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CHAPTER ONE INTERNET BET #01
Wednesday, January 17, 1996 – 6.30 pm
At 6.30 pm, Jukka Honkavaara bets $50 that Tottenham Hotspur will beat Hereford United in an FA Cup, third round replay. The game kicks off in one hour and 15 minutes.
Eleven days earlier, Saturday, January 6, 1996 – 3 pm
The Bulls earn their trip to White Hart Lane, when they hold Tottenham Hotspur to a 1-1 draw.
The game is David and Goliath stuff; classic first vs. third division rivalry.
Underdogs and giant killers; the best of the FA Cup.
On a rain-soaked pitch, in front of a capacity crowd of 8,806 people, a confident Spurs squad swaggers into play. The team had humbled Manchester United 4-1, only a week earlier.
The London visitors are two divisions clear of the contenders. Surely, this is just a day at the office. Time to clean up, bag a few, and go home.
In the 31st minute, Ronnie Rosenthal gets lucky and heads home a shot that is going wide. The atmosphere at the Edgar Street football stadium dips. The crowd subdued by a Spurs side, sticking to the script.
After half-time, the mood changes. Hereford United play like a team with nothing to lose. The visitors are getting bogged down by the west country mud and rain. This is grubby, scrappy, dirty football. Not what these pampered Londoners are used to.
Sixteen minutes into the second half, following a reckless challenge from Ronny Rosenthal, Hereford win a penalty. Skipper Dean Smith steps up to do the honours. He is the club’s record signing and star player.
Smith fires the penalty high and wide, into the rafters at the Meadow End. A penalty miss so bad, it’s still a talking point for fans in the pubs, social clubs and bars of Herefordshire.
The Bulls could have buckled. They don’t. They rally. They battle. They fight like heroes.
In the 62nd minute, centre back John Brough earns a passport to free beer for the rest of his life, when he heads in a corner from Keith Downing.
For the final minutes of the game, Spurs rally, a Teddy Sheringham shot is saved heroically by Chris Mackenzie. Hereford hold fast. The team has earned its trip to White Hart Lane. Hereford United has drawn the game and won a replay.
Wednesday, January 17, 1996 – 7.45 pm
Jukka Honkavaara is playing it safe. At odds of 1/25 or 1.04, a win for Tottenham Hotspur will return $2 on his $50 stake.
The Hereford fans will tell you: the only reason the team lost was because Tottenham refused to let them bring the club mascot to the game: a one-ton Hereford champion bull named Cudos.
Hereford United manager Graham Turner said: “He was a champion bull. He paraded around Edgar Street but they refused to allow him at White Hart Lane.
“So, to show how docile he was, we took him to the local china shop. Unfortunately, as the cameras were clicking, he had diarrhoea. It brought new meaning to the phrase shop-soiled goods.”
Sadly, shit results are set to be very much the flavour of the day for Hereford United.
The team’s away day to north London is about to go south.
It is time for the giant to get back to doing what giants do: killing. It is time for the favourites to flex. It is the end of the road for the Hereford United 1995/1996 FA Cup run.
It’s 20 minutes before Spurs score.
The traveling fans in fine voice, until Sheringham fires in the first of three. A crowd of 31,534 watch the game. Hereford battle on bravely, swamped by the opposition. In the very last minute of the game, Gareth Stoker scores a cracking consolation goal; a volley from outside the penalty box.
In the end, both pundits and fans agree that the 5-1 score is a little harsh on the visiting underdogs. An on-form Teddy Sheringham scores a hat-trick and Chris Armstrong nets a brace. Hereford United worked hard and played well.
They are simply outclassed.
The travelling fans are reflective and happy. It is a cup run to remember, for Hereford’s barmy army. A missed penalty, a shitting bull, glorious goals at both White Hart Lane and Edgar Street. Classic stuff.
Wednesday, January 17, 1996 – 9.30 pm
It’s January 17, 1996. The Internet is still a new thing. People are only just beginning to get to grips with email. It’s estimated that there around 100,000 websites on line. In 2024, there are 1.13 billion. Dial-up modems are the norm, connecting mainly IBM manufactured computers.
