11 ms·

The History of the Dot Com Era

148 points by jdkee 5y ago

qwerty456127 5y ago
IMHO the Dot Com era never ended, much like the cold war never did. These just come out in waves. The today "dot com" bubble of ridiculously expensive bullshit IT companies can well burst one day as well.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  Will burst. But probably not for a year or two. The current hyped up everything + large scale money printing by the EU + US makes me want to put actual gold bars under my bed.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    I believe many people would rather buy gold bars if this wasn't regulated heavily. Today gold bars are not much different from paper money - they must have a label of a licensed foundry, can only be traded by licensed merchants and the price at which an individual can sell a random piece of gold usually is well below the market AFAIK. Cryptocurrencies are way more convenient but are themselves a bubble (which I find less likely to burst than the shares though).
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      If the system would collapse like in the great depression, gold still works.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      Also, in case of an economic depression, cryptocurrencies will crater. It has not tested really yet, but I would bet on them sinking to near $0 in that case. Time will tell, but I'll be in gold anyway when the bank run comes to exchange cryptos to something to buy actual bread.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        I believe there is a chance that cryptocurrencies will crater but I would not be so sure they will. Cryptocurrencies have liquidity/value backed by black and gray markets (not entirely, but in a big proportion) which will always be there (and probably even boom) when the white markets crash. Cryptocurrencies also can't be emitted in unlimited volumes at just the feds' will so are immune to inflation which tends to skyrocket for fiat currencies in events of huge crises. It may even happen that in such an event some states will address booming inflation by officially making cryptocurrencies legal tenders.
virgulino 5y ago
I highly recommend the documentary "Riot On!". Great documentary, great cinema, and great entertainment. "E-Dreams" and "Startup.com" are also very good. All of them on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j847rYNo2G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j847rYNo2G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fd8pdniJZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fd8pdniJZk
noduerme 5y ago
Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physical servers or prepaying for bandwidth. If you dream of it, you can make it. There are literally children playing with neural network APIs in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. They're going to produce some amazing software. Me - I'm a bit of a 90s dot-com casualty, secure in a career but lost the move fast and break things mentality awhile ago. I make sure to keep myself up to date. Part of it's just keeping your mind alive to new ideas. There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing. The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; that doesn't mean it isn't the font of creativity. We get old but the things we build survive in new forms.
- _trampeltier 5y ago
  >move fast and break things mentality A lot of todays IT is kind of core infrastructure and it hurt very much if you break things constant. Just came to my mind now. Todays software is fat and slow like more and more people today vs. command liners are still the slim, sporty ones.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I actually said that because last night I had a revelation. In my software now I want to move slow and don't break anything. That's a more healthy philosophy, I think. It doesn't mean the software is fat or slow -- quite the opposite. The code is better and cleaner because I'm not in a race to make a big tall tower, I'm perfecting a craft to build a perfect cabinet.
- MrGilbert 5y ago
  > The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with several links to different forums or blogs. There is no similar searchability of Discord, Facebook and Twitter that I'm aware of. Maybe that's where the "more open back in the days" comes from.
sien 5y ago
The Internet History Podcast is excellent : http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ It was created while writing the book 'How the Internet Happened' which is referenced. The episodes on how Google got to Adwords and the episodes on browser development are particularly good. It's a real treasure trove.
jjbinx007 5y ago
Funnily enough I was looking for an article I read about a public figure and the website is long gone. Fortunately there was a copy on Archive.org but it really made me long for the days when the world and their dog felt excited enough to create websites that weren't commercial, weren't laden with ads, they were just labours of love. There were fan websites, sometimes linked together in web rings (I loved web rings) or listed on Yahoo! There were hobby/enthusiast websites where people would share information for the hell of it. I still miss those days. What I don't miss are the perpetual "under construction" gifs but the current web is so corporate and so ad infested/hostile. Yes, we now have Youtube videos on every conceivable subject but I can't help but think we've lost something along the way.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Did we lose it or did we just get much more stuff that is different from it and lose discoverability because the sheer amount of overall stuff is orders of magnitude bigger, plus search engine trickery?
