─── THE 2000s WING ───
the broadband boom and bust. MySpace, Flash games, the second wave that thought it would last.
1525 dead. ordered by year of death, newest first.
pre80s | 80s | 90s | [00s] | 10s (2010-2014 · 2015-2019) | 20s
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2009-12-31
Microsoft Encarta (1993 - 2009)
the multimedia encyclopedia that came on cd-rom and later dvd. microsoft bought funk & wagnalls in 1989, dressed it up with video clips and panoramic images,...
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2009-12-31
Swatch Internet Time (.beats) (1998 - 2009)
swatch's 1998 attempt to replace timezones for the internet age. the day was divided into 1000 beats. each beat was about 86 seconds. the meridian was swatch...
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2009-12-31
Suncoast Motion Picture Company (1986 - 2009)
suncoast was a 90s and 00s american mall video retailer, peaking around 400 stores before the streaming era. parent musicland filed bankruptcy in 2003, best...
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2009-12-31
easyInternetCafé (1999 - 2009)
easyinternetcafe was stelios haji-ioannou's bet that the internet cafe would become a high-street utility, the same way easyjet had become a low-cost airline....
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2009-12-31
In2TV (2006 - 2009)
in2tv was aol and warner bros putting the warner television archive on the web for free in march 2006, paid for by one or two minutes of advertising per...
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2009-12-31
Metababy (1998 - 2009)
metababy opened in november 1998 on a single rule. any address under the domain was a page, and any page could be rewritten by anyone who found it, with raw...
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2009-12-31
Radio UserLand (2000 - 2009)
userland demoed it as pike in march 2000 and shipped it properly a year later at $39.95 for the year, which bought a desktop program plus hosting at...
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2009-12-31
Ircle (1993 - 2009)
ircle was how you got onto irc from a macintosh. olaf titz wrote the first version in think pascal and released it in 1993 under the gpl through version 1.56,...
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2009-12-31
DATAPAC (1976 - 2009)
canada switched on the first public data network designed from the start for x.25 in 1976, and then kept it running for thirty three years. it was supposed to...
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2009-12-31
WorldSpace (1999 - 2009)
noah samara spent the early 1990s persuading the international telecommunication union to invent a radio band, and in 1999 he used it to point two satellites...
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2009-12-31
Net Jet (2007 - 2009)
hasbro sold american children a game console with no processor in it. the net jet was a gamepad you plugged into a windows pc, which then downloaded the games...
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2009-12-31
Netzeitung (2000 - 2009)
m. dumont schauberg announced on 6 november 2009 that it was giving up the concept of an internet newspaper with its own newsroom, for economic reasons, and...
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2009-12-31
Storytlr (2008 - 2009)
laurent eschenauer wrote storytlr to power his own homepage, then he and alard weisscher put a proper interface on it and started hosting it for strangers. it...
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2009-12-31
XHTML 2.0 (2002 - 2009)
for seven years the w3c drafted a version of html that would not run in any browser built for the previous one. xhtml 2.0 dropped backward compatibility on...
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2009-12-15
Teletext (UK) (1993 - 2009)
teletext ltd was the commercial side of the uk teletext signal. it ran on itv and channel 4 from 1 january 1993, after taking the franchise from oracle which...
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2009-12-15
Planet Sound (1997 - 2009)
john earls edited a music magazine that lived inside a television signal, and enough of the british music press quoted it back that the bbc and nme both ran...
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2009-12-15
Psystar (2008 - 2009)
apple filed in the northern district of california on 3 july 2008, weeks after the first machines went out, and never lost a round of it afterwards. psystar...
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2009-12-15
Yahoo! World of Star Wars (2007 - 2009)
yahoo spent the last quarter of 2009 deleting things. geocities went in october, and seven weeks later the star wars site went the same way, with thirty days...
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2009-12-14
FireTune (2005 - 2009)
mozilla's trademark policy killed this one, and totalidea said so on the page where the download used to be. firetune was a free windows utility that asked how...
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2009-12-09
Monopoly City Streets (2009 - 2009)
three million in play money and every street google maps knew about, against a server that fell over under the weight of people trying to register. hasbro and...
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2009-12-08
Imeem (2003 - 2009)
imeem was the music social network that briefly looked like the future. it had a free ad-supported streaming player with playlists you could embed in a myspace...
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2009-12-08
PowerQuest PartitionMagic (1994 - 2009)
partitionmagic was the boot floppy you reached for when you wanted to make room for a second os without wiping the disk. powerquest invented the category in...
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2009-12-08
Indeo Video (1992 - 2009)
intel architecture labs shipped indeo in november 1992 alongside video for windows, and it was one of the first codecs that could play video on an ordinary...
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2009-12-06
Favrd (2008 - 2009)
dean allen pulled it offline on a sunday in december 2009 and left a note saying stars on twitter had become take-out menus hung on the doors of other...
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2009-12-03
Wikivoices (2008 - 2009)
on 4 march 2008 a handful of wikipedia editors got on skype, pressed record, and called it not the wikipedia weekly because there was already a wikipedia...
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2009-12-01
Metropolitan Home (1969 - 2009)
metropolitan home launched as apartment life at meredith in 1969 and rebranded to its final name in april 1981. hachette filipacchi media bought the title from...
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2009-12-01
BTChina (2003 - 2009)
btchina was the tracker most of china pointed its bittorrent client at, an index of films and shows that ran on foreign fansubs and cheap broadband. one man...
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2009-12-01
Kludge (2000 - 2009)
arturo perez ran a music magazine out of los angeles from 2000 with a masthead of more than twenty people working under him, and the thing it was known for was...
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2009-11-30
Zembly (2008 - 2009)
sun microsystems spent 2008 arguing that the next generation of software would be small social apps written by people who were not professional developers, and...
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2009-11-26
Mininova (2005 - 2009)
mininova was the default torrent index for the late 2000s, back when ten million visits a day was a thing a torrent site could have. a dutch court told it to...
