(FORTUNE Magazine) – SAN FRANCISCO Founded 1992 Revenues: $5.2 million employees: 151 Private www.cnet.com

When Halsey Minor, founder and CEO of CNET, told people about his company back in 1992, lots of folks scoffed at his idea. Combine cable programming with a site on that Internet thing? And the only content will be news about computers? Um...thanks. You know your way out.

Four years can make quite a difference. Minor's flagship Website, cnet.com, has signed up over 580,000 users since its launch last June. And his first TV show, CNET Central, has built an audience of 1.1 million viewers since its April 1995 debut on the USA network.

Minor can't talk much about the company these days, due to an upcoming IPO. One person awaiting the results is the first big investor to take Minor seriously--Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose holding company has a 26% stake. Even with millions in financing, Minor needed many months to find a cable network willing to air a show about computers. USA agreed to sell him a half-hour slot--but left him in charge of finding advertisers. Companies like IBM and MCI now sponsor the show. The Entertainment Tonight of computing, CNET Central now also airs on USA's sister network, the Sci-Fi Channel, and a San Francisco station. The show is a chatty review of computing news and features that's refreshingly free of geekspeak; typical features include segments on electronic privacy and on hot computer games. The Sci-Fi Channel has put two more of the company's shows on its schedule, creating a two-hour block of CNET programming.

The Website, meanwhile, offers Netheads computing news, advice, and reviews, and has spun off two sites: search.com, a directory of search engines, and shareware.com, a shareware library. Advertisers include Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

--Tim Carvell