Ten Years Ago Today: Industry Pioneers Recall the Impact of Netscape's Spectacular IPO
Just ten years ago there was no Amazon, no eBay, and the founders of Google were still in high school. Then a little company called Netscape had its IPO on August 9, 1995 - and the Internet 'gold rush' was on.
(PRWEB via PR Web Direct) August 9,
2005 -- It was the first 'dotcom' IPO. No one expected much, but there were
signs.
Signs like the switchboard at Netscape's Mountain View offices
lighting up at all hours of the day and night with frantic calls from the public
asking about the offering.
When the closing bell of the stock exchange
rang August 9, 2005, insiders on both Wall Street and in Silicon Valley sat back
stunned. The Internet, long the province of scientists and computer geeks, had
been transformed in the course of a day's trading into a major financial force
to be reckoned with.
Netscape's product? A simple piece of software that
made it easy to 'surf' the Internet.
Today, folks don't spend as much
time 'just surfing' as they used to. They already know where they're going on:
to read the news, to go shopping, to do their homework, to chat with friends.
The Internet's become part of the fabric of everyday life.
But just ten
years ago, the landscape was completely different.
For a little
perspective on what the Internet was like before Netscape:
* There was no
eBay, no Google, no Amazon. Yahoo! was two guys in a dorm room.
* The
average modem connected to the Internet at just 28 kps - about 100 times slower
than today's average high speed access accounts.
* Shopping was hard
because few companies had figured out how to take money online.
* Web
sites were so rare that one of the most popular destinations on the Internet was
a site that announced new web sites, any web sites. In 1995, just having a web
site was big news all by itself.
Recently, some remarkable video footage
from the early days of the Internet's 'Big Boom' was uncovered in the attic of
Internet pioneer Ken McCarthy. It shows Marc Andreessen, the twenty-three year
old co-founder of Netscape, introducing his new invention to a group of San
Francisco business just months after the company started and long before most
investors knew a browser from a bonnet.
For more information about this
footage: http://www.TheSystemSeminar.com/bigboom
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/8/prweb271033.htm