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2009-11-24
POWDER (2007 - 2009)
eighty four days separate the publication of powder as a w3c recommendation from the closing of the group that wrote it. the spec was supposed to be how a...
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2009-11-23
Cyworld US (2006 - 2009)
in korea, cyworld had something like nine out of ten people under twenty. sk telecom opened a thirty-person office in san francisco in 2006 and shipped the...
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2009-11-19
AmiZilla (2003 - 2009)
an anonymous donor known only as a former netscape executive put $4,205.61 into a community pot to get mozilla running on amigaos, then pulled the money back...
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2009-11-17
Pandemic Studios (1998 - 2009)
pandemic studios was founded in 1998 in westwood, los angeles, by andrew goldman and josh resnick after they left activision. across eleven years it shipped...
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2009-11-16
Microsoft Office Accounting (2006 - 2009)
microsoft office accounting was a small-business bookkeeping program shipped as part of the office 2007 lineup. it started in 2006 as microsoft small business...
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2009-11-15
BubbleShare (2005 - 2009)
bubbleshare was a toronto photo-sharing site with a voice-caption gimmick and one of the smoother AJAX zoom widgets of the era. kaboose bought it in early...
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2009-11-13
RealArcade (2001 - 2009)
realnetworks built a casual games portal in 2001 and bolted it onto the realplayer install on every windows machine in the country. for eight years it sold...
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2009-11-13
Xoopit (2006 - 2009)
xoopit was a firefox plugin that added a strip across the top of gmail showing every attachment you had ever received as thumbnails. photos, videos, pdfs,...
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2009-11-08
Bombagyár (2007 - 2009)
registration required a real name and a home address, which is an odd door policy for a site whose entire pitch was that it would host the people nobody else...
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2009-11-07
GoPets (2005 - 2009)
a seoul studio spent four years on a virtual pet that lived on your desktop rather than in a browser tab, and that could travel to a stranger's machine in...
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2009-11-03
Microsoft Thumbtack (2008 - 2009)
live labs was microsoft's applied research arm, and the small print on everything it shipped said that nothing was guaranteed. thumbtack let you drop links and...
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2009-11-01
Nokia Internet Tablets (2005 - 2009)
nokia internet tablets were a four-device line of small linux web tablets, sold from late 2005 to late 2009. the 770, then the n800 and n810. they were not...
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2009-11-01
Hell.com (1995 - 2009)
kenneth aronson registered hell.com in august 1995 and ran it for fourteen years as a gated online art project involving roughly fifty new media artists across...
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2009-11-01
Rupture (2006 - 2009)
shawn fanning's second act, built for a game i never played. rupture watched your world of warcraft characters and pushed the profiles out to a social layer...
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2009-11-01
chello (1999 - 2009)
upc launched chello in march 1999 across five countries on the same day, and for a lot of europe it was the first internet connection that was simply on. fifty...
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2009-10-30
OdSiebie.com (2008 - 2009)
a press conference in wrocław ended odsiebie.com on 30 october 2009, with the polish rights bodies standing next to the prosecutors and the police. it was the...
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2009-10-27
livedoor キーワード (2006 - 2009)
eight weeks after prosecutors arrested takafumi horie, and less than four weeks before the tokyo exchange threw his company off the board, livedoor shipped a...
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2009-10-26
GeoCities (1994 - 2009)
the city of personal homepages. you got a small chunk of disk space, a subdomain like geocities.com/Heartland/Plains/9876, and you could put up a page about...
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2009-10-26
Hampsterdance (1997 - 2009)
hampsterdance was the first internet meme that crossed from email forwards into pop culture. deidre lacarte built it in august 1997 on geocities, three hundred...
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2009-10-26
Metropolis Software (1992 - 2009)
metropolis software was founded in warsaw in 1992 by two high school friends and spent seventeen years making adventure games and shooters for a country that...
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2009-10-24
xB Browser (2006 - 2009)
the tor project shipped a browser bundle of its own and the reason for torpark stopped existing. steve topletz had put portable firefox and a tor client on a...
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2009-10-22
InkBall (2004 - 2009)
inkball shipped in august 2004 inside windows xp tablet pc edition 2005, a puzzle game whose only control was a line you drew with a pen. colored balls came...
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2009-10-22
Windows Ultimate Extras (2007 - 2009)
microsoft sold windows vista ultimate at $399 retail and justified the gap over home premium with a program called ultimate extras: premium add-ons that would...
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2009-10-22
Windows Meeting Space (2007 - 2009)
a peer-to-peer meeting tool microsoft put inside windows vista to replace netmeeting, able to share a desktop or a file with up to ten people and able to build...
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2009-10-20
Apple Mighty Mouse (2005 - 2009)
apple shipped the mighty mouse on august 2, 2005. it was the first apple mouse with more than one button after twenty-two years of one-button orthodoxy, and it...
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2009-10-13
Backflip (1999 - 2009)
backflip sold you a bookmark folder that lived on the web instead of on one machine, which in 1999 was a real problem worth solving. it survived the dot-com...
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2009-10-08
Verizon Hub (2009 - 2009)
the verizon hub launched on february 1, 2009 as a $200 tabletop touchscreen phone with a $35 monthly service charge. it was a 7 inch lcd device built around...
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2009-10-05
Gourmet (1941 - 2009)
gourmet was the first us food monthly, launched by earle r. macausland in january 1941 out of new york. it ran forty-two years as an independent property...
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2009-10-05
Rocky Mountain Independent (2009 - 2009)
rocky mountain independent was a small online news site launched by steve foster and about a dozen ex-rocky-mountain-news staff on 4 july 2009. subscription...
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2009-10-01
Microsoft Works (1987 - 2009)
microsoft works was the office suite you got when you bought a compaq or an emachines at a discount. it had its own word processor that almost saved to.doc and...
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2009-10-01
NewsFutures (2000 - 2009)
over 120,000 events were listed as tradable contracts on newsfutures between september 2000 and october 2009, and not one dollar changed hands on any of them....