  - jjbinx007 5y ago
    Could be a bit of both, although I suspect people moved over to platforms such as blogs and social media instead of outpouring their thoughts on personal web spaces.
ekster 5y ago
I moved to San Francisco in 2001 to go be part of the Dot Com boom as well, but arrived at the very end. I came out fine, but went through a period over a year or so where I'd join a company, a month or two later they would close, and the same thing repeated five or six times before I switched to the video game industry for a bit.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  SOMA in 2001 had tumbleweeds blowing down the street, and you could park on the sidewalk and there was nobody to notice.
pjmlp 5y ago
Having been part of it, and knowing two survivors from the inside, Altitude Software and OutSystems, I am feeling the midlife crisis as well. Specially when I also realize most of our juniors weren't even around when I was playing with this new software development stack made available to selected MSFT partners.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mprovost 5y ago
I moved to California to work at a dot com on March 3, 2000. The NASDAQ peaked one week later on March 10. To me that era is captured in Douglas Coupland's novels Microserfs (pre-crash) and JPod (post-crash). JPod was also made into a show for Canadian TV that's a lot of fun!
- noduerme 5y ago
  I don't know whether to laugh or cry for you. Being part of it was something. I took a greyhound to San Francisco in 97 and went through the yellowpages trying to find jobs. Lived in a scary as hell weekly bum hotel in the tenderloin and walked, in a suit, to the Hilton every day to make phone calls for interviews. I was 17. Called one company called "Sunset" or "Sunrise" productions, who needed a designer. Interviewed with them in SOMA; it was Bear Magazine/GBM and man, I walked out of there feeling like fresh meat. But it was almost $30k/year. Got hired for $28k/yr [at a "web startup"] as a junior designer instead - I didn't need that kind of therapy bill. Was treated like complete shit, made to work 12 hour days in competition with senior designers and the AD, while they complained about the webmonkey grunts next to me who I was trying to learn HTML from. In an office of "producers" and salespeople who were all getting ridiculous paychecks and buying late-model jeeps, the only smart ones were the ones who were brewing their own code and staying up late working on their own projects. The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Hitting on the one female designer who loathed the place. It taught me never to work in an office again as long as I live. Can't believe I didn't read either of those Douglas Coupland novels. "Generation X" was pretty seminal, though.
  - Slartie 5y ago
    > The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Sure about this? World of Warcraft was first released in 2004.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      I'm not sure and I cringed when I wrote it b/c I wasn't playing the games they played. They were playing some RTS thing involving bases and armies on the local network. A top-down 2.5D game you could scroll around a map on. [edit] after some checking I'm pretty sure it was some earlier version of Warcraft, not WoW.
strenholme 5y ago
It was an era when I was making far too much money doing far too little work, but it’s not an era I want to relive. I go over some of what it was like for me at https://medium.com/@strenholme/i-lived-and-worked-in-and-around-silicon-valley-in-the-tech-industry-from-1995-until-2001-when-the-f0dc9a3b0ea0 https://medium.com/@strenholme/i-lived-and-worked-in-and-aro...
null_object 5y ago
One aspect of these retrospectives of the dot-com boom era, is the mistaken idea that everyone at the time was unquestioningly swept along with the hype. Here in Sweden, while the newspapers were full of proudly patriotic articles about how boo.com was part of a new paradigm of internet-based economies that somehow didn't need to be 'profitable' in some ill-defined 'old-fashioned' sense, pretty much all the serious developers that I worked with were wondrous and mocking of the hype and the ridiculously shaky technology that underwrote it. At the same time, massive central buildings in the most expensive parts of Stockholm were being luxuriously renovated to provide multinational 'tech' companies with a base for their over-inflated staff: friends of mine were employed at one of them, and within a couple of months most of their friends and their girlfriends, and their girlfriend's friends were also working there, holding work-titles that had little relation to any business-case that we or even they could understand. Whenever I visited to hang out in the enormous purpose-built cinema or in one of the crazily and expensively fitted meditation or creation rooms, I was always amused by the enormous bowl of luxurious fruit in the lobby - always topped by a pineapple. The small detail seemed to symbolize the absurdity of the whole show: who was the pineapple meant for? Which member of staff or visitor was supposed to pick up this pineapple on the way through the lobby? Usually it stayed there the whole week, to be replaced the week after by another fresh pineapple, and so on until the bust.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Appears this is a long tradition with pineapples! I remember hearing people used to rent them, here’s one source, “The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple” [0] > A pineapple which had overcome all those hurdles was scarce enough to be valued at £60 (roughly £11,000) … Concerned about wasting such high-value fruit by eating it, owners displayed pineapples as dinnertime ornaments on special plates which would allow the pineapple to be seen and admired but surrounded by other, cheaper, fruit for eating. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-53432877 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-53432877
