The Internet Era (1990-1999)
The Web. Netscape, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google. AOL is the world's largest internet provider. The first wave of "online" everything; the bubble inflates.
Part of Technology
20 moments in this segment.
- — First Website Goes Live. August 6, 1991. Tim Berners-Lee publishes info.cern.ch — the first website ever. Hosted on a NeXT machine in his CERN office. Still online in archived form 30+ years later.
- — Linux Kernel Released. September 17, 1991. Linus Torvalds, age 21, releases version 0.01 of the Linux kernel. By 2024, runs on every Android phone, every Chromebook, the majority of web servers, and the world's top 500 supercomputers.
- — Mosaic Browser. April 22, 1993. NCSA Mosaic — the first graphical web browser to display inline images. Within a year, the web is consumed by mainstream audiences. Marc Andreessen leaves NCSA to co-found Netscape.
- — Amazon Founded. July 5, 1994. Jeff Bezos founds Amazon in his Bellevue garage. First book sold: July 1995. By 2024: the world's largest e-commerce + cloud-computing company; Bezos the richest person on Earth for most of the previous decade.
- — Java Released. May 23, 1995. Sun Microsystems releases Java. "Write once, run anywhere." By 2024, ~9M Java developers; the dominant enterprise programming language for 25+ years.
- — AOL Free-Trial CDs. AOL's free-trial CDs that came in every magazine, every cereal box, every mailbox in the US 1993-2006. Estimated 1 billion CDs produced.
- — eBay Founded. September 3, 1995. Pierre Omidyar starts AuctionWeb (renamed eBay 1997). First item sold: a broken laser pointer for $14.83. The platform that proved the internet could host real commerce between strangers.
- — ICQ Released. November 15, 1996. Israeli company Mirabilis releases ICQ — first widely-used internet messenger. The "uh-oh" notification sound is one of the most-recognised audio cues of the late-1990s internet.
- — Hotmail Launches. July 4, 1996. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launch Hotmail — first widely-used webmail. Acquired by Microsoft in December 1997 for $400M, the first 9-figure internet acquisition.
- — Google Founded. September 4, 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google. Andy Bechtolsheim writes a $100,000 check before they have a bank account. PageRank algorithm; by 2004 the most-used search engine ever.
- — PayPal Founded. December 1998. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin found Confinity (Elon Musk's X.com merges 2000; rebrands as PayPal). eBay acquires for $1.5B in 2002. The "PayPal mafia" goes on to found LinkedIn, YouTube, SpaceX, Tesla, Yelp, Palantir, Reddit.
- — Salesforce Founded. March 8, 1999. Marc Benioff founds Salesforce — first major company built entirely on the SaaS model. "No software." By 2024: world's largest CRM, $250B market cap.
- — Bezos in his Garage. 1997 60 Minutes profile of 33-year-old Jeff Bezos in Amazon's Bellevue warehouse. The infamous packing-the-orders-on-the-floor footage.
- — The Matrix — "Bullet Time". March 31, 1999. The Matrix's "bullet time" sequence — 122 still cameras firing in sequence around Trinity's kick. Reshaped the visual language of action cinema for the next decade.
- — Larry & Sergey on PageRank. 1998 Stanford-era interviews with Larry Page and Sergey Brin explaining PageRank. The pitch that became one of the most valuable algorithms in history.
- — Pets.com Sock Puppet Commercial. The Pets.com sock-puppet Super Bowl XXXIV commercial. Cheerful, doomed; the most quoted relic of the dot-com bubble.
- — Pale Blue Dot — Voyager 1. February 14, 1990. Voyager 1 takes the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph from 6 billion km away. Carl Sagan's narration of the image became one of the most quoted speeches about Earth.
- — Netscape IPO on CNN. August 9, 1995. Netscape IPO opens at $28; closes at $58.25. CNN financial-news coverage as the bubble inflates in real time.
- — NBC Today Show: "What is the Internet?". January 1994. Bryant Gumbel asks "What is the internet, anyway?" on the Today Show. Defines the pre-web mainstream understanding of what was coming.
- — Java Launch Demo. 1995. James Gosling and the Sun team demoing Java — the "write once, run anywhere" promise that would define enterprise software for 25 years.