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2009-10-01
Sphere (2005 - 2009)
aol bought sphere in april 2008 for a price reported at upward of twenty five million dollars, renamed the engine surphace eighteen months later, then briefly...
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2009-09-30
Vodafone live! (2002 - 2009)
vodafone live! was the operator-portal that vodafone bolted onto every handset in its network starting in october 2002. it was the european answer to japan's...
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2009-09-30
Austext (1980 - 2009)
brisbane and sydney are where the useful pages started coming through in 1982, on a service the seven network had been testing since the late seventies and...
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2009-09-29
Kazehakase (2003 - 2009)
twenty-nine in japanese numerals reads ni-ku, the word for meat, so this browser put out its releases on the 29th of the month with a piece of meat knowledge...
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2009-09-22
Slashcode (2000 - 2009)
slashdot gave its own software away in march 2000 under the gpl, so that anyone could run a site with the same moderation and karma machinery. the public...
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2009-09-21
Facebook Beacon (2007 - 2009)
beacon was the moment facebook decided that what you bought on overstock or fandango should show up on your wall by default. it lasted twenty-two months....
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2009-09-15
GrandCentral (2005 - 2009)
the fremont startup that gave you one phone number for life and rang every device you owned when somebody called it. google bought it for ninety five million...
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2009-09-09
Sbectel (1982 - 2009)
when south west wales finished switching off its analogue transmitters on 9 september 2009, the welsh-language teletext service went off with them. sbectel had...
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2009-09-07
Google Web APIs (2002 - 2009)
one developer key, five hundred queries a day, later a thousand. that was the entire offer google made in april 2002, and for four years it was the only...
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2009-09-01
ADV Films (1992 - 2009)
adv films opened in houston on 17 august 1992 and spent the next fifteen years deciding which japanese cartoons got english voices in north america. at its...
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2009-09-01
Ulead PhotoImpact (1996 - 2009)
most image editors made you choose between pushing pixels and drawing shapes. photoimpact refused to, and kept a vector object layer sitting on top of the...
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2009-08-31
Microsoft Soapbox (2006 - 2009)
soapbox was the youtube clone microsoft built into msn video. it required a windows live id, played back through windows media player inside internet explorer,...
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2009-08-31
NewsGator (2004 - 2009)
newsgator was the rss company that owned feeddemon, netnewswire, an outlook plugin, and a sync service that kept all of them in step before google reader did...
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2009-08-28
AppleTalk (1985 - 2009)
appletalk was how apple computers found each other before the internet made everyone speak the same language. released in 1985, it let a room full of macs and...
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2009-08-26
Blyk (2007 - 2009)
blyk was an advertising-funded mobile virtual network operator launched in the united kingdom in october 2007 by former nokia president pekka ala-pietilä and...
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2009-08-24
Microsoft Popfly (2007 - 2009)
popfly was a microsoft web tool for stitching mashups out of building blocks in the browser, launched as a public beta on may 18 2007 by the developer...
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2009-08-24
Iris Browser (2008 - 2009)
a perfect hundred on acid3, scored on a stylus phone in 2009, while shipping desktop browsers were still failing the same test. that was iris, built by torch...
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2009-08-21
Riya (2004 - 2009)
riya was the face-recognition photo tagger that arrived years before facebook could reliably do the same thing. the founders realized nobody would pay for...
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2009-08-20
ConSentry Networks (2003 - 2009)
mario nemirovsky, founder and chief scientist, told network world on 20 august 2009 that his company was going out of business effective that day. staff had...
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2009-08-18
MediaDefender (2000 - 2009)
randy saaf and octavio herrera started mediadefender in los angeles in 2000 and sold decoys to every major label and studio, flooding kazaa and later...
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2009-08-17
Snaptalent (2007 - 2009)
two years of runway were still sitting in the bank when snaptalent quit. four founders started it in 2007 and took it through y combinator's winter 2008 batch...
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2009-08-15
Susning.nu (2001 - 2009)
susning.nu was a swedish wiki that lars aronsson started in 2001, back when swedish wikipedia was not yet worth reading, and for three years it was the larger...
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2009-08-11
Shiira (2004 - 2009)
a mac browser written in japan by makoto kinoshita, with the stated goal of being better and more useful than safari. it ran the same webkit engine underneath,...
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2009-08-01
Google Page Creator (2006 - 2009)
google page creator launched in beta on february 23 2006 at pages.google.com. any gmail user could log in, drag in a template, and publish a personal page at...
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2009-08-01
xD-Picture Card (2002 - 2009)
olympus and fujifilm launched a memory card of their own in july 2002 because owning the format meant owning the accessory sale afterward. it was smaller than...
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2009-08-01
Arcor (1996 - 2009)
arcor was germany's second phone company, assembled in 1996 out of mannesmann money and the fiber deutsche bahn had running beside its railway tracks. it spent...
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2009-07-31
LaserDisc (1978 - 2009)
laserdisc was the first consumer optical video format. it shipped in atlanta in december 1978 as mca discovision, became pioneer's product in the 1980s, and...
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2009-07-31
The Matrix Online (2005 - 2009)
the matrix online launched march 22, 2005 as the official continuation of the film trilogy with the wachowskis' blessing. then world of warcraft happened, and...
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2009-07-31
Outpost Gallifrey (1995 - 2009)
outpost gallifrey was the long-running doctor who fan site shaun lyon launched on 11 december 1995 from los angeles. it ran episode guides and reviews under a...
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2009-07-31
Google Mashup Editor (2007 - 2009)
may 2007 was peak mashup and google shipped a browser ide for it. you wrote a page in a tag set google invented, pointed it at an rss feed, and google hosted...
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2009-07-31
Coupon-Eligible Converter Box (2008 - 2009)
thirty-three and a half million forty-dollar coupons, mailed to american households as bank cards that would buy one thing and nothing else. the tv converter...
