10 Rules for Radicals
Retrieval System—that this EDGAR database should be available on the Internet for free.
These EDGAR filings were used by stock brokers, economists, and analysts, and a $300 million/year industry had sprung up retailing these documents. When I was a doctoral student in economics, I learned that sometimes you could write to the corporation and ask them to send you their annual report by U.S. Mail, but often I ended up forking over $30 a document to some information retailer to read these filings electronically.
To feed this $300 million/year industry, the SEC had set up a $30 million deal with Mead Data Corporation. The theory was that these filings were indigestible raw data, so Mead would act as the information wholesaler and add "value" to the documents—and they would sell to information retailers, who would add even more "value" to the documents—and finally these documents would reach the information consumer, presumably professionals on Wall Street who knew how to read these highly technical filings full of, you know, numbers and stuff.
A very brave bureaucrat at the National Science Foundation, Dr. Steve Wolff, arranged for my nonprofit radio station to get a few hundred thousand dollars, enough so we could buy a feed of the EDGAR data. Eric Schmidt, then the CTO at Sun Microsystems, pitched in a box with four SPARC-2 processors. UUNET offered free transit, Cisco threw in a router, and MFS Datanet provided a 10 megabit fiber link to the Internet Exchange known as MAE East.