Text messaging barely exists. It doesn’t function between different networks. The programming language Java is less than a week old. Apple is struggling; the business is on the verge of bankruptcy. Steve Jobs is yet to return to the board and reinvent the wheel.
In New York, the World Trade Centre still trades. Within 24 hours of the FA Cup 3rd round replay’s final whistle, a bomb will destroy a bus in the heart of London’s West End, killing three people and injuring eight.
Three days earlier, Take That announced they were splitting up. Within a fortnight, Diana will agree to divorce Prince Charles. Amazon is selling only books and has only just started to make a profit, after losing money for two years straight.
In the UK, John Major is still Prime Minister, but Tony Blair’s Labour party are 26 points ahead in the polls. In the US, Bill Clinton is beginning his campaign for a second term. No one knows who Monica Lewinsky is (well… apart from Bill).
Super Bowl XXX is in 11 days. The Dallas Cowboys will win their fifth Super Bowl, defeating the Steelers 27-17, at the Mountain America Stadium in Tempe Arizona.
In the UK, George Michael is at number one with Jesus to a Child. In the US, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men are singing One Sweet Day, at the top of the charts.
Google doesn’t exist. It’s more than two years away from its first search. There is no such thing as online payment processing. It will be nearly three years before PayPal (Confinity) appears. In 2000, PayPal will merge with Elon Musk’s X.com.
At the cinema, Toy Story is the top grossing film. Robert Rodriguez’ From Dusk till Dawn is released today. GoldenEye, Jumanji and 12 Monkeys are still packing in the punters.
TFI Friday has made its debut a week earlier. Spitting Image will broadcast for the final time. Two days later, Jarvis Cocker will invade the stage at the 1996 Brit Awards and moon Michael Jackson, as he performs the Earth Song.
eBay is less than four months old and called AuctionWeb. The name eBay doesn’t arrive until September 1997. If you want to buy music, the CD is the format of choice; tape cassettes are in rapid decline.
In the world of gaming, the PlayStation is still the dominant console worldwide, with the Game Boy and Sega Saturn selling well in Japan. Super Mario 64 is voted game of the year, with debuts from Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot.
Mark Zuckerberg is 12 years old. Zendaya, Florence Pugh, Lorde, and Tom Holland are all born in 1996. Timothy Leary, Gene Kelly, George Burns and Ella Fitzgerald all check out for good.
Pornography is virtually the only business online that is both making money and driving technology. Sex sells. It’s not just masturbation. It’s innovation, motivation and dissemination.
Pornographers are the problem solvers. Online business models evolve from the porn business. College campus FTP sites get horny geeks hooked on the Internet. Danni Ashe puts it out on Usenet and Danni’s Hard Drive is a sensation.
Starnet is on a roll. With websites like Sizzle.com, Chisel.com and Redlight.com, its worth soars. When the business is raided by Vancouver law-enforcement agencies in August 1999, investigating offenses of illegal gaming and obscenity, its value is near $900 million before tumbling by 69 per cent.
Porn will feature a great deal more in this story.
Wednesday, January 17, 1996 – 9.31 pm
In Finland, Jukka Honkavaara has just won his wager: a $2 profit and his $50 stake returned.
No one knows exactly how many people backed Tottenham Hotspurs to beat Hereford United, in this third-round replay. The odds would have been short; you would need to bet big, to make a decent return.
Honkavaara made the bet, in Finland, on his computer. He had stumbled across a betting site called Intertops, using an early search engine called AltaVista.
Here is Honkavaara in his own words:
“I’m not sure exactly how I found Intertops. I was looking for something else. Google didn’t exist. I think I used AltaVista to find this one site. I can remember only the basics. I was doing some sports betting. Here in Finland the choices were limited: the national lottery and a pools betting system, where you would pick win, lose, or draw on 13 games.
“My apologies to all Hereford United supporters but I made my bet for Tottenham. I think Teddy Sheringham scored three goals.
“The funny thing is: what I was looking for, was to see how this works. I wanted to make a sure bet. It’s why I backed Spurs to win. I had no idea I was making history. I was contacted in 2006, when they were checking records. They had established that I was the very first person to make an online sports bet.”
Wednesday, January 17, 1996 – 6.30 pm
In Salzburg, four men are looking at a printer.
