How the Web Might Have Happened Even Without an Internet

Martha Rogers’ and my vision of how businesses could use interactivity to create relationships with individual customers, which we described in our 1993 book The One to One Future, was partly inspired by a business I had tried to start in 1990, working with my good friend and grad school pal Chip Elitzer.

If you’re old enough to remember 1990, there was no World Wide Web, and computer-to-computer connections were clunky and difficult. Email was a slowly growing communications medium, but still quite cumbersome. And CompuServe was the go-to company for the tiny minority of technophiles who “chatted” with others online or participated in message forums.

Chip and I, however, had a simple idea for using currently available technology to stimulate one-to-one interactions, and for allowing businesses to sell more efficiently to individual consumers. We founded a company, HomeFax, and planned to:

Give fax machines to consumers to use for free, in exchange for them taking advertising messages along with their inbound faxes.

The initial idea for HomeFax was mine, but it was Chip’s analysis that turned it into a genuinely interesting business. He said we had to think about two concepts that facilitated interactions: mailboxes and bulletin boards.

Your mailbox (meaning either a postal mailbox or an electronic one, maintained on a computer) is something that can be accessed by anyone with your address. Anyone can send their own message to you by putting it into your mailbox, but only you can retrieve that message. And a bulletin board, Chip said, is the flip side of a mailbox: only you can post a message on your own bulletin board, while anyone who has your bulletin board’s address can read it. 

So we designed HomeFax to leverage the use of fax mailboxes and bulletin boards.

Before subscribing to HomeFax’s service, a consumer would be required to complete a questionnaire inquiring about preferred brands and shopping needs. Then they would be issued a fax machine for their personal use, along with a personal fax phone number maintained by HomeFax. Faxes sent to a subscriber’s own fax number would come in to our computer and be stored digitally for them, in the subscriber’s fax mailbox.

At any point, a subscriber could use their free fax machine to call HomeFax and download whatever faxes they had been sent since the last time they checked. And included in the subscriber’s fax mailbox would be a maximum of one ad or commercial offer per day, based on the subscriber’s questionnaire answers and prior downloads.

To send a fax to someone else, a subscriber would use the same process – dialing out to HomeFax’s computer and then inputting someone else’s fax number, whether the recipient was a HomeFax subscriber or not.

In this way, no HomeFax subscriber would ever have to pay for an extra phone line to receive fax messages, because their machine would never have to be available to receive incoming calls. HomeFax machines would only be making outbound calls, and only to HomeFax, either to download a fax mailbox or to send fax messages out to others.

We also planned to use bulletin boards to allow merchants like restaurants and retail stores to make their information available to HomeFax subscribers. For a small monthly fee, a merchant could fax us their menu, their prices, or pictures of their merchandise (black and white only), and we would store this information on our computer. Then, using a directory provided by HomeFax, an interested subscriber could simply punch in the right code to have a particular merchant’s detailed information placed into their own fax mailbox, along with whatever coupons or other offers the merchant chose to provide.

And, HomeFax would make this bulletin-board service available at no charge to schools, government agencies, and charitable organizations (like churches), so they could post their schedules, applications forms, announcements, and other documents, all to be available for downloading by interested HomeFax subscribers.

Chip and I tried to raise $9 million from various strategic investors (fax machine manufacturers and computer companies) to set our company up in a test market, but after two years we were unsuccessful and had to abandon the effort.

In retrospect, we narrowly averted a financial disaster, because had we actually raised the money, we would have spent millions to buy and distribute ad-supported fax machines just in time to be completely undermined by the World Wide Web, which arrived in 1994 with the first commercially available web browser, Netscape’s Mosaic. 

Consolation prize: HomeFax’s business plan did provide me with a great deal of insight into how a genuinely interactive platform might eventually work to connect businesses to consumers, an insight Martha and I found highly useful for our 1993 book.

In fact, if you read Chapter Seven of The One to One Future you’ll see that it paints an eerie picture of how the World Wide Web operates. All that’s missing are the words “web” and “internet,” which don’t appear in that chapter or anywhere else in the book.