herdrick 5y ago
The book "Burn Rate" by Michael Wolff is good.
Terretta 5y ago
Perhaps the dot com era is best understood as the gold rush tail of the personal computer then Internet boom. For a feel of what lead into that, you could do worse than binging Halt and Catch Fire. ”Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series... Was surprised this wasn’t mentioned in the media roundup, as it captures what it was like for me as part of this better than the documentaries I’ve seen.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One aspect of the history of the era is that it was also a collision of the PC world and the Internet world which were largely isolated until the Web era. One was hobbyists with BBSs and then (disconnected) PCs in business. (Although the latter was uneven. I worked at a computer company and we used terminals until probably the early 90s.) And the Internet was largely academic until the Web.
smallerfish 5y ago
After the second startup I'd worked at (NYC based, founded by ex colleagues of Bezos from DE Shaw) started burning out in early 2001, I worked for a consulting company. One of our clients were the shady founders of CyberRebate, who no doubt saw the writing on the wall and were looking to put their capital into a backup product. Their idea was a "plugin" that users would install on your computer, which would proxy all internet traffic - swapping out ads for their own. In return for running it, users would earn coupons and points. Of course, CyberRebate crashed and burned in May 2001, and that contract dried up with it. I vaguely remember a horrific architecture involving EJBs (session beans perhaps) running on WebSphere - a scarring enough experience that I studiously avoided J2EE (although stuck with JVM languages) since. After that gig fizzled up, I moved to the bay area (in the midst of the tech drought) and did construction gigs sourced from craigslist to pay the bills while attempting to start a brick & mortar retail business. Eventually tech picked back up and I got back behind a screen.
motohagiography 5y ago
Oddly, I don't see 3 years from 20y+ ago as History, as I've still got nameserver IP addresses and domains in my head from back then that are still up, but it's giving me the sense of how a lot of what we think of as history are minor events used as synecdoche (when a part is used to represent a whole) to represent an era. I took for granted that a 3 day concert in a field gets called the Woodstock Era and that the ideas attached to it were somehow important, and now 2 years of post cyberpunk bubble riding is being used as some kind of a foundation for meaning. That certainly puts that in perspective. :) It was an inflection point of some kind, sort of marking pre/post-internet in the culture. The story of doing what we were all doing without a sense of the impact it would have would be entertaining. I worked at one of the early ISPs as a teenager in about '95 and was in my early 20s when the dotcom boom happened, all after spending a few years playing in industrial bands and after raves went commercial, and y2k created a sense that if you were going to do anything, you needed to do it now. What can we learn from it? To me it was a story of co-opting and gentrification, where you had a small community of hackers scaling their bbs and fidonet services into ISPs, the last years of subcultures (as a thing at all) throwing their final parties before they got absorbed and homogenized into the internet. It was the beginning of a new abstraction, where I think culture became unmoored from physical relationships and (as predicted by po-mo theorists) is mostly simulacra. To use that era as a reference waypoint, I'd say we've reached peak credulity in regard to virtual, simulated culture that originates on the internet, and I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing back.
chrismaeda 5y ago
I also graduated into the heart of the dot com era (I was a friend's 'plus one' at the Wired Magazine 5th anniversary party). But my brain fixated on the dinnerware. I grew up in driving distance of the Homer Laughlin china factory and we went there on a grade school field trip in the 70s. Their stuff is super expensive but it's nice to hear the factory is still there and they found a market in commercial buyers.
wazoox 5y ago
Ah, the dotcom era. I ditched a job offer from Silicon Graphics (remember this one?) to join a startup just as the bubble started to burst (late 99). The guy who's got the job I refused then went on to be one of the early employees at O[...] and then H[...] Inc., where he's now EMEA director of something (and rich, I suppose though terribly overworked). My startup had most of its founding hopes in no other company than Enron. I suppose I don't really need to explain it went very, very wrong. However we managed to limp until mid-2003, burning through all of our cash. Fun times :)
