AM/FM Online and the Internet

The early net, new ventures

Since the TX Magazine days I'd been experimenting with online services. Radio Today had a fledgling news service on a small bulletin board run by Chris England. Later, my final year project at university was to build a hypertext system, intended for use on an online service. I continued to develop this after graduating, supported initially by the revenues that TQM was bringing in with its phone services. Then, in 1990, access started to open up to the Internet in the UK.

The Internet was a huge inspiration to me. Here was a whole new medium that was built from the start to allow ordinary people to communicate with each other in new ways and to let them produce and publish their own content, bypassing the normal media in the same way the pirates had done. In that spirit, with so much content being generated for the AM/FM Newsline it seemed a shame that it should go to waste. And so in 1992 the AM/FM Online Edition was born. This gathered together all the stories from the previous month and put them out in a bulletin, delivered through an e-mail list, CompuServe, CIX and one of the radio newsgroups.

At that time the World Wide Web didn't exist, but when it did, TQM had one of the first non-educational sites in the UK. It was incredibly hard to find someone who actually wanted to host you then — commercial FTP hosting was available, but no-one knew what to do about the web yet and how much they should charge. Eventually TECC, who were involved in the first commercial BBC site, were kind enough to give us some space for free.

Alongside AM/FM came some other mailing lists too. UK-Dance was the first, launched in 1992 and still running with considerable success today. From being influenced by the synthpop and indie of the early pirates, I'd moved through a hip hop phase as that began to appear on the airwaves, but then the whole rave revolution of '88 had turned me on to acid house and techno in a big way. In '92 there was a hole that, like TX, it seemed someone ought to fill, this time in providing a place to talk about rave culture. And so UKD was born. UK-Radio came next but got given the axe when I no longer had the time to maintain it. Chris England then stepped in and resurrected the mailing list later.

Eventually AM/FM kind of faded away much like Radio Today had before. The new laws introduced in 1991 had made it much harder to report pirate radio, and so the emphasis on legal radio gradually increased. However, that wasn't anywhere near so fun and the calls had begun dropping off to a level where it was no longer economic to keep going.

I'd also become increasingly occupied as an Internet consultant, working with the fledgling Web start-ups of the time, like Webmedia. Through them I met Ben Hayman and ended up co-founding Webdevelopment Ltd and inventing the content management system Mediasurface. This built on the hypertext system I'd developed before and ultimately went on to become the company's name too. But that, as they say, is a whole other story...

Next >>>