• The Internet and the World Wide Web
  • The Internet spins off of the ARPANet (1970-1990)
    • Rapid Growth: 1981: 213 internet hosts; 1991: 617,000 hosts; today: 109 million hosts.
    • Stewart Brand founds The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL) in 1985
      • First on-line chat room/bulletin board
  • The University of Minnesota launches Gopher, a user-friendly internet file transfer program (1991)
  • Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web at CERN (1994); quickly becomes the internet standard
  • The "Browser Wars" begin
    • Netscape
      • Marc Andriessen develops Mosaic at the University of Illinois, the first "Web Browser" (1993)
      • Marc Andriessen and Jim Clark found Netscape Communications (1994)
        • Venture Capital funding from John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (founded 1972)
      • First Netscape browser appears (1994)
      • Netscape IPO sets off "Internet Mania" in Silicon Valley (August, 1995)
    • Microsoft
      • December 7, 1995: Bill Gates gives "Pearl Harbor Address" to Microsoft employees
        • Microsoft Internet Explorer to be included free in Windows 95 OS
      • By 1998 Microsoft and Netscape each control roughly half of the browser market
    • U.S. Justice Department files anti-trust suit against Microsoft; browser war with Netscape the focus
    • America On-Line (AOL) (founded in 1982 by Steve Case) acquires Netscape for $4.3 billion (October, 1998)
    • Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson rules in favor of the U.S. Government, declares Microsoft a monopoly (April, 2000)
    • AOL acquires Time-Warner Communications to become world's largest media conglomerate (October, 2000)
      • Timeline
      • AOL-Time Warner has a current market capitalization of $231 billion
• E-Commerce and the Dot.Commandos
  • Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com in Seattle (1995)
    • Venture Capital funding from John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (founded 1972)
    • Jeff Bezos named Time Magazine Person of the Year (1999)
    • Amazon.com has not yet made a profit; its current market capitalization is $5.7 billion
  • Jerry Yang and David Filo start Yahoo! (1994)
    • Stanford connection: Yang and Filo start Yahoo! while graduate students at Stanford
    • Venture Capital funding from Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital (founded 1972)
    • Yahoo! IPO (April 1996)
    • Yahoo! earned $1.1 billion in revenues in 2000; its current market capitalization is $11.7 billion
  • Six members of the Stanford class of 1994 start Excite!
    • Venture Capital funding from John Doerr of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers (founded 1972)
    • John Doerr teams up with TCI Cable to form @Home, a broadband internet service provider (1995)
    • @Home IPO (1997)
    • Excite! and @Home merge to become Excite@Home (1999)
    • Excite@Home earned roughly $600 million in revenues in 2000; its current market capitalization is $1.6 billion
• The Stock Market Collapses; Thousands of Dot.Coms fold (2000)
• The Rise and Fall of the NASDAQ composite index (1997-2001)
• What future for Silicon Valley?

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