- watersb 5y ago
  Ah yes... the Taco Bell across the street from SGI. Before it tanked and became that laser-tag place.
nickdothutton 5y ago
Signal to noise ratio was better, and your ability to take out the noise.
cptnapalm 5y ago
On some stock related subreddits, people are comparing the current bull run to the dot com era. Most of the people doing that have no idea how utterly insane the dot com era was. One company, Pixelon, blew all their capital on a party featuring KISS and a reunion of the Who. One IPO announcement I recall featured a guy holding his burned copy of Red Hat with his name written on it in marker.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Even for average investors, I remember all you had to do was pick a tech stock with a name you're heard of and watch it go up 1%-3% per day. There were windows where cryptocurrencies felt like that in the last 5 years, but the overall market, not as much.
- blippage 5y ago
  One commentator remarked, looking back, that the sign that the bull market is at the top is when deals happen that are outrageous even by the standards of the time. The AOL/Time Warner merger is one example, although there would have been others. There's a general sense of euphoria, and even through the adrenaline rush, people are still in awe at the audacity of corporate actions. In the UK, there was a short series called "Who wants to be an Internet Millionaire", an obvious word-play on the game show "Who wants to be an Millionaire". In it, start-ups pitched their internet ideas, Dragon's Den style (except the investors weren't up themselves). I also remember Lastminute.com. The amount of media coverage that has was ridiculous, and seemed to centre around the fact that one of the founders, Martha Lane Fox, was a woman.
pjmorris 5y ago
For the business point of view on the boom and crash, I liked 'Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold', Cassidy.
crocal 5y ago
It was summer 99. I was finishing my CompSci MS degree in US. I was driving back from visiting DC with my future wife in my Oldsmobile ‘84 Cutlass Supreme (a.k.a. wreck on wheels). The day was so hot the radiator exploded, so we waited in a diner until the night fell and we could ride in cooler air. A guy and his family parked next to us. His car was also bust. It was a Yahoo guy. 15 minutes later I had a friggin’ job offer in my back pocket, as we rode toward the setting sun. Those were the days.
chaoticmass 5y ago
I was 15 when the dot-com bubble burst, and I had been following all the hype and madness avidly. Where I lived, our cable provider had ZDTV (later TechTV), and I watched that network all the time. Something you'd hear endlessly was that this was a "new economy" where the "old rules don't apply," and "Business 2.0" was the new game. I played along with the stock market, keeping a spreadsheet on my computer with all of my fantasy stock buys and sells, updated daily. I got excited for each days new highs, even though I didn't really have anything in the game. Annnnd then the wheels came off. My imaginary stock portfolio left devastated. Even though I was just an observer on the sidelines, I learned some valuable lessons.
emerged 5y ago
I caught the tail end. So I got to be a junior dev without stock options and watch everyone who was a far worse coder get rich. But you can easily argue we are all still riding the crest of a tech wave.
mekane8 5y ago
I graduated college in 2003 and I remember the excitement at good job prospects among my CS degree peers growing right along with the bubble. I remember being pretty depressed going into our last semester. One of my favorite "historical" pieces from the era is "Mother Earth, Mother Board". https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ Not specifically about the bubble, but lots of fun tidbits from the internet in those days.
analog31 5y ago
I still remember my non-techie dad's concise history at the time: He watched The Nightly Business Report every evening on PBS after supper. After the crash, he told me: "Every night, they would interview some kids wearing glasses with lenses the size of nickels, spouting jargon that nobody could understand. Now you don't see those kids any more."
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
Man, this article had me interested at the mention of "Progressive Networks" and RealNetworks. Blast from the past. Not heard Progressive Networks in a good while haha
aazaa 5y ago
The most enduring lesson about the Dot Com bubble was not the bubble itself, but rather how little the bursting of the bubble registered in real time. Go back to any popular press in early March 2000 and you'll find little hint that the declines were anything other than temporary. Sure, the odd contrarian would be trotted out from time to time, but mainly for sport. Ditto the GFC. I remember being in the audience of Startup School circa 2008 and some editor from a business magazine gave a talk about how he didn't give a hoot about "Subprime." What he really cared about was productivity declines. When you get a real bubble going, so many have attached everything to it that they just can't bring themselves to actually look at it objectively. People can actually say "new economy" or "new paradigm" or "the old rules don't apply" with a straight face. By that metric, "the everything bubble" we currently have is nowhere close to popping. The bears are everywhere. When the last prominent bear goes into hibernation, the inevitable won't be far. I think this phenomenon deserves more attention.