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2009-07-30
Apple Shake (1997 - 2009)
shake was the compositing program peter jackson's wellington vfx houses used to put gollum on screen. it started life at nothing real in 1997, was bought by...
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2009-07-27
Borland (1983 - 2009)
borland was the company that taught you what an ide could feel like, two decades before that became normal to expect. turbo pascal undercut microsoft pascal by...
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2009-07-24
SearchMe (2005 - 2009)
searchme gave you your search results as a stack of page screenshots you flipped through sideways, the way itunes showed album covers in 2008. it raised thirty...
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2009-07-23
MyStrands (2005 - 2009)
february 2005 in corvallis, oregon: a team out of barcelona put a music recommender online that read your player instead of your purchase history and answered...
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2009-07-21
Stephen Fry's Podgrams (2008 - 2009)
nine episodes in seventeen months, read aloud by an actor who was already one of the most visible early users of twitter. the podgrams ran from twenty-five...
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2009-07-14
Yahoo! Gallery (2006 - 2009)
at o'reilly's etech conference in march 2006 yahoo opened four more apis to outside developers and put up a directory where anyone could find what got built...
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2009-07-13
Yahoo! 360° (2005 - 2009)
yahoo 360 was yahoo's social network in the years yahoo was supposed to be turning into a portal company. it launched in march 2005 in eight countries and...
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2009-07-10
Midway Games (1958 - 2009)
midway started in 1958 as a chicago amusement-game manufacturer, took over the us license for pac-man in 1980, and ran for fifty-one years before filing...
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2009-07-07
Fanfou (2007 - 2009)
fanfou was the first chinese twitter clone. it launched in beijing in may 2007 from the same wang xing team behind xiaonei, and it grew to nearly a million...
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2009-07-07
.Mac Groups (2005 - 2009)
the least advertised thing in a .mac subscription was groups. you invited a few people, and apple handed the set of you a private website with a message board...
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2009-07-01
CompuServe CB Simulator (1980 - 2009)
cb simulator was the first widely-available public chatroom on a commercial network. sandy trevor wrote it at compuserve and put it live on 21 february 1980....
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2009-07-01
Shadowbane (2003 - 2009)
shadowbane was a fantasy mmo where the whole world was player-made. guilds raised cities from nothing, then rival guilds sieged and burned them, and losing a...
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2009-07-01
Everex (1983 - 2009)
in 1988 everex sold half the tape backup drives on earth, and in 1990 it did 436 million dollars of business with 2,200 people on the payroll, and almost...
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2009-07-01
Net Yaroze (1996 - 2009)
ken kutaragi's idea was that ordinary people should be allowed to program the playstation, and for about $750 sony would sell you a black console with...
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2009-07-01
Ireland On-Line (1992 - 2009)
barry flanagan started an internet company in galway in 1992, two years before most of the country knew what one was, and in january 1994 it became ireland's...
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2009-07-01
Rubies of Eventide (2003 - 2009)
a 1998 text mud old enough to ship with a working dos client put a 3d face on itself and relaunched as a paid mmo on 2 june 2003. it died on valentine's day...
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2009-07-01
Hainei (2007 - 2009)
on 16 november 2007 wang xing opened hainei, a real-name network for people who had outgrown the campus site he had sold the year before. kaixin001 arrived...
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2009-07-01
DL.TV (2005 - 2009)
two ex-techtv hosts on a ziff davis budget, putting out a weekly download in five file formats because nobody had agreed on one yet. the numbered episodes...
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2009-06-30
CompuServe (1969 - 2009)
the first big commercial online service in the US. text only for most of its life. its user IDs were long numeric strings that looked like 71234,5678. it ran...
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2009-06-30
Microsoft Money (1991 - 2009)
microsoft money was the household budgeting app that came in a shrinkwrap box. it lost the fight to quicken in the US and never built a home in turkey. mint...
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2009-06-30
Windows Live OneCare (2006 - 2009)
microsoft's first paid consumer antivirus suite. it launched may 31 2006 as a $50 per year subscription that bundled the antivirus engine with a firewall, plus...
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2009-06-30
Microsoft Tafiti (2007 - 2009)
tafiti was a public silverlight demo from microsoft's platform incubation group that wrapped live search results in an animated ui. it launched on 22 august...
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2009-06-30
Yahoo Bix (2006 - 2009)
bix was a sunnyvale startup launched in july 2006 by stewart bonn and the speiser brothers, a website that let users enter video karaoke and photo contests and...
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2009-06-30
AvantGo (1997 - 2009)
avantgo let you read the web on a handheld before a handheld could reach the web. you subscribed to channels on a desktop computer, and every time you dropped...
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2009-06-30
WinCIM (1989 - 2009)
compuserve was a text service you reached by typing go and a word. in 1989 it moved to a private binary protocol called hmi and shipped its own software so the...
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2009-06-30
Milanca (2006 - 2009)
october 2006, and the japanese web had already decided that video should be free. gyao was streaming whole television programs with ads and no charge at all....
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2009-06-30
MSN Web Messenger (2004 - 2009)
in august 2004 microsoft put msn messenger in a browser tab, for the very large number of people whose computer would not let them install anything. your...
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2009-06-30
CompuServe OurWorld (1996 - 2009)
in 1996 compuserve started handing its members web space and calling it ourworld. you built pages with a tool called home page wizard and they went up at...
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2009-06-30
Windows Live Agents (2006 - 2009)
on 25 november 2008 the windows live agents team shipped version 5.1 of its sdk and used the same post to announce that the whole platform was being retired....
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2009-06-30
Flowgram (2008 - 2009)
on 12 june 2009 abhay parekh wrote to his users that flowgram would be gone by the end of the month. the product let you talk over real web pages while they...
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2009-06-29
Maven Networks (2002 - 2009)
maven networks was the 2002-2009 cambridge ma online-video platform that powered the embedded video players for fox news, sony bmg, cbs sports, the new york...
