> Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?
A singularity? No.
One of the early driving obsessions was a coalition dethroning Microsoft (which both did and didn't happen). A battle over closed-vs-open. That story was everywhere.
The main thing I notice is that there's a bit of a difference in the way value is created. Even in the UK the arrival of the web created a lot of early adopter winners — ISPs, design agencies, small dev shops like the one I worked for. And it generated a fair chunk of early money, changed the direction of state monopoly telecom etc.
Early well-bounded successes in 96-98 earned proper money, generated a bunch of press, generated new work. Because they had to: you didn't get access to huge pots of cash to grow with, until you had a product that was on the market and selling. The VCs didn't know you existed.
At the beginning it was small tech industry hustle and actual product creation, and a lot of companies really had the small software company playbook and ran that. You had a lot of PC resellers and systems builders who suddenly found themselves as qualified as anyone to build websites or run ISPs.
The problem after that was everyone's eyes got bigger than their bellies, the projects got too ambitious too soon, the VC money arrived even in the UK, and there were a lot of failures. I perceive the moment the firm I worked for got VC money to be the beginning of the end. I thought my bosses were altogether crazy to take the deal.
We basically were not ready to scale fast — the dot com era really scaled brand new companies in terms of number of employees and scope at a level that was at that time sort of unprecedented except maybe in the semiconductor industry.
Towards the pets.com IPO crash end of things, that is when it started to get unreal in a way that you'd recognise now — people talking about entirely new business models, and you had a running joke that if you just put "… on the internet" at the end of your elevator pitch people showered you with cash. The most insane of these being CueCat: a barcode scanner, but on the internet.
But did we think it would fuck everything up everywhere all at once? No. It was going to make us money and make it easier for everyone to buy and sell things, but it was going to create jobs (and it did for a while). It took until well into the early 2000s for the impact on retail to be truly felt.
Nowadays, companies scale enormously before they make any money, VC cash gets handed over to PhD students who only have the concepts of a plan, freemium tiers do the marketing and everyone is trying to follow the loss-leading market-share growth strategy that Amazon arguably pioneered.
The AI boom is perhaps the peak of that Amazon growth culture, "winner-takes-all" thinking, which was always insane.