148 points by jdkee 5y ago

IMHO the Dot Com era never ended, much like the cold war never did. These just come out in waves. The today "dot com" bubble of ridiculously expensive bullshit IT companies can well burst one day as well.

tluyben2 5y ago
Will burst. But probably not for a year or two. The current hyped up everything + large scale money printing by the EU + US makes me want to put actual gold bars under my bed.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I believe many people would rather buy gold bars if this wasn't regulated heavily. Today gold bars are not much different from paper money - they must have a label of a licensed foundry, can only be traded by licensed merchants and the price at which an individual can sell a random piece of gold usually is well below the market AFAIK. Cryptocurrencies are way more convenient but are themselves a bubble (which I find less likely to burst than the shares though).
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    If the system would collapse like in the great depression, gold still works.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    Also, in case of an economic depression, cryptocurrencies will crater. It has not tested really yet, but I would bet on them sinking to near $0 in that case. Time will tell, but I'll be in gold anyway when the bank run comes to exchange cryptos to something to buy actual bread.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      I believe there is a chance that cryptocurrencies will crater but I would not be so sure they will. Cryptocurrencies have liquidity/value backed by black and gray markets (not entirely, but in a big proportion) which will always be there (and probably even boom) when the white markets crash. Cryptocurrencies also can't be emitted in unlimited volumes at just the feds' will so are immune to inflation which tends to skyrocket for fiat currencies in events of huge crises. It may even happen that in such an event some states will address booming inflation by officially making cryptocurrencies legal tenders.

virgulino 5y ago

I highly recommend the documentary "Riot On!". Great documentary, great cinema, and great entertainment. "E-Dreams" and "Startup.com" are also very good. All of them on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0lrIi0ce5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j847rYNo2G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j847rYNo2G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fd8pdniJZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fd8pdniJZk

noduerme 5y ago

Ah yeah dude. I'm having a midlife crisis too. But the dot-com era was only about 97-99. I miss the bitcoin casino era, when anyone who could write a poker parser could make real money. Wait. I miss the time when we got our news from 60 Minutes and Peter Jennings. Here's another thought: We've never had it so good. We can write anything we can dream of, on any device, and deploy it anywhere, without corralling physical servers or prepaying for bandwidth. If you dream of it, you can make it. There are literally children playing with neural network APIs in ways that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. They're going to produce some amazing software. Me - I'm a bit of a 90s dot-com casualty, secure in a career but lost the move fast and break things mentality awhile ago. I make sure to keep myself up to date. Part of it's just keeping your mind alive to new ideas. There is no - I repeat no wonderful fairy tale to tell about the years from 97-99. People were just as rapacious and greedy as they are now; they were using cruder tools but it was the same thing. The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; that doesn't mean it isn't the font of creativity. We get old but the things we build survive in new forms.

_trampeltier 5y ago
>move fast and break things mentality A lot of todays IT is kind of core infrastructure and it hurt very much if you break things constant. Just came to my mind now. Todays software is fat and slow like more and more people today vs. command liners are still the slim, sporty ones.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I actually said that because last night I had a revelation. In my software now I want to move slow and don't break anything. That's a more healthy philosophy, I think. It doesn't mean the software is fat or slow -- quite the opposite. The code is better and cleaner because I'm not in a race to make a big tall tower, I'm perfecting a craft to build a perfect cabinet.
MrGilbert 5y ago
> The open web existed, still exists, and will always be buried under a mountain of corporate shit; Thinking about the time from 2003 onwards (my personal dot-com era) until maybe 2009-ish, I nowadays miss the forums. Not so much because of the interaction with others (I get that on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Discord too), but because of "searchability". I typed my question into Google, and got greeted with several links to different forums or blogs. There is no similar searchability of Discord, Facebook and Twitter that I'm aware of. Maybe that's where the "more open back in the days" comes from.

sien 5y ago

The Internet History Podcast is excellent : http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/ It was created while writing the book 'How the Internet Happened' which is referenced. The episodes on how Google got to Adwords and the episodes on browser development are particularly good. It's a real treasure trove.

jjbinx007 5y ago

Funnily enough I was looking for an article I read about a public figure and the website is long gone. Fortunately there was a copy on Archive.org but it really made me long for the days when the world and their dog felt excited enough to create websites that weren't commercial, weren't laden with ads, they were just labours of love. There were fan websites, sometimes linked together in web rings (I loved web rings) or listed on Yahoo! There were hobby/enthusiast websites where people would share information for the hell of it. I still miss those days. What I don't miss are the perpetual "under construction" gifs but the current web is so corporate and so ad infested/hostile. Yes, we now have Youtube videos on every conceivable subject but I can't help but think we've lost something along the way.

dgb23 5y ago
Did we lose it or did we just get much more stuff that is different from it and lose discoverability because the sheer amount of overall stuff is orders of magnitude bigger, plus search engine trickery?
- jjbinx007 5y ago
  Could be a bit of both, although I suspect people moved over to platforms such as blogs and social media instead of outpouring their thoughts on personal web spaces.