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2009-06-23
Setanta Sports (2002 - 2009)
setanta was an irish company that spent the 2000s buying sports rights in britain that sky had held on its own since 1992. in 2006 it took two premier league...
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2009-06-23
Manifesto Games (2005 - 2009)
greg costikyan spent the early 2000s arguing in print that the game business had become sequels and licenses with no room left for anything strange, and...
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2009-06-17
Sesam (2005 - 2009)
schibsted owned most of the newspapers norwegians read and decided the country should have its own search engine rather than rent one from california. sesam...
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2009-06-16
PlanetOut (1995 - 2009)
planetout started in august 1995 as a forum on the microsoft network, run by tom rielly, and spent the next decade absorbing the rest of american gay media...
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2009-06-15
Jumpcut (2005 - 2009)
jumpcut was the browser video editor that landed early enough to matter and late enough to get bought by yahoo before it could grow. you cut and remixed clips...
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2009-06-14
Jaxtr (2005 - 2009)
jaxtr was a calling service wrapped in a social network, founded in menlo park in 2005. you put a small widget on your blog or profile and people could call...
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2009-06-10
Club-Internet (1995 - 2009)
club-internet was one of the companies that put france online. it launched in 1995 out of the lagardère group, a dial-up service and portal that gave a...
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2009-06-10
Predictor@home (2004 - 2009)
the first boinc project that did not come out of berkeley. michela taufer's group at the scripps research institute launched it on 9 june 2004 to enter the...
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2009-06-06
Palm Treo (2002 - 2009)
the treo was the smartphone before the iphone was the smartphone. handspring built the first one, palm bought handspring, and for six years the treo was the...
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2009-06-04
Langmaker (1996 - 2009)
jeffrey henning ran a newsletter about invented languages from 1995 and turned it into the website that became the directory of the whole hobby, the place...
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2009-06-03
Microsoft Live Search (2006 - 2009)
live search was the brand microsoft tried on its search engine for three years between msn search and bing. it launched as windows live search on 11 september...
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2009-05-31
dMarc Broadcasting (2002 - 2009)
dmarc broadcasting was a radio-ad automation platform founded by chad and ryan steelberg in newport beach in 2002. google bought it in january 2006 for 102...
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2009-05-31
Cafesta (2002 - 2009)
in december 2008 the operators of cafesta emailed every member to say the site could not continue as it was, and would people consider buying an avatar. it was...
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2009-05-31
Popular Science Predictions Exchange (2007 - 2009)
33,339 people were holding pop dollars when popular science closed its prediction market on 31 may 2009, a shade under two years after opening it. you got...
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2009-05-30
Vidoop (2006 - 2009)
vidoop replaced the password with a grid of pictures. you chose a few categories when you signed up, and at every login the grid came back with a letter...
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2009-05-30
Doblog (2003 - 2009)
on the morning of 8 february 2009 a hard disk failed at ntt data and every blog on doblog went dark at once. the service had run since november 2003 as an...
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2009-05-29
Sony eyeVio (2007 - 2009)
sony eyeVio was a japan-only video-sharing site launched by sony corporation on 27 april 2007, six months after google bought youtube. the site required a...
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2009-05-29
Deadline Games (1996 - 2009)
deadline games was a danish studio that spent its first decade making quiz and edutainment titles for a domestic market of five million people, then bought...
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2009-05-27
Trusera (2007 - 2009)
trusera was built on the idea that the useful thing is not a diagnosis but somebody who has already been through it. keith schorsch started it in seattle after...
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2009-05-26
Macromedia HomeSite (1996 - 2009)
homesite shipped september 1996 from a single developer in north carolina named nick bradbury, written as a delphi side project. it was the html editor for...
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2009-05-21
MSN QnA (2006 - 2009)
microsoft ran a question and answer site for three years and renamed it twice while it was running, which tells you roughly how loved it was inside the...
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2009-05-19
trueSpace (1994 - 2009)
roman ormandy started building 3d software on the amiga in the mid eighties and shipped truespace 1.0 for windows in 1994. it put modeling and animation into...
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2009-05-19
Otoko no Ko Bokujou (2009 - 2009)
six days. cyberagent opened a marriage-hunting service on japanese mobile phones on 13 may 2009 that let women register the men they knew, display them as...
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2009-05-18
XFree86 (1992 - 2009)
for twelve years this was the thing that put pixels on the screen of almost every linux and bsd machine on earth, and almost nobody who used it could name it....
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2009-05-11
Concord Camera (1982 - 2009)
this is the company whose name was almost never on the camera. concord built cheap film bodies and single-use cameras in china and sold them under other...
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2009-05-01
OQO (2000 - 2009)
oqo built the smallest fully-functional windows pc on earth for most of the 2000s. the model 01 shipped in 2004 at under a pound, with a slide-out keyboard and...
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2009-05-01
Quixtar (1999 - 2009)
on 1 september 1999 amway launched a separate internet company and kept its own name off it. quixtar sold the same products through the same distributors,...
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2009-05-01
Fake IPL Player (2009 - 2009)
for four weeks in april and may 2009 a large part of indian cricket believed that a squad player at kolkata knight riders was blogging from inside the tour....
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2009-04-30
Spock (2006 - 2009)
spock was a vertical search engine for people, indexing 250 million real humans from public sources. cnet named it the most promising startup of 2007. intelius...
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2009-04-30
SWX Europe (1995 - 2009)
on 21 september 1995 three people who had left the london stock exchange opened a rival to it, the first in two hundred years, and almost nobody traded there....
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2009-04-29
OD2 (1999 - 2009)
od2 was the engine under most of europe's legal music downloads before apple got here. peter gabriel started it in bristol in november 1999 and it never sold...
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2009-04-27
e-gold (1996 - 2009)
e-gold was a gold-backed digital currency that ran from 1996 to 2009 out of melbourne florida. douglas jackson, a radiation oncologist, founded it with barry...
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2009-04-27
Location View (2007 - 2009)
a tokyo company put street-level imagery of japanese cities online on 14 may 2007, more than a year before google street view arrived in japan. the footage...
