The Oakland Tribune, in the late 1990s, operated much the way newspapers had for decades, with a few recent additions. The beige desktop computer that each of us reporters worked on was now equipped with direct access to the paper’s own digitized archives, the AP wire, and an email account.
There was also, perched on a desk in the center of the newsroom, exactly one computer connected to the internet — that nobody used.
Fast-forward to 2002: That was the year that Wired magazine estimates that “Google” slid into society’s collective vocabulary as a verb, on its way to entering the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2006.
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