I first heard about the wonders of the online world in 1985 from talkshow Rush Limbaugh in Sacramento. But I didn’t send my first email until 1993, and didn’t buy my first real computer until July 1997 (an hour after I brought it home I had made my first blog post on my AOL web page).
Rabbi Dana Kaplan writes in his forthcoming book The Transformation of American Judaism:
The Lubavitch have found that the internet is a terrific way to present Judaic texts. Shimon Laber explains that "the Torah jumps around. It is the original hyper-linked text. Nothing can bring it out like the web." There is a long history to the Chabad involvement with the internet. Rabbi Yosef Kazen began producing internet material as early as 1988. He distributed it on Fidonet, an online discussion network which was part of the early computer communication systems preceding the development of the World Wide Web. Kazen would distribute a regular e-newsletter to several thousand subscribers, foreshadowing the much more massive Chabad internet presence in later years. He also digitized some of the most important Chabad texts, including the Tanya in English translation. These texts became part of what Kazen called a Jewish Web library. He included an interactive "Ask the Rabbi" column, which later became a popular staple of almost every Jewish internet site, as well as Jewish sections on AOL, MSN, and so forth.
