For better or worse, Time Warner’s area on the Net was part of an evolution in cyberspace. The process had begun with the small academic magazines and hobbyist publications that turned to the Net as a cheap way to find readers. Many if not most still relied on plain text without graphics; they were little more than archived dispatches to mailing lists—which was fine because the words mattered above all. One of the best of these was Adam Engst’s _Tidbits_. Written for Apple owners, it also appeared on the World Wide Web and bulletin board systems, and Engst claimed more than 100,000 readers—no small feat for a kitchen-table-style publisher. Nonconglomerates still provided most of the magazines on the net, and not all were for techies or sci-fi buffs. _International Teletimes_ was edited by Ian Wojtowicz, a gifted high school student who lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. _Teletimes_ went out over the Web with fetching art, not just text, and some of the prose could have graced _Harper’s_ or the _Atlantic_. Recounting a winter trip by train, a college student named Paul Gribble wrote: “Every now and then we pass a lake, completely frozen over, flat and white, smooth as a skating rink. I’d love to walk to the center of a big frozen lake like that and just sit there for a while. I’d feel like the first blot of paint on a fresh silk canvas.” Many steps up from _Teletimes_, in business terms, was _Global Net Navigator_. Like the _N & O_ in North Carolina, _GNN_ was trying to use advertising to support its activities, and you could see ads from companies as large as Digital Equipment Corporation. _GNN_ was not just technical. It posted informative, brightly written articles on topics ranging from money to food and travel. _Wired_ magazine was on the Net, too, with an offshoot called _HotWired_, which itself wandered far from technical topics and attracted lucrative ads from the likes of Volvo and AT&T. None of these publications, of course, happened to be a Household Name like Time Warner’s _Time_ or _People_. Many experts felt that as a profitable medium for big-time magazines—and let’s not confuse size with quality or lack thereof—the Internet had a long way to go.