Late Gates nearly misses cyberspace race

By VIRGINIA WINDER

MICROSOFT man Bill Gates nearly missed the internet revolution because of security fears.
Surfing the net was banned in all Microsoft offices in the first half of the 1990s to prevent rival companies getting access to the company’s trade secrets.
Each day, thousands of sensitive emails circulated around the 30,000 onsite intranet PCs and Gates (pictured) didn’t want this information going further.
So, to go online, employers had to sign in and out of computers in the main library or browse the net at home.
It wasn’t until 1994, when Netscape launched its free search engine service, which was downloaded by millions of people worldwide, that Gates realised that cyberspace was the way of the future.
Now, his free Microsoft Network (MSN) is one of the world’s leading social networks, along with rivals Bebo, MySpace and Facebook.

FREAKY FACTS... Web weaving world together

1) Google is the number one search engine in the world, with almost three times the audience of nearest rival, Yahoo Search.
2) About 61% of New Zealand’s adult internet users bought something online in March this year, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
3) The internet was invented back in 1969 by the United States Department of Defence as a means of communication in case it was attacked by Russia.
4) The world wide web was invented by an Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland in 1989. The first website was built at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (art at CERN, pictured) located north-west of Geneva. It was first put online on August 6, 1991.
5) Type “Bill Gates” into his own MSN Live Search engine and it comes up with 3,091,656 results. Rival search engine Google presents 21,100,100.