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2009-04-24
Central Park Media (1990 - 2009)
central park media opened in new york on 11 april 1990 and spent nineteen years buying north american rights to japanese animation that nobody else was bidding...
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2009-04-23
Putfile (2004 - 2009)
putfile was the kind of video host i should have known about. it ran 2004 to 2009 out of godalming, england, founded by gordon page. ZVUE acquired it in 2007....
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2009-04-22
Baby Shaker (2009 - 2009)
ninety nine cents bought a black and white drawing of a crying baby and a timer that counted up while you tried to calm it. shaking the phone put two red...
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2009-04-21
AskMeNow (2005 - 2009)
fifty four thousand five hundred and thirty six dollars. that was askmenow's revenue for the whole of fiscal 2007, against a net loss of twenty and a half...
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2009-04-20
Zango (1999 - 2009)
two brothers in bellevue built a business on a bargain nobody was meant to read: you take the free game, we take the right to put advertisements on your screen...
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2009-04-17
Furl (2003 - 2009)
furl was the page-archiving social bookmarking site of the mid-2000s. mike giles founded it in 2003 with a single distinguishing feature: every bookmark saved...
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2009-04-17
Coollist (1997 - 2009)
onelist and egroups took the free mailing list market in 1998 and yahoo bought the survivor. coollist was already there, one of the also-rans nobody wrote...
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2009-04-16
Habbo Japan (2003 - 2009)
the japanese localization of habbo hotel never took hold. sulake opened it in february 2003 as one of the first overseas hotels, alongside the early...
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2009-04-14
Ascaron (1991 - 2009)
ascaron spent eighteen years in gütersloh making trading simulations that were enormous inside germany and barely registered outside it, then made sacred,...
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2009-04-13
FlashMail (1998 - 2009)
an internet provider in corvallis, oregon, with a few thousand customers in the willamette valley, ended up owning one of the last survivors of the 1998...
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2009-04-08
Pleo (2007 - 2009)
pleo was a 349-dollar robot dinosaur toy from ugobe, co-founded by furby's caleb chung. it shipped in december 2007 with skin sensors, microphones, a camera,...
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2009-04-08
AT&T Pogo (2008 - 2009)
a phone company decided in 2008 that browsing needed to look like flipping through physical objects, hired a toronto 3d shop to build it on top of firefox, and...
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2009-04-02
Openmoko (2006 - 2009)
openmoko was a taiwanese motherboard company's attempt to build a phone with nothing hidden inside it. the neo 1973 shipped in july 2007 and the neo freerunner...
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2009-04-01
Silicon Graphics (SGI) (1981 - 2009)
silicon graphics inc was founded in november 1981 by jim clark and a group of stanford engineers, ran the unix workstation market for two decades on the back...
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2009-04-01
Microsoft Agent (1997 - 2009)
microsoft agent was the ActiveX-based animated-character runtime that shipped in september 1997 alongside internet explorer 4. four free characters lived on...
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2009-04-01
Computer Shopper (1979 - 2009)
computer shopper was the 700-plus page newsprint tabloid of pc parts, motherboard ads and mail-order coupons that landed in north american mailboxes every...
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2009-04-01
SeeqPod (2005 - 2009)
seeqpod was a search engine for playable audio and video files on the open web, built out of emeryville in 2005 by a small team with lawrence berkeley national...
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2009-04-01
Mugshot (2006 - 2009)
red hat's attempt at an open-source social network, a feed that pulled together the music you played and the sites you shared and showed it to people with the...
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2009-04-01
MyToons (2007 - 2009)
three weeks after the march 2007 launch it had taken over 1.5 million unique visitors, which looked like proof that animation wanted its own video site rather...
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2009-03-31
Wikia Search (2008 - 2009)
jimmy wales' attempt at an open-source search engine, launched as a public alpha in january '08 with thirty million pages indexed. by august it held seventy...
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2009-03-31
SafeDisc (1998 - 2009)
safedisc was the macrovision pc-game copy-protection system that shipped on hundreds of cd and dvd titles from 1998 onward. final build 4.90.010 went out 2 may...
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2009-03-31
MobaHO! (2004 - 2009)
a hundred thousand subscribers against a target of a million is the whole story. mobaho! put eight video channels and thirty audio channels on a satellite over...
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2009-03-31
HP Upline (2008 - 2009)
hewlett-packard sold unlimited online backup for a few dollars a month, broke it three weeks after launch and closed it eleven months later. the backups...
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2009-03-30
Yahoo! Briefcase (1999 - 2009)
yahoo briefcase was thirty free megabytes of online storage with a yahoo id, ten years before "the cloud" was a marketing phrase. you uploaded a doc or a few...
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2009-03-27
Christian Science Monitor daily print (1908 - 2009)
the christian science monitor was founded in boston in november 1908 by mary baker eddy, published daily except sundays and holidays for a full century. it was...
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2009-03-26
Blender (1994 - 2009)
august 1994, and the delivery format was a disc. regina joseph built the first magazine published entirely on cd-rom, with sound and video in it, at a moment...
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2009-03-25
Yahoo FareChase (1999 - 2009)
farechase was a travel meta-search engine built in israel in 1999. yahoo paid around 20 million dollars for it in july 2004 to compete with sidestep and the...
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2009-03-20
Lookybook (2007 - 2009)
craig frazier had run a design studio in california since 1980, and in november 2007 he opened lookybook so that a parent could turn every page of a picture...
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2009-03-20
music.download.com (2004 - 2009)
february 2009 was the last month anyone could load the page. cnet built music.download.com in 2004 to catch the unsigned artists it had just evicted from...
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2009-03-19
SpiralFrog (2007 - 2009)
spiralfrog was the largest ad-supported free music download service in north america. it shipped songs as drm-locked wma files that expired after 60 days...
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2009-03-18
Yahoo! MyWeb (2005 - 2009)
yahoo myweb was the social bookmarking service yahoo built internally in june 2005, four months before it bought delicious in december 2005. the two products...
