Home video and mail order build the first mass market that web businesses later grow out of: the VHS vs Betamax format war, publishers with public filings, pay cable channels.
Sony
Betamax
Sony released Betamax in 1975, the first mass-market home video recorder, with a better picture than its competitors.
What Wikipedia does not have: The first American Betamax was a television, not just a recorder.
JVC
VHS
JVC released the VHS format in 1976, a year after Sony and its Betamax, and openly licensed it to any manufacturer.
What Wikipedia does not have: The engineer at the origins of JVC's video division retired two years before VHS was released.
Era 21994–19992 stories
Early web: subscriptions and the birth of high-risk billing
The first paid websites and the billing companies that learned to handle chargebacks, recurring payments and banks unwilling to carry that volume.
Playboy Enterprises
A magazine conceived in 1953 on $600 and someone else's photo of Marilyn Monroe, bought for $500, grew into a media empire with a magazine, cable TV, and one of the first sites on the web (1994), but it had been losing readers…
What Wikipedia does not have: The cover that made the first issue was not a Playboy shoot.
Penthouse
General Media
A magazine that the unemployed artist Bob Guccione put together at a kitchen table in London in 1965 specifically to shoot down Playboy's rabbit had pushed its circulation to almost 5 million copies a month by 1979 (though,…
What Wikipedia does not have: The company went bankrupt three times, not once
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