While store specific credit cards were a fairly well known quantity at the time, this particular innovation came in two parts. First, the card was very generically associated with currency and hence was useful at a wide variety of stores, restaurants and such. Second, the card introduced the concept of a broker between the card holder (the user of credit) and the bank or other financial institution (the provider of credit). The broker enabled the transaction of lending and borrowing money in relatively small amounts, for a small fee of course. The broker in this case ultimately morphed into the major credit card associations that we know today.

Another evolutionary extension occurred in the concept of a broker with the explosion of the Internet during the 1990’s. Consider for the moment that the earliest incarnations of this ubiquitous network enhanced personal communication and the conveyance of information. At the time, the primary examples of brokers in the area of personal communication addressing were the white pages and yellow pages telephone directories published by AT&T, or the local telephone monopoly of choice; that is, the Baby Bells or various national telecommunications agencies. The primary example of a broker in the area of information availability and interchange was the card index file at the library. This file showed a knowledgeable researcher pretty much the entire contents of the library in question, and it was cross-indexed by book title, by subject and by author. Given a monopolistic control over content in both areas, these two mechanisms were fairly useful for accessing resources on a local plane. The Internet, however, just didn’t fit this model at all.

Remember that the architecture of the Internet was aimed at avoiding the total loss of resources that would be caused by a nuclear attack on either telephone company switching offices, or the public library for that matter. Consequently, a whole new paradigm evolved for finding both people and information on the Internet; the paradigm of the video game. This paradigm, while represented in a myriad of different games, often requires the player to search the abstract space offered up by the game; sometimes to achieve a concrete objective, sometimes just to be able to continue to search. During this search, threats might be encountered, and dealt with, and various objects might be encountered; objects that could be saved for later use in appropriate situations. This concept was instilled into a dynamic index of the Internet effected by search engines. Search engines are somewhat analogous to the anatomical feature called ears; their purpose is to scour the forest listening for the sounds of falling trees. Thus, locations on the Internet are addressed through a Universal Resource Locator (URL); for example, http://www.google.com is a universal resource locator, and so is http://www.whitehouse.gov. Search engines spend all of their spare time accessing any universal resource locator that they can come in possession of, and then building a quickly searchable index of the contents derived from the Web pages they come in contact with. Now, when one wants to find some one or some thing on the Internet, the typical approach is to first enter a set of key words into a search engine and see what universal resource

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