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2009-03-17
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (print edition) (1863 - 2009)
the seattle post-intelligencer print edition was killed on 17 march 2009, 146 years after it started life as the seattle gazette in december 1863 in a wooden...
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2009-03-17
ITV Local (2005 - 2009)
itv's attempt at putting the english regions online, tried first in brighton and hastings in 2005 and then rolled out across the whole network. local news and...
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2009-03-16
WiMedia Alliance (2002 - 2009)
a deadlocked committee did this one. the ieee task group working on high-rate ultra-wideband narrowed twenty-three proposals down to two radios that could not...
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2009-03-13
Fabchannel (2000 - 2009)
a concert hall turned itself into a broadcaster. fabchannel put television-grade cameras into paradiso and melkweg in amsterdam and streamed whole gigs, free...
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2009-03-12
FindWhat.com (1999 - 2009)
in september 1999 a small florida company that had been selling search engine placement stopped selling placement and started auctioning it, letting...
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2009-03-08
Circuit City (1949 - 2009)
circuit city peaked at 567 stores and was the largest us consumer-electronics chain by revenue through much of the 1990s. in march 2007 management fired about...
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2009-03-01
Vindigo (1999 - 2009)
two traders quit d. e. shaw in 1999 and built a city guide that lived on a palm pilot. vindigo held restaurant reviews and walking directions for american...
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2009-03-01
XLEAGUE.TV (2007 - 2009)
in 2007 a british company decided competitive gaming was a television format and bought satellite carriage to prove it. xleague.tv sat on sky channel 291 with...
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2009-03-01
Groxis (2001 - 2009)
grokker took a search query and gave you back a map. results arrived as nested circles grouped by topic, so you could see the shape of a subject before reading...
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2009-02-28
Tabula Rasa (2007 - 2009)
tabula rasa was richard garriott's other life. ultima online made his name. this was the follow-up: an MMO set in space, eight years in development, published...
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2009-02-28
Empas (1999 - 2009)
empas launched in december 1999 as a korean search engine built around natural language queries, and for a couple of years it was the country's second portal...
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2009-02-27
Rocky Mountain News (1859 - 2009)
the rocky mountain news was denver's oldest daily newspaper, born in a print shop on the corner of larimer and cherry in april 1859 when denver was six months...
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2009-02-27
Manganovel (2007 - 2009)
toshiba owned 89 percent of a manga shop that sold volumes for four dollars and then paid its own customers half the price of any translation they made of one....
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2009-02-26
Angelfire / Tripod (1996 - 2009)
the other free hosting services. while geocities took the bigger audience, angelfire and tripod each had millions of personal pages, fan sites, and...
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2009-02-26
Swurl (2008 - 2009)
two guys built swurl in the evenings, and when their day jobs got heavier they wrote that down and stopped. it pulled nineteen services into one illustrated...
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2009-02-21
MSN Groups (1995 - 2009)
msn groups was the bureaucratic floor of the msn building. you got a shared message board, a small file storage area, a member list, and a url under...
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2009-02-20
Enjoy Japan (2002 - 2009)
naver opened enjoy japan in june 2002 as a bulletin board with japanese and korean machine translation running underneath every post, so that neither side had...
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2009-02-19
Coghead (2003 - 2009)
coghead sold a promise that keeps coming back and keeps not working: build real business software without a programmer. from 2003 it let people assemble hosted...
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2009-02-18
Solipsis (2002 - 2009)
joaquin keller and gwendal simon designed solipsis inside france télécom's research division as a shared virtual world with no servers in it, where every...
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2009-02-18
Bud.TV (2007 - 2009)
fifteen million dollars bought a beer company its own television network in february 2007, and the first thing the network did was ask for your driver's...
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2009-02-16
Jellyfish.com (2006 - 2009)
a shopping search engine earns affiliate commission on every click it sends to a retailer, and in 2006 two founders in middleton, wisconsin decided to hand...
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2009-02-15
The Baltimore Examiner (2006 - 2009)
the baltimore examiner was a free daily commuter paper launched in april 2006 by philip anschutz's clarity media group as part of a us-wide free-daily chain....
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2009-02-15
Lycos Europe (1997 - 2009)
there were two lycos companies. the american one in massachusetts, and this one, a joint venture between bertelsmann and lycos inc that licensed the name for...
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2009-02-11
Blazer (2000 - 2009)
every palm treo sold between 2002 and 2008 had a browser under the globe icon called blazer, and for a lot of american business users that browser was the...
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2009-02-09
KB Toys (1922 - 2009)
kb toys started in pittsfield massachusetts in 1922 as kaufman brothers, a wholesale candy company. it pivoted to wholesale toys in 1946 and to mall retail...
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2009-02-06
Ruckus Network (2003 - 2009)
ruckus was the 2003 vincent han and david galper venture that gave free music to anyone with a .edu email address. january 2006 it switched from subscription...
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2009-02-05
Wikitruth (2006 - 2009)
jimmy wales called it a hoax and said whoever ran it had almost certainly been banned. the people running it said the opposite, that several of them were...
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2009-02-04
JuicyCampus (2007 - 2009)
juicycampus was an anonymous college gossip board that ran from 2007 to 2009 and turned american campuses into a comment war. matt ivester, a duke graduate,...
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2009-02-04
Project Kangaroo (2007 - 2009)
kangaroo was going to be one place to watch british television, built jointly by bbc worldwide and itv with channel 4 alongside them, holding more than ten...
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2009-02-03
Free Radical Design (1999 - 2009)
free radical was the studio four senior rare developers opened in 1999 to keep making the kind of arcade-feel console shooters they had built on the n64. the...
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2009-02-01
Dodgeball (2000 - 2009)
dodgeball was a check-in-by-sms service that ran from 2000 to 2009. dennis crowley and alex rainert built it at nyu and ran it as an indie startup until google...