ekster 5y ago

I moved to San Francisco in 2001 to go be part of the Dot Com boom as well, but arrived at the very end. I came out fine, but went through a period over a year or so where I'd join a company, a month or two later they would close, and the same thing repeated five or six times before I switched to the video game industry for a bit.

redis_mlc 5y ago
SOMA in 2001 had tumbleweeds blowing down the street, and you could park on the sidewalk and there was nobody to notice.

pjmlp 5y ago

Having been part of it, and knowing two survivors from the inside, Altitude Software and OutSystems, I am feeling the midlife crisis as well. Specially when I also realize most of our juniors weren't even around when I was playing with this new software development stack made available to selected MSFT partners.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mprovost 5y ago

I moved to California to work at a dot com on March 3, 2000. The NASDAQ peaked one week later on March 10. To me that era is captured in Douglas Coupland's novels Microserfs (pre-crash) and JPod (post-crash). JPod was also made into a show for Canadian TV that's a lot of fun!

noduerme 5y ago
I don't know whether to laugh or cry for you. Being part of it was something. I took a greyhound to San Francisco in 97 and went through the yellowpages trying to find jobs. Lived in a scary as hell weekly bum hotel in the tenderloin and walked, in a suit, to the Hilton every day to make phone calls for interviews. I was 17. Called one company called "Sunset" or "Sunrise" productions, who needed a designer. Interviewed with them in SOMA; it was Bear Magazine/GBM and man, I walked out of there feeling like fresh meat. But it was almost $30k/year. Got hired for $28k/yr [at a "web startup"] as a junior designer instead - I didn't need that kind of therapy bill. Was treated like complete shit, made to work 12 hour days in competition with senior designers and the AD, while they complained about the webmonkey grunts next to me who I was trying to learn HTML from. In an office of "producers" and salespeople who were all getting ridiculous paychecks and buying late-model jeeps, the only smart ones were the ones who were brewing their own code and staying up late working on their own projects. The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Hitting on the one female designer who loathed the place. It taught me never to work in an office again as long as I live. Can't believe I didn't read either of those Douglas Coupland novels. "Generation X" was pretty seminal, though.
- Slartie 5y ago
  > The producers stayed up late playing WoW and avoiding their wives and babies. Sure about this? World of Warcraft was first released in 2004.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I'm not sure and I cringed when I wrote it b/c I wasn't playing the games they played. They were playing some RTS thing involving bases and armies on the local network. A top-down 2.5D game you could scroll around a map on. [edit] after some checking I'm pretty sure it was some earlier version of Warcraft, not WoW.

strenholme 5y ago

It was an era when I was making far too much money doing far too little work, but it’s not an era I want to relive. I go over some of what it was like for me at https://medium.com/@strenholme/i-lived-and-worked-in-and-around-silicon-valley-in-the-tech-industry-from-1995-until-2001-when-the-f0dc9a3b0ea0 https://medium.com/@strenholme/i-lived-and-worked-in-and-aro...

null_object 5y ago

One aspect of these retrospectives of the dot-com boom era, is the mistaken idea that everyone at the time was unquestioningly swept along with the hype. Here in Sweden, while the newspapers were full of proudly patriotic articles about how boo.com was part of a new paradigm of internet-based economies that somehow didn't need to be 'profitable' in some ill-defined 'old-fashioned' sense, pretty much all the serious developers that I worked with were wondrous and mocking of the hype and the ridiculously shaky technology that underwrote it. At the same time, massive central buildings in the most expensive parts of Stockholm were being luxuriously renovated to provide multinational 'tech' companies with a base for their over-inflated staff: friends of mine were employed at one of them, and within a couple of months most of their friends and their girlfriends, and their girlfriend's friends were also working there, holding work-titles that had little relation to any business-case that we or even they could understand. Whenever I visited to hang out in the enormous purpose-built cinema or in one of the crazily and expensively fitted meditation or creation rooms, I was always amused by the enormous bowl of luxurious fruit in the lobby - always topped by a pineapple. The small detail seemed to symbolize the absurdity of the whole show: who was the pineapple meant for? Which member of staff or visitor was supposed to pick up this pineapple on the way through the lobby? Usually it stayed there the whole week, to be replaced the week after by another fresh pineapple, and so on until the bust.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Appears this is a long tradition with pineapples! I remember hearing people used to rent them, here’s one source, “The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple” [0] > A pineapple which had overcome all those hurdles was scarce enough to be valued at £60 (roughly £11,000) … Concerned about wasting such high-value fruit by eating it, owners displayed pineapples as dinnertime ornaments on special plates which would allow the pineapple to be seen and admired but surrounded by other, cheaper, fruit for eating. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-53432877 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-53432877

herdrick 5y ago

The book "Burn Rate" by Michael Wolff is good.

