Online World was a brave experiment. Inspired by Wired, Mondo 2000, Ivan Pope’s W3 fanzine and Boing Boing, it was intended to be the UK’s first mainstream net.culture magazine. And to a certain extent it was, beating Future’s .NET to the newsagents by a whole week.

Unfortunately despite selling out, it also only lasted three issues, caught up in the sale of a publishing house and some decidedly dodgy dealings by its new owners, who failed to pay printers, photographers and the freelance team that was writing and putting the magazine together.

Still, I got a job out of it, running tech for UK Online on the strength of my Complete Beginners Guide to the Internet series. If I can ever get the old Mac hard drive resurrected, I’ll put them online (and if I can ever even find the drive!). Until then, here as a historic record (because it was all so long ago) are two technology rants I wrote (and interestingly still stand by!) and the monthly “Neat Web Pages” section from the back of the magazine (sans links because the sites are long gone now, and who wants links to what at best would be a collection of ghost sites).

So here’s a small archive of what the UK thought was hip and cool back in the Winter of 1994, in the early days of the web...