Avon Internet Business Park
I decided to set up the Avon Internet Business Park project because the
World-Wide-Web and the Internet were developing at an unprecedented speed and
it seemed clear that conventional empirical methods were unlikely to keep pace
with the development.
If Hewlett Packard (HP) Labs was to gain an early understanding of trading conditions on this highly-promising technology, we should hook up with some real businesses trying to do some real trading.
By exploiting HP's existing fast Internet connection, we could offer local businesses the opportunity of gaining mentored commercial access to the WWW on the explicit understanding that this was a limited-lifespan experiment.
After 2 years the AIBP would close down and we anticipated at that point the collaborating businesses would be in an informed position to make a decision about continuing their Internet presence independently of HP Labs.
The AIBP was duly launched under the sheltering auspices of Vishnu, a project which had been set up to investigate cryptographic issues in e-commerce security.
The AIBP was listed in What's new with NCSA Mosaic: June 1995 as: "An experimental Web server run by Hewlett Packard Laboratories designed to help HP Labs and Bristol businesses understand trading conditions on the Internet. Concentrating on helping clients establish their own commercial presence."
The above text also appears on this page where the story of the AIBP is taken a little further.