Terretta 5y ago

Perhaps the dot com era is best understood as the gold rush tail of the personal computer then Internet boom. For a feel of what lead into that, you could do worse than binging Halt and Catch Fire. ”Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series... Was surprised this wasn’t mentioned in the media roundup, as it captures what it was like for me as part of this better than the documentaries I’ve seen.

ghaff 5y ago
One aspect of the history of the era is that it was also a collision of the PC world and the Internet world which were largely isolated until the Web era. One was hobbyists with BBSs and then (disconnected) PCs in business. (Although the latter was uneven. I worked at a computer company and we used terminals until probably the early 90s.) And the Internet was largely academic until the Web.

smallerfish 5y ago

After the second startup I'd worked at (NYC based, founded by ex colleagues of Bezos from DE Shaw) started burning out in early 2001, I worked for a consulting company. One of our clients were the shady founders of CyberRebate, who no doubt saw the writing on the wall and were looking to put their capital into a backup product. Their idea was a "plugin" that users would install on your computer, which would proxy all internet traffic - swapping out ads for their own. In return for running it, users would earn coupons and points. Of course, CyberRebate crashed and burned in May 2001, and that contract dried up with it. I vaguely remember a horrific architecture involving EJBs (session beans perhaps) running on WebSphere - a scarring enough experience that I studiously avoided J2EE (although stuck with JVM languages) since. After that gig fizzled up, I moved to the bay area (in the midst of the tech drought) and did construction gigs sourced from craigslist to pay the bills while attempting to start a brick & mortar retail business. Eventually tech picked back up and I got back behind a screen.

motohagiography 5y ago

Oddly, I don't see 3 years from 20y+ ago as History, as I've still got nameserver IP addresses and domains in my head from back then that are still up, but it's giving me the sense of how a lot of what we think of as history are minor events used as synecdoche (when a part is used to represent a whole) to represent an era. I took for granted that a 3 day concert in a field gets called the Woodstock Era and that the ideas attached to it were somehow important, and now 2 years of post cyberpunk bubble riding is being used as some kind of a foundation for meaning. That certainly puts that in perspective. :) It was an inflection point of some kind, sort of marking pre/post-internet in the culture. The story of doing what we were all doing without a sense of the impact it would have would be entertaining. I worked at one of the early ISPs as a teenager in about '95 and was in my early 20s when the dotcom boom happened, all after spending a few years playing in industrial bands and after raves went commercial, and y2k created a sense that if you were going to do anything, you needed to do it now. What can we learn from it? To me it was a story of co-opting and gentrification, where you had a small community of hackers scaling their bbs and fidonet services into ISPs, the last years of subcultures (as a thing at all) throwing their final parties before they got absorbed and homogenized into the internet. It was the beginning of a new abstraction, where I think culture became unmoored from physical relationships and (as predicted by po-mo theorists) is mostly simulacra. To use that era as a reference waypoint, I'd say we've reached peak credulity in regard to virtual, simulated culture that originates on the internet, and I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing back.

chrismaeda 5y ago

I also graduated into the heart of the dot com era (I was a friend's 'plus one' at the Wired Magazine 5th anniversary party). But my brain fixated on the dinnerware. I grew up in driving distance of the Homer Laughlin china factory and we went there on a grade school field trip in the 70s. Their stuff is super expensive but it's nice to hear the factory is still there and they found a market in commercial buyers.

wazoox 5y ago

Ah, the dotcom era. I ditched a job offer from Silicon Graphics (remember this one?) to join a startup just as the bubble started to burst (late 99). The guy who's got the job I refused then went on to be one of the early employees at O[...] and then H[...] Inc., where he's now EMEA director of something (and rich, I suppose though terribly overworked). My startup had most of its founding hopes in no other company than Enron. I suppose I don't really need to explain it went very, very wrong. However we managed to limp until mid-2003, burning through all of our cash. Fun times :)

watersb 5y ago
Ah yes... the Taco Bell across the street from SGI. Before it tanked and became that laser-tag place.

