CNET celebrates 20 years

CNET.com editor Linday Turrentine and CNET News editor Connie Guglielmo write about the 20th anniversary of the tech news website.

Turrentine and Guglielmo write, “One of us (Lindsey) started at CNET in 1999, when the site was just four years old. CNET held a special place in the nascent Internet economy as one of a burgeoning number of companies born to take advantage of a brave, new interconnected world changing everything about how we communicate and consume information.

“We can only describe those early days at CNET as frenzied, insane and more fun that anyone ever expected to have at a job. We wrangled over whether to hyphenate the word ’email’ and whether Apple, in 1996, was still relevant. We debated whether consumer interest in online shopping and the browser wars between Microsoft and Netscape were truly significant news stories.

“We set out to review any gadget a shopper might consider spending money on, and we invested the time, effort and lab space to review them all impartially and with honesty. We still do.

“The rapid pace of change since 1995 has kept the Internet and CNET in a state of constant and thrilling flux. Growing into — and remaining — the world’s largest and most-widely read technology media brand (by a wide margin, thanks to you all) has given us front-row seats to two decades of genius and innovation, dazzling industry successes and spectacular failures.”

Read more here.