A year or so after Frank Daniels III became executive editor, he first beheld the Internet over at North Carolina State. “An engineering student said, ‘Have you seen this?’ and he showed me Usenet. And about forty-five minutes later, while I was thirty minutes late for a meeting, I was speechless. I walked out. I was just buzzing with the possibilities.” Daniels saw some engineering newsgroups and, yes, some sexually related ones. “I couldn’t believe how many people I saw talking together, just following each other’s conversations. The letters to the editor at the time were the only connection the _News & Observer_ had with its readers. “Our business is connecting people. Here was a whole world that existed without our knowledge. It was a small world and an elitist world, but it confirmed my earlier belief that computers were going to be ubiquitous.” Effortlessly Daniels understood that Usenet wasn’t Videotext—people _wanted_ you to talk back. So the Internet was at least on his mind as a possibility for the time when the numbers were right. Daniels for the moment pushed into less exotic areas; for example, he started a useful, lively, but expensive fax newsletter for the elite, _The Insider_, which covered North Carolina politics with a commitment to detail missing from the daily press. The _N & O_ also offered sophisticated research services, using the databases it was amassing. And the paper let readers dial up stories over the telephone through a technology known as Audiotext. The electronic action, however, really took off after Daniels hired George Schlukbier, a computer-oriented librarian who had worked wonders at the _Sacramento Bee_. Like Daniels the frat boy, Schlukbier flaunted a few eccentricities within bounds. An electronic signature at the bottom of his Internet messages identified him as “Chief Bull Goose Looney,” a tribute to the giant Indian who terrorized Nurse Ratched in _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_, the Ken Kesey novel. Some, of course, might argue that the Internet is itself a virtual asylum with the inmates in charge.