The network that explained technology to everyone else.

Halsey Minor left a job at a New York bank and, in December 1992, started c|net with Shelby Bonnie, a classmate from UVA. The original idea was television: a 24-hour cable network about computers and technology, at a moment when computers were not yet a mass-market subject.

The television network worked, but the web turned out to be the better medium for what they were doing, and CNET became one of the first properties to prove that an internet publication could be a real business. Minor ran it as chairman and chief executive until 2000, when Bonnie succeeded him.