A Brief History of Electronic Publishing

There are many specialized magazines in almost all the subsectors of our economy and almost all the interests of current human activity. But how did it all start and what is an Ezine anyway? Well, many who specialize like Ezine Publishers think of it as an e-zine or newsletter emailed to a subscription list.

Others say that an Ezine is an electronic newsletter or magazine, regardless of the method of electronic distribution. They say that an electronic publication could reside on a website, an intranet system, or be delivered over any network, including the largest network or network of networks; The Internet. In fact, we might disagree on the definition for a moment.

If my story is correct, ARPA hired Bell Labs and Xerox Park to create a communication system and they were the first people to call something E-Mail or electronic mail. But even before that, they sent correspondence: online network newsletters, announcements, and discovery notifications in the exact same general format as many of the online newsletters, or Ezines, as we would call them today.

So even though it wasn’t called Ezine back then, because the term hadn’t been coined, it was Ezine, but email didn’t exist yet. Even the Internet did not exist, but it was an electronic newsletter. As things progressed, it wouldn’t matter which came first. And with respect to that, there will be a further evolution of both the chicken and the egg, as the distribution’s feathered friends still have to cross the road to get to the other side and they will discover how the road ahead (and it could be a clue ) could be repaved in the future. Consider all this in 2006.