Dot.com to Dot.bomb The rise and fall of web mania

The craze of the internet was a time I remember well.  I was graduating from the UW Seattle in 1991.  It was an exciting time for geeks like myself.  I was constantly tinkering with my 386dx40; upgrading hardware, tweaking Win3.1 to it's maximum potential.

And then the internet started to explode.  I could connect with my friends from home.  I could send and receive emails, wow.  Graphical browsers came on-line.  You could visit web pages that not only had text, but images.  Things were a bit, slow.  that 25k image took a few seconds to load, but boy was it worth it.

Then around 95, things really started taking off.  Modems were getting faster, high-speed service were coming down in price.  I knew more and more people who were installing high speed DSL over their phone lines.  Next thing you knew we were watching video over the internet.  It was pretty low-res at the time, but it was a glimpse into the future.

During this time, there was a "gold-rush" of websites.  Companies try to understand what this internet was.  Many realized, that it didn't matter if they understood it, only that they needed to be a part of it.  Those that didn't adapt would pay the price.  Internet companies were popping up all over the place, and for every such company there was a line of investors looking to cash in.

Everything came to a head with the turn of the century, and in 2000 the whole house of cards came crashing down.  Many companies had become insanely overvalued.  InfoSpace, on paper, was at one point worth more than Boeing...and almost over-night it wasn't.

There were many companies that barely looked good on paper, and with no real substance, vanished very quickly.  This had the effect of crippling many companies that had a solid foundation, and many did not survive the fall out.

There have been other market bubbles since the internet explosion, such as the housing market.  But these don't come close to comparison.  I don't think I'll see anything in my lifetime as significant as the birth of the web.  As the saying goes, "may you live in interesting times."