The printer has just chittered. There is activity. Something’s happening.
The four men are hanging out in the back room of the office, talking shit and shop. It’s the end of the day. They look at each other. Did you do that? They have been testing the system; sending bets. But this is not a test. This is new. This is incoming.
The printer is a Genicom 3410 dot matrix. It’s state-of-the-art in 1996. It’s connected to a Microsoft SQL server, with a tech stack, powered by Windows NT. The website is by O’Reilly, running VB6 ODBC CGI-WIN.
Staring at the printer are Ian Sherrington, Simon Noble, Detlef Train and his brother Eddie.
The room is located in the offices of Intertops Sportwetten GmbH, in Salzburg; on Augustinergasse, a non-descript street, west of the city, a stone’s throw from the 14th century Johannes-Schlößl Christian guest house and gardens.
The four men look at each other. A wave of excitement turns into a cheer. They have accepted an online bet. The very first. The printer provides a permanent record.
Here’s how Simon Noble remembers it: “It was myself, Eddie, Detlef, and it might also have been Julia (Detlef’s English girlfriend) that were in the office, on the night, with Ian.
“We were all sending through random bets, to see if the system was working. To avoid getting hacked, all bets were printed out in real time, on a matrix dot printer by the entrance to the office. The thinking was: if someone hacked the servers, they couldn’t hack the physical record of the bet too.
“There was a chance that we might get our first bet, as there was a guy from Portugal who had already made the first deposit. There were a handful of clients we knew had money in their accounts.
“Anyway, we were sat around talking and then we heard the printer go. We all looked at each other, as if to say, ‘did you do that?’ It was obvious none of us had. We all ran from the backroom to the printer to see what had happened.
“There was a big cheer, lots of excitement, and we waited around for another hour or so, to see if there would be any more bets. There weren’t.
Detlef invited everyone to Restaurant Ridenburg for a slap-up meal.”
Ian Sherrington was the brains behind the system. Here is his recollection.
“I was in Salzburg at the Intertops office. This was after one and a half years of work. It had taken a year to code the sports betting system and a further six months to incorporate it into the website.
“We had hooked up a printer to the website. When a bet was placed, it would be printed out as a permanent record of the bet. This meant, if it was somehow altered at a later date, we could reference it back. No one trusted anything.
“We had the website up and live. There was a performance graph running on the server, showing traffic to the site. We could see all the blips of the hits to our website. These started off pretty quietly with just the occasional hit. It was like watching paint dry.
“In fact, it was pretty scary. We were thinking that no-one would seriously place a bet on the internet.
“After a few hours, things picked up and traffic became more frequent. It started to take off. Then, when the first bet was placed, the printer jumped into action and shocked us all.”
Wednesday, January 17, 1996
The die is cast. The first online sports bet settled. Jukka Honkavaara is up two dollars. Simon Noble, Ian Sherrington, Detlef and Eddie Train are celebrating a single bet with champagne and strudel.
In a few months, Intertops will relocate to Antigua and things get interesting.
A cast of entrepreneurs, wide boys, inventors, big players, creatives, porn stars, gangsters, chancers, cheats, gamblers, alcoholics, addicts, investors, investigators, the FBI, lawyers, Native Americans and wide-eyed opportunists will all perform.
The Caribbean stage is set, with an average annual temperature of 25°C.
It’s will be hot. There will be big money, innovation, invention, drugs, prostitution, payment processing, affiliate action, and speculation. Big personalities with egos to match.
Porn, gambling, sex and betting. The true pioneers of the Internet. The unsung heroes who paved the way for Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Google; the dirty secret that, anyone who was there, knows to be true.
How did it start?
Who came up with the ideas?
What invention sucked on the tit of necessity.
Who are these men staring at a printer?
What happened next?
How quick did it grow?
Where does it go next?
Read on and all will be revealed.
As of 2025, it is estimated that the online betting business is worth more than $106 billion.
CHAPTER TWO
At 6 foot 2 inches, Ian Sherrington has developed the slight ‘lean’ that so many tall men and women adopt. A lifetime spent staring into the pixelated void of a computer screen hasn’t helped.
Always smiling, with a nervy air of invention, Sherrington began his online career ........ to be continued