ABSTRACT
Professional writing in cyberspace virtually did not exist before the 1990s. While there were a few services such as Prodigy, Quantum Computer Services (later AOL) and CompuServe that did employ journalists and editors to compile copy by the beginning of the 1990s, substantial activity in this area had to wait for the advent of the Web. This is not to say that writing began with the Web – far from it: newsgroups, email and bulletin boards flourished for decades before the invention of HTML, each of these a hotbed for electronic scribbling. The visual appeal of the Web, however, soon brought with it the anticipation that this was a new medium that could be used for commercial communication.
