Well I can tell you all about that...
IORR.org went live early 1996. Actually you can still find each and every page ever published on IORR through various links on this site. It is just that I never had time to organize everything very professionally The Stones do tour often, and I have too much to do. But if you open the NEWS pages and scroll to the bottom part you will see the entire Stones history from 1997 up to today, through links to old news pages. Just take a look at the 1997 news, including Bridges to Babylon comments and updates:
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As you can see I had the title of the album by mid July 1997 which was a great scoop. At that time nobody had a clue and it took a long time until it was actually confirmed. I got the info from a very inside source.
In 1997 I am sure few of you did actually have a PC with internet. Not at home. Not at work. So I got most of my info through other sources. And it was not natural to run a forum back then. In fact forum solutions were not even invented. Web pages were quite premature so we are talking about a time when internet was still early stage. Things you take for granted now were not around. back then Microsoft did actually say internet would go away. They invented their own network MSN and were hoping it would replace internet. Later on they made MS Explorer and got rid of Netscape. Long story. Actually I had e-mail in 1980 but that was long time before the web, which came around 1991 or so. But it wasn't really common for everybody until late 90's, after BtB... Those were the days...
Bjornulf