The world wide web, once thought of as a generation-defining invention, these days gives us pause to reflect on how deeply online life has shaped us, for better and worse.

Measure the distance we’ve come with this return to the relative innocence of the year 2000. In The Internet is Your Business, an educational documentary produced by the South Australian Film Corporation, we hear from small-business owners who have already started to see the benefits of incorporating online marketing and record-keeping into their routines.

Ivan Steed, an early adopter with a sign-and-flag business in Adelaide, talks us through the growth of his family company and its progression into an online concern as we see the painstaking in-house hand-machining of the product. On the brink of the new millennium, the Australian small-business community was poised between the steadiness of tradition and the unimaginable speed of the future.