1996: The Dotcoms

Sun Microsystems formed the JavaSoft group in order to develop the Java technology. Java, a language optimized for writing programs intended to run over a network, was (and is) a big deal, but the news of the year was not technical but cultural. This was the year when irrational exuberance slid behind the wheel, the year the dotcom balloon broke free of its moorings on planet Earth.

Much of the fever came from the spreading conviction that old business models were dying: Why would anyone ever want to go to a store anymore? How could a business compete if it was carrying the overhead of a brick-and-mortar shop? All this meant that anyone wanting a return on his investment had to find a place to park it in cyberspace. Somewhere. Anywhere.

1997: Distributed Computing

Jeff Lawson of Distributed.net showed how the Internet could be used to harness a very large number of geographically dispersed microcomputers to attack a single problem—in this case, a ciphertext released as a challenge by RSA (with a $10,000 prize attached). Today distributed nets are being used to solve problems in protein folding, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, financial modeling and many other problems. Under the name grid computing, the concept has become a small but important industry, offering companies needing lots of cycles a cheap alternative to supercomputers.

1998: XML

XML, a markup language optimized for the Internet, supporting most known human scripts and compatible across a wide range of languages and platforms, increased the power and capacities of the Net.