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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1991: Tim Berners-Lee Tries to Convert the Hypertext Faithful
After a year and a half of stalling from CERN management, Tim Berners-Lee hopes the momentum at the end of 1990 will continue into the new year. But disappointment soon follows.
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1990: Programming the World Wide Web
In the final few months of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and his CERN colleague Robert Cailliau develop the world’s first browser, create the HTML markup language, write the first web server, and invent HTTP.
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1999: Netscape’s Fall and the Rise of the Mozilla Browser
By 1999, not only has Netscape fallen behind Microsoft in browser technology, it also has 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 are two stylistically opposed approaches to web design in the 1990s, epitomized by two distinct — and utterly different — technologies, both of which debut in 1996.
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1995: MySQL Debuts and Web Databases Slowly Emerge
By the end of 1995, the foundational pieces of the open source LAMP stack for web development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) are in place. However, MySQL is not initially open source.
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1995: Apache and Microsoft IIS Shake Up Web Server Market
In April 1995, the Apache Web Server Project announces a new 'public-domain HTTP server'. Soon after, Microsoft announces its first web server software, Internet Information Server.
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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: The Open Web With Mozilla, W3C’s DOM, and WaSP
1998 is the year the web starts to open up. It's when projects like Mozilla and organizations like the W3C and The Web Standards Project begin to steer the web towards a more equitable future.
