Dot-com
Internet history during the dot-com era, from the 1990s through to the first few years of the 2000s.
Note: some of these articles were migrated from my previous website, Web Development History (WDH), which was active during 2021. Check the timeline for a chronological list of WDH posts.
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1990: Programming the World Wide Web
In the final few months of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleague Robert Cailliau developed the world’s first browser, created HTML, wrote the first web server, and invented HTTP.
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1999: The Fall of Netscape and the Rise of Mozilla
By 1999, not only had Netscape fallen behind Microsoft in browser technology, it also had trouble navigating relationships — with both its parent AOL and the developers of its open source project, Mozilla.
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1996: Flash and CSS Bring Design to the Web
There were two stylistically opposed approaches to web design in the 1990s, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debuted in 1996.
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1995: MySQL Arrives, Completing the LAMP Stack
By the end of 1995, the foundational pieces of the open source LAMP stack for web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) were in place. However, MySQL was not initially open source.
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1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up the Web Server Market
The Apache project was publicly announced in April 1995. It was followed soon after by Microsoft's first web server software, Internet Information Server (IIS).
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1994: How Perl Became the Foundation of Yahoo
The founding of Yahoo is one of the iconic Silicon Valley business stories. What’s lesser known is the web development story of Yahoo throughout 1994, based on a scripting language called Perl.
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1998: Open Season with Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP
1998 was the year the web started to open up. It was when open source projects like Mozilla and open standards like DOM began to steer the web towards a more open, equitable future.
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1997: The Year of DHTML
DHTML, or Dynamic HTML, was essentially a combination of HTML, JavaScript, the newly released CSS standard, and an emerging web programming model called the DOM (Document Object Model).
