Backchat - Flashback - April 1993. We delve into our archives to find out who and what were making the headlines in our pages 12 years ago, just as the internet was starting to make an impact.

The prism of hindsight finds seeds of change

Cast your mind back to April 1993, just 12 years ago. New Labour hadn't been invented, but the ground had been laid in the fallout from Black Wednesday the previous September. The movie Groundhog Day was drawing crowds, and Jurassic Park was set to become the hit of the summer. The April 1993 issue of Information World Review (dubbed "The Information Community Newspaper" and with a [pounds sterling]5 cover price) was put together in the weeks after the World Trade Centre in NYC was bombed. A van carrying explosives parked beneath the North Tower killed six and injured more than 1,000, but 2/26 would not go down in history like 9/11. During this month the first release of Mosaic, dubbed "the killer application of the 1990s" and developed by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications, was released. It would change the world of information professionals dramatically, though our attention was on more mundane media - information on CD-ROM and through fixed lines, ISDN and humble text terminals. The web was about to make its presence felt.

Dialog is wishing on a DataStar

The fallout from the March 1993 acquisition of DataStar by Dialog continued to reverberate around the industry. "The word monopoly has been bandied about," wrote Barry Mahon. "Reference to the EEC has been discussed, until it was realised that both parties were outside the jurisdiction of the EC." US-based Knight-Ridder had bought DataStar from Swiss-based engineering technology firm, Motor-Columbus. We noted there were synergies: "The Berne computer offers around 250 medical, business, pharmaceutical and European directory databases, over ...