Suddenly it was possible to put photographs and rich graphics on the Web – it changed from being just an academic tool to a source of information, entertainment and advertising.Since the arrival of graphical browsers, the growth of the Web has been explosive. But in 1993 a “graphical browser” called Mosaic was developed by academics in Indiana. The original software to use it – called a browser – could carry nothing but text. On most Web pages a number of words will be highlighted, usually in a different colour text. By clicking the mouse on that word, you are connected directly to another file which may be on the same computer, or could be on an entirely different part of the Net on the other side of the world.Had the Web been only that, it would never have captured the public’s imagination. Rather than using seamless streams of text, it divided the information into pages – these might take up more than a computer screen, but they would have a clear beginning and end. To move from page to page, Cern used “hyperlinks” – a neat way of connecting pages together.

The Internet would still be an arcane backwater, inhabited mainly by academics, were it not for the arrival of the World Wide Web.The Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern) in Switzerland in 1990, just another Internet tool that would enable scientists to share information over the network. Users had to be familiar with the so-called Unix operating system, which was difficult to learn and allowed only text to be sent across the network. The Internet “protocol” defined the way in which messages could travel, allowing data to be sent down telephone or other lines in a form that all the other computers could understand.
But it was not a system for beginners. For the computer user, it is just one more page among the millions that make up the World Wide Web. The Web is part of the Internet, which is usually defined as a network of computer networks. Originally set up by the US Defense Department, the Net connected computers belonging to the military and academic establishments.

For the advertiser it is a cheap way of providing extra publicity. The code is the “address” of the company on the World Wide Web, the most glamorous part of the Internet. Anyone with access to the Net can key in the code to find out more about the company and its products. To most people this is meaningless – but to a fast-growing group it is the route to a whole new area of fun and information. Advertisements have been gaining a new appendage in the last year A strange line of code – something like http:// www abc megacorp/ – has appeared under company logos. Both the moral and class inhibitions that deterred people from playing the pools are absent: playing the lottery is as classless as queueing at a supermarket checkout. As a result, the pools suddenly seem incredibly dated, as redolent of the past as Norman Wisdom or Come Dancing..

People who never contemplated doing the pools have become regular lottery players, tempted by the way it fudges the distinction between betting and giving to charity. Only with the threat of the lottery did they set up the Football Trust in 1990 and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts (FSA) in 1991 (betting tax was reduced so the firms didn’t actually feel any pain), through which they now hand out a total of some pounds 90m per annum to worthy causes.These were desperate concessions made by an ailing industry. The secretive Moores family has maintained Littlewoods as a private business since 1923; now a former chief executive from outside the family circle, Barry Dale, fired by the family last year, is seeking to buy them out, with the backing of the feared American takeover specialists Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. In August the firm announced the closure of its coupon-processing plant in Cardiff with the loss of 200 jobs; altogether 1,100 jobs have gone in the past year, and further redundancies are threatened if business continues to deteriorate. The pools companies want the Government to make further concessions – more tax cuts, for example – to the pools to avert the danger of even more job losses.For the punters the task of guessing results and filling in coupons becomes more and more like a chore, less and less a unique key to happiness. On the strength of the weekly coupons, Littlewoods built a retail and mail-order empire that now dwarfs its pools business – but the Moores family and their rivals, despite goading from politicians and press, seemed to feel no obligation to do anything to improve the impoverished lot of many of the football clubs on which their business depended.

Yet with the exception of the Treasury, the winners and the owning dynasties, the nation got little obvious benefit from all this activity. She was true to her word: 29 years, four husbands and one suicide attempt later, she was reported to be living on a widow’s pension of pounds 30 per week, and to have become a Jehovah’s Witness.For other winners, nemesis came more quickly: the Scotsman in the 1960s who drank his way through a pounds 26,000 win in under a year; the family in Leamington Spa who were punished for their pounds 330,000 win when their house was trashed, their coloured patio stones stolen, and their goldfish murdered with a fork.As the lottery has become today, the pools was the stage where envy, greed, folly and virtue played out their roles. The perennial favourite was Vivian Nicholson, who declared in 1961 when she and her husband won pounds 152,000 that she was going to “spend, spend, spend”. For the readers of the tabloid press, there was no better way of living vicariously than through the joys and sorrows of people whose only difference from oneself was how they had filled in the coupon.The big winners became folk heroes, figures in a contemporary morality play which encompassed every shade of tragedy and farce. The business began to snowball: from receipts of pounds 257 for the 1924- 25 season to pounds 2,000 for 1926-27, then soaring to pounds 10,000 a week in 1928.By the 1950s, Britain’s football pools was, according to Mark Clapson in A Bit of a Flutter, “the biggest privately-owned gambling concern in the world”. The advantage of the budding pools firms was that, as all stakes were pooled, the size of the pay-out depended not on fixed odds but on the total stakes paid in. Then in 1922 a Liverpool telegraphist called John Moores and three partners began touting coupons outside northern football grounds By 1925 it was beginning to click.