About The Information Economy

I began research on economic issues involving the Internet in 1992 while I was a faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan. Sometime in 1993 I set up a gopher on my NeXTstation and created a set of links to various documents that were relevant to that research. This was one of the first gophers devoted to an economic topic.

In early 1994 I deployed a Web server on my NeXTstation since it was a much more convenient way to organize materials. The "Economics of the Internet" server was announced in the March 29, 1994 What's New at NCSA server. The earliest record I have is a wwwstat page dated February 8, 1994. This server became a reasonably popular site (for its time), transferring about 20 megabytes of materials a day.

In August of 1995 I moved to the University of California at Berkeley where I became dean of the School of Information Management and Systems. For a few months I ran the Web site at both Michigan and Berkeley, while I was working on rearranging the material to form a site devoted to a broader set of issues. Thanks to the able help of Bryan Lewis and the SIMS Web Team, we were able to roll out the new Web site devoted to The Information Economy on December 1, 1995.

Hal Varian

Send feedback regarding The Information Economy to: infoecon@sims.berkeley.edu
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