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1998

The Year Browsers Went to War

Google is founded in a garage. Microsoft bundles Internet Explorer and wins the browser war. Amazon and eBay go public. The dot-com bubble inflates. Instant messaging connects millions. The internet is about to change everything.

Early Web1995–1999GeoCities. Tiled backgrounds. Marquees. Guestbooks. Pure chaos.
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Time capsule

What it felt like

osWindows 98 / Mac OS 8.5
browserInternet Explorer 4.01 / Netscape Communicator 4.5
messengerAIM ('Buddy List' door slam) / ICQ / Yahoo Messenger
social networkSixDegrees.com / TalkCity chatrooms
musicBritney Spears, Lauryn Hill, Cher 'Believe' Auto-Tune, MP3 downloads
phoneNokia 5110 with interchangeable faceplates
videoDVD rentals entering Blockbuster & VHS
websiteFlash animations, cascading stylesheets (CSS), banner ad networks
fashionFrosted hair tips, oval wire-rim sunglasses, cargo pants, baby tees
gadgetApple iMac G3 Bondi Blue & Game Boy Color
newsClinton-Lewinsky scandal; Good Friday Agreement signed in Northern Ireland
cultureThe Truman Show presages reality TV; PokΓ©mon Red & Blue launch in the West
The timeline

Events that shaped the year

CATEGORY:
01
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company launchsearchbusiness
1998-09-04

Google Founded

Two Stanford PhD students build a search engine that ranks pages by how many other pages link to them. They call it BackRub. Then they rename it Google, a misspelling of 'googol.' Their first office is Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park. Yahoo and AltaVista already exist. But Google finds better results. It starts small and eats the world.

PageRank revolutionized search. Google became the default way humans find information. The garage origin story became Silicon Valley mythology.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporate Google Inc. after developing PageRank at Stanford.
#google#search#stanford#pagerank#garage
Influenced:
02
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platform shiftsoftwareweb
1998-06-25

Internet Explorer 4.0 Bundled with Windows

Netscape Navigator had 90% market share in 1995. Then Microsoft bundles IE with Windows and gives it away free. By 1998, IE crosses 50% and keeps climbing. Netscape open-sources their browser (creating Mozilla), but it's too late. The antitrust trial begins. The browser war is over. Microsoft won. For a while.

Demonstrated the power of bundling. Led to the antitrust case that defined tech regulation. Showed that open-source could fight back (eventually).

Microsoft bundles Internet Explorer with Windows, effectively winning the first browser war against Netscape.
#internet-explorer#netscape#microsoft#browser-war#antitrust
03
IMPβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆ
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business eventbusinessweb
1998-05-22

Amazon and eBay Go Public

Amazon IPOs at $18 a share. eBay IPOs at $53. Amazon is losing money. eBay is printing money. Jeff Bezos says he's playing the long game. Wall Street is skeptical. The dot-com bubble is inflating. But both companies survive the crash. Amazon becomes the everything store. eBay defines online auctions. Both become verbs.

Proved e-commerce was real. Created the template for modern online marketplaces. Both companies survived the dot-com crash that killed hundreds of competitors.

Amazon and eBay's IPOs in 1998 validate e-commerce and online auctions as billion-dollar businesses.
#amazon#ebay#ipo#ecommerce#auction
04
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cultural eventbusinesssoftware
1998-10-19

Microsoft Antitrust Trial Begins

Bill Gates testifies via video deposition and comes across as evasive and combative. The government argues Microsoft used its Windows monopoly to crush Netscape. The famous 'chair throwing' scene. Judge Jackson eventually rules Microsoft is a monopoly. The case reshapes how the world thinks about big tech.

First major tech antitrust case. Set precedents for how governments regulate technology monopolies. The ruling forced Microsoft to open up to competitors.

The US Department of Justice sues Microsoft for anti-competitive practices, beginning the biggest tech antitrust case in history.
#microsoft#antitrust#doj#bill-gates#monopoly
Influenced:
eu google antitrust(2017)tech regulationmicrosoft open sourcebrowser choice
05
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cultural eventcommunicationsoftware

IM Wars: ICQ vs AIM

ICQ launched in 1996 and made 'uh oh' a sound everyone knew. AOL responds with AIM in 1997. By 1998, IM is how people communicate. Away messages become an art form. Buddy lists become social graphs. File sharing, chat rooms, and that satisfying door-open sound. This is the first time most people experience real-time online communication.

Created the real-time communication paradigm. Away messages were proto-status updates. Buddy lists were proto-social graphs. Directly influenced every messaging app since.

Instant messaging explodes as ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger fight for dominance of real-time communication.
#icq#aim#instant-messaging#chat#away-message
06
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cultural evententertainmentsoftware

MP3 and the Napster Prelude

The MP3 format makes music files small enough to share over the internet. Diamond Multimedia releases the Rio PMP300, the first portable MP3 player. The RIAA panics. Congress passes the DMCA. Napster is about to change everything. But in 1998, it's still mostly about MP3.com and downloading individual songs.

