On December 3, 1994 the Web was just born and in Italy we were already there: we got off to a great start. In a hotel in Milan the Sardinian publisher Nicola Grauso, nicky for all, officially presented Video On Line, which Nicholas Negroponte will define as “one of the 3 projects in the world that show they have better understood the potential of the Internet”.
There were in the room about thirty journalists, not a few given the vaguely esoteric theme for the time. Presenting the project were computer scientists Reinier Van Kleij, Pietro Zanarini and Francesco Ruggiero, all in some way linked to Crs4, that center of excellence born in Cagliari a few years earlier.
Video On Line was truly a revolution that placed Sardinia at the center of the world. The day after, on the Unione Sarda, the journalist Carlo Figari, with the title “How to navigate the sea of online networks”, gave the news as follows: “Video On Line is born, a new telematic service, intended for families and companies, to get information and communicate. It is a system that will allow you to do everything via video, from reading newspapers to press reviews, from consulting the stock exchange to databases, from spending while sitting comfortably at home. looking for a book in the catalogs of hundreds of libraries. It is very easy to use because one click will be enough to receive information or to purchase products “. Again:” Video On Line is a telematic service that will allow you to have free access to the Internet, the largest computer network in the world, from which you can get other services in a practically infinite chain. How can you connect? Very simple: all you need is a personal computer, a modem and a telephone line. Once the connection is activated, a graphic image with a series of icons will appear on the PC video. These icons are the access doors to the various channels foreseen for now: Internet; hypermedia newsstand; email; shopping via video; just click with the mouse on one of these icons to enter the desired service “.
And finally: “It is no coincidence that those who access the Internet are said to navigate as in an endless sea that changes constantly, because the information that enters and leaves the Internet constantly changes. As well as the sea, the Internet also has its own nautical charts, the pilots capable of piloting along the voyage. And Video On Line is one of them “.
The project got off to a flying start and Grauso soon had the illusion of bringing the Internet to the world. But it was in Italy that it stopped. However, it remains an epic page. It will always have a place in the museum of Italy’s lost opportunities in the field of innovation.
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