For those who were around: what was the most vivid memory, either of the technology during the dotcom boom, or the excessive spending that sprouted up around it?
Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#2Reading fuckedcompany.com every morning and watching the carnage happen in realtime.
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#3Rich friends in high school bragging about buying Cisco stock.
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#4The night it all ended. For a few years you couldn't get into any restaurant SF North Beach on the weekend without reserving days or even weeks in advance. Then one Saturday night my wife and I were walking around looking for a place to eat and realized every restaurant we looked at had tables available.
(I think it was in February 2001.)
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#5Wondering how companies with not very good ideas or products and losing huge amounts of money could be getting the valuations that they were.
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#6This E-Trade commercial that played during the Superbowl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#7America Online buys TimeWarner!
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#8Sitting in Netscape’s sysadmin offices at midnight Dec 31, 1999, watching them monitor for Y2K issues. My friend was on duty that night, and we’d offered to keep him company. Most of their servers had times that were skewed and/or in different time zones, so the actual transition was smeared over many hours. But by my watch, the real local midnight was celebrated by somebody popping their head over the top of their cubicle and shouting “Fishcam okay!”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcam
I know there were probably more dramatic places to spend that moment, but I’m glad I hung around for that.
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#9Listening to my father and his work friends at Microsoft in the late 90s talking about their upcoming retirements from their investments solely in Cisco and MSFT.
It sounded so glorious, yet... my dad is still working.
Re: Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?
#10Playing quake 3 arena in the office with 30 other engineers after the work day.