On Jan. 22, 1996, in an article tucked away on Page D7, The New York Times announced the public launch of its website. “The New York Times begins publishing daily on the World Wide Web today, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents,” stated the article, by Peter H. Lewis. “The electronic newspaper (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times.” Mr. Lewis had once owned that very URL. In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. Mr. Lewis then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, he recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. In 1988, the editor Bill Stockton, who Mr. Lewis said championed science and technology reporting, assigned Mr. Lewis to cover the “rise of the internet.” At some point, “I asked permission to register a web domain for The Times, and was told no,” Mr. Lewis wrote in the email. “Several of us thought that was shortsighted.”
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