I was a lawyer in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement from 1995 to 1997, a time perhaps most notable for being the infancy of the public’s use of the Internet. When I first arrived at the SEC, our online resources consisted of a single station that we called a “Bridge machine” that provided some basic business news and a “Ticker Room” that consisted of a couple of Bloomberg terminals.
Sometime in 1995—just around the time that most of us at the SEC were first starting to hear about the World Wide Web—an Internet terminal appeared in the Ticker ...