nickdothutton 5y ago

Signal to noise ratio was better, and your ability to take out the noise.

cptnapalm 5y ago

On some stock related subreddits, people are comparing the current bull run to the dot com era. Most of the people doing that have no idea how utterly insane the dot com era was. One company, Pixelon, blew all their capital on a party featuring KISS and a reunion of the Who. One IPO announcement I recall featured a guy holding his burned copy of Red Hat with his name written on it in marker.

dehrmann 5y ago
Even for average investors, I remember all you had to do was pick a tech stock with a name you're heard of and watch it go up 1%-3% per day. There were windows where cryptocurrencies felt like that in the last 5 years, but the overall market, not as much.
blippage 5y ago
One commentator remarked, looking back, that the sign that the bull market is at the top is when deals happen that are outrageous even by the standards of the time. The AOL/Time Warner merger is one example, although there would have been others. There's a general sense of euphoria, and even through the adrenaline rush, people are still in awe at the audacity of corporate actions. In the UK, there was a short series called "Who wants to be an Internet Millionaire", an obvious word-play on the game show "Who wants to be an Millionaire". In it, start-ups pitched their internet ideas, Dragon's Den style (except the investors weren't up themselves). I also remember Lastminute.com. The amount of media coverage that has was ridiculous, and seemed to centre around the fact that one of the founders, Martha Lane Fox, was a woman.

pjmorris 5y ago

For the business point of view on the boom and crash, I liked 'Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold', Cassidy.

crocal 5y ago

It was summer 99. I was finishing my CompSci MS degree in US. I was driving back from visiting DC with my future wife in my Oldsmobile ‘84 Cutlass Supreme (a.k.a. wreck on wheels). The day was so hot the radiator exploded, so we waited in a diner until the night fell and we could ride in cooler air. A guy and his family parked next to us. His car was also bust. It was a Yahoo guy. 15 minutes later I had a friggin’ job offer in my back pocket, as we rode toward the setting sun. Those were the days.

chaoticmass 5y ago

I was 15 when the dot-com bubble burst, and I had been following all the hype and madness avidly. Where I lived, our cable provider had ZDTV (later TechTV), and I watched that network all the time. Something you'd hear endlessly was that this was a "new economy" where the "old rules don't apply," and "Business 2.0" was the new game. I played along with the stock market, keeping a spreadsheet on my computer with all of my fantasy stock buys and sells, updated daily. I got excited for each days new highs, even though I didn't really have anything in the game. Annnnd then the wheels came off. My imaginary stock portfolio left devastated. Even though I was just an observer on the sidelines, I learned some valuable lessons.

emerged 5y ago

I caught the tail end. So I got to be a junior dev without stock options and watch everyone who was a far worse coder get rich. But you can easily argue we are all still riding the crest of a tech wave.

mekane8 5y ago

I graduated college in 2003 and I remember the excitement at good job prospects among my CS degree peers growing right along with the bubble. I remember being pretty depressed going into our last semester. One of my favorite "historical" pieces from the era is "Mother Earth, Mother Board". https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ Not specifically about the bubble, but lots of fun tidbits from the internet in those days.

analog31 5y ago

I still remember my non-techie dad's concise history at the time: He watched The Nightly Business Report every evening on PBS after supper. After the crash, he told me: "Every night, they would interview some kids wearing glasses with lenses the size of nickels, spouting jargon that nobody could understand. Now you don't see those kids any more."

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

Man, this article had me interested at the mention of "Progressive Networks" and RealNetworks. Blast from the past. Not heard Progressive Networks in a good while haha

aazaa 5y ago

The most enduring lesson about the Dot Com bubble was not the bubble itself, but rather how little the bursting of the bubble registered in real time. Go back to any popular press in early March 2000 and you'll find little hint that the declines were anything other than temporary. Sure, the odd contrarian would be trotted out from time to time, but mainly for sport. Ditto the GFC. I remember being in the audience of Startup School circa 2008 and some editor from a business magazine gave a talk about how he didn't give a hoot about "Subprime." What he really cared about was productivity declines. When you get a real bubble going, so many have attached everything to it that they just can't bring themselves to actually look at it objectively. People can actually say "new economy" or "new paradigm" or "the old rules don't apply" with a straight face. By that metric, "the everything bubble" we currently have is nowhere close to popping. The bears are everywhere. When the last prominent bear goes into hibernation, the inevitable won't be far. I think this phenomenon deserves more attention.