The 50 most significant moments of Internet history

By Nate Lanxon on 25 September 2008, 4:02pm

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It depends on who you ask, but Web 1.0 is usually seen as the era of the Web prior to the bursting of the dotcom bubble, when sites were mostly static pages and information was simply being made available on the Internet, rather than exclusively for it. We've avoided including short-lived 'bubble businesses' in this list of five defining moments of Web 1.0.

The Tech is MIT's campus newspaper and was the first newspaper to be available on the Web. Its Web server was the first to serve up a complete newspaper, predating every newspaper in existence's Web presence. Popular 2008 opinion claims print magazines and newspapers will be completely replaced by online versions, making The Tech even more notable.

In February 2008, Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn, but Yahoo declined. Not bad, considering Yahoo began in a trailer. It was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang -- two electrical engineering PhD candidates -- and they simply wanted to catalogue interesting Web sites. 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web' was its original name. Thankfully the name was shortly changed to Yahoo, which they backronymed into 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle'. Less thankfully, they insisted on sticking an exclamation mark after it.

Founded by Jeff Bezos the previous year, Amazon is not one of the greatest success stories of the Internet -- it's one of the few that survived the epic dotcom bubble burst in 2000, despite having to fire much of its workforce, posting a yearly net loss of $1.4bn according to Amazonia, and failing to excite the world as a publisher of mostly public domain books (did you know that?), all in the same 12 months.

Back when the site began as AuctionWeb -- selling a broken laser pointer to a collector of broken laser pointers -- you didn't have to pay to list or sell the crap stashed in your garage. That eventually changed, earning eBay founder Pierre Omidyar billions. Apart from turning a profit from the start, not to mention surviving the dotcom bubble, what makes eBay particularly interesting is that it relies on its users being honest. And interested in buying utter rubbish.

On 10 January 2000, America Online announced it was to acquire Time Warner for $160bn, creating a $350bn corporate giant and the largest media company on the planet, in the largest acquisition in corporate history. Analyst Phil Leigh told CNET News at the time, "If it hasn't been evident to most of us yet, it should be obvious to us now that the Internet is about audio and video and not just merely text and graphics." Apparently AOL knew that, too, and bet $160bn on it being true.