MP3 killed the album. The DMCA set the legal framework for digital content. Together they started the music industry's digital transformation.

MP3 format gains mainstream adoption and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is signed into law.
#mp3#music#digital#dmca#riaa
Influenced:
napster(1999)itunes store(2003)streaming musicdmca debates
07
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cultural eventwebdesign

GeoCities Peak and the Personal Web

GeoCities gives everyone a free homepage with neighborhoods β€” Hollywood for entertainment, SiliconValley for tech, Tokyo for anime. Your page has a hit counter, a guestbook, animated GIF flames, and a marquee that says 'Welcome to My Page.' It's ugly, it's chaotic, and it's the most democratic creative expression the world has ever seen.

Taught millions of people HTML. Created the first web communities. The personal homepage is the ancestor of every social media profile.

GeoCities reaches its peak as millions of people build their first personal websites with animated GIFs and guestbooks.
#geocities#html#personal-homepage#web-design#guestbook
Influenced:
myspace profiles(2003)blogging era(2002)social media profilesweb design evolution
08
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platform shiftbusinesscommunication

AOL Dominates ISP Market

You can't escape AOL. The CDs are everywhere β€” in your mailbox, at the grocery store, in magazines. 'You've Got Mail' becomes a cultural catchphrase. AOL Instant Messenger connects millions. For most Americans, AOL IS the internet. It's walled, it's curated, and it's about to face the open web.

Brought the internet to mainstream America. Created the walled-garden model. AOL's decline would teach the industry that open beats closed.

AOL reaches 12 million subscribers, becoming the dominant internet gateway for American households.
#aol#isp#dialup#walled-garden#email
Influenced:
dialup to broadbandwalled gardensaol time warner(2000)open web
09
IMPβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–‘β–‘
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technology releaseentertainmentsoftware

RealAudio Streaming

Before YouTube, before Spotify, before Netflix streaming, there was RealPlayer. The little purple icon that buffered. You'd click a link to listen to a radio station from Tokyo. It would buffer. And buffer. And buffer. Then play for 30 seconds and buffer again. But it was LIVE. You were hearing something from the other side of the world in real time. That was magic.

Pioneered streaming media. Proved live audio/video over the internet was possible. Set the technical foundation for every streaming service that followed.

RealPlayer and RealAudio make streaming media possible, enabling live radio and video over the internet.
#realplayer#streaming#audio#video#buffering
10
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standardizationwebdevelopment
1998-02-10

XML 1.0 Published

HTML tells browsers how to display things. XML tells computers what things mean. It's boring compared to the browser wars, but XML becomes the backbone of web services, SOAP, RSS feeds, and enterprise software. Every API you've ever used has XML DNA, even if JSON eventually stole its lunch.

Created the standard for structured data exchange. Enabled web services, RSS, and modern APIs. JSON may be more popular now, but XML built the foundation.

The W3C publishes the XML 1.0 specification, establishing the foundation for data interchange on the web.
#xml#w3c#standard#data#web-services
11
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launchgadgetdesign
1998-05-06

Steve Jobs Unveils the Bondi Blue iMac G3

Steve Jobs walked onto the Flint Center stage and pulled the cloth off a computer that looked like candy from another planet. Designed by Jony Ive, the iMac dumped beige plastic boxes and murdered the legacy 3.5-inch floppy drive in favor of twin USB ports. It promised one-step connection to the internet in under ten minutes, instantly transforming Apple from near-bankruptcy into a cultural icon.

The iMac G3 kicked off Apple's golden renaissance and sparked a design revolution that brought vibrant translucent plastics to everything from irons to Game Boys.

Apple iMac G3 in translucent Bondi Blue, designed by Jony Ive.
12
IMPβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆβ–ˆ
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cultural shiftgadgetgamingculture
1998-09-28

PokΓ©mon Red & Blue Conquers the West

Equipped with Game Boy link cables, kids huddled in schoolyards trading Pikachu, Charizard, and Mew. The tagline 'Gotta catch 'em all!' fueled an obsession spanning animated television series, foil trading cards that sold for hundreds of dollars, and feature films. Created by Satoshi Tajiri out of his childhood passion for insect collecting, PokΓ©mon became the highest-grossing media franchise in history.

PokΓ©mon demonstrated the power of transmedia franchises and community-driven social trading games decades before smartphone app stores.

Nintendo released PokΓ©mon Red and Blue for Game Boy in North America, launching an unmatched multimedia juggernaut.
13
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cultural shiftnewsweb
1998-01-17

Drudge Report Breaks the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal Online

Operating from a dingy Hollywood apartment, independent web journalist Matt Drudge typed a late-night dispatch revealing that Newsweek had killed a story investigating President Bill Clinton's relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The link ricocheted across bulletin boards and talk radio, forcing mainstream television networks to report on an internet post.

It demonstrated that internet aggregators and bloggers could bypass traditional editorial gatekeepers and dictate the national news cycle.

Matt Drudge published what Newsweek had chosen to sit on, inaugurating internet news supremacy.
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