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2009-02-01
STAR-BEACH (1999 - 2009)
starbeach was a message board for japanese phones where you posted asking for someone to write to you. no fee, no app, no computer involved, just a handset and...
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2009-02-01
Comedy 23/6 (2007 - 2009)
barry diller's iac and arianna huffington went into the satire business together in november 2007 and were out of it fifteen months later. 23/6 hired daily...
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2009-02-01
Co.mments (2006 - 2009)
you left a comment on somebody's blog in 2006 and then had no way of finding out whether anyone answered it. assaf arkin's fix was a bookmarklet that watched...
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2009-01-31
Electronic Gaming Monthly (print) (1989 - 2009)
the multi-platform us gaming print magazine, twenty years on newsstands. founded march 31 1989 by steve harris under sendai publications. ziff-davis took over...
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2009-01-31
Hellgate - London (2007 - 2009)
hellgate london was the diablo team's first act after they left blizzard. it was supposed to be the next great isometric action-rpg with a first-person camera...
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2009-01-30
GreatestJournal (2003 - 2009)
greatestjournal was one of the many sites built on livejournal's open-source code, launched in 2003. what set it apart was free image hosting, called gjpix,...
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2009-01-30
Toonami Jetstream (2006 - 2009)
cartoon network and viz media put toonami on the web in july 2006, free and paid for by advertising, at a point when almost nobody was doing legal video...
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2009-01-29
Ensemble Studios (1995 - 2009)
ensemble studios was the dallas rts house that built the age of empires series across twelve years and three full installments, then closed the day halo wars...
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2009-01-28
Transmeta (1995 - 2009)
transmeta stayed quiet for five years and came out in january 2000 with a chip that had almost no x86 logic on it. a software layer translated intel...
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2009-01-27
Culture11 (2008 - 2009)
william bennett put money behind an online magazine in august 2008 and david kuo ran it, and the pitch was a center-right slate: cultural criticism from the...
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2009-01-26
Alexa Web Search Platform (2005 - 2009)
a dollar per cpu hour, and a dollar for every fifty gigabytes you pushed through it. that was the price of building a search engine on top of amazon's crawl of...
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2009-01-25
Unicel (1990 - 2009)
unicel was the brand on rural cellular corporation, a company that forty small minnesota telephone companies put together in 1990 by pooling five cellular...
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2009-01-23
Qimonda (2006 - 2009)
infineon moved its memory business into a separate company in 2006 and listed it in new york three months later, arriving just as dram prices fell eighty five...
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2009-01-21
Times File (2005 - 2009)
in december 2008 the new york times emailed its readers to say that social bookmarking sites could do the heavy lifting from now on. times file had let a...
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2009-01-18
Jubii (1995 - 2009)
jubii was denmark's first search engine and then its homegrown yahoo, a portal so dominant it reached more than ninety percent of danish internet users at its...
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2009-01-18
xMule (2003 - 2009)
in june 2003 a fight over a hijacked project website split lmule and produced xmule, and two months later a subpoena split xmule and produced amule. what it...
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2009-01-18
CAPICOM (2001 - 2009)
signing something with the real windows crypto library meant c++ and a lot of it. capicom meant three lines of visual basic, which is why script authors and...
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2009-01-17
TOTSE (1989 - 2009)
jeff hunter and j.c. stanton opened & the temple of the screaming electron as a dial-up bbs in 1989 under the nirvananet umbrella, focused on a growing...
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2009-01-15
Ficlets (2006 - 2009)
an aol system architect built a writing site with a byte ceiling on it. you got between 64 and 1,024 bytes, and anybody who read your story could bolt a...
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2009-01-15
circaVie (2007 - 2009)
eighteen months was all it got. aol opened circavie in july 2007 as a place to lay your life out chronologically, in a flash widget you could embed on somebody...
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2009-01-15
Whopper Sacrifice (2009 - 2009)
233,906 friendships were ended in ten days of january 2009, at a rate of ten per free sandwich. facebook had asked the agency to stop notifying people that...
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2009-01-09
Alltel (1983 - 2009)
alltel was the fifth largest wireless carrier in america and most of the country could not have told you what its logo looked like. it ran the biggest network...
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2009-01-09
Bullog.cn (2006 - 2009)
luo yonghao built bullog in 2006 because the big chinese portals kept deleting things, and for three years it was the most liberal blog host in the chinese...
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2009-01-07
Fantasy Congress (2006 - 2009)
on monday 23 october 2006 four students at claremont mckenna college put up a game in which you drafted real members of the united states house and senate and...
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2009-01-05
JPG Magazine (2004 - 2009)
jpg was a photography magazine that let its readers make it. you uploaded photos and the community voted the best ones into a printed issue you could buy on a...
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2009-01-02
JournalSpace (2002 - 2009)
journalspace was a small blogging platform that ran from 2002 to early 2009 with a few hundred thousand bloggers in its quiet steady-state. on december 22 2008...
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2009-01-01
PC Magazine (print) (1982 - 2009)
ziff-davis's flagship pc magazine, the one whose ad-page count in any given month of 1996 was thicker than most short novels. founded march 1982 by david...
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2009-01-01
StarForce (2000 - 2009)
starforce was the russian copy-protection company that built the aggressive kernel-level drm system used on western pc-game releases from the early 2000s...
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2009-01-01
gOS (2007 - 2009)
gos was a google-themed ubuntu derivative built around the google web apps suite. it shipped on the everex gpc tc2502 at walmart for 199 dollars on november 1...
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2009-01-01
Nokia Lifeblog (2004 - 2009)
the earliest mainstream idea of lifelogging shipped as an s60 app plus a windows companion. every photo and MMS your phone captured would sync to a timeline on...
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2009-01-01
Guba (1998 - 2009)
guba started as an archive, not a video site. the name was an acronym, gigantic usenet binaries archive, and in 1998 that is what it was, a way to search the...
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2009-01-01
Palm OS (1996 - 2009)
the operating system that lived in your palm before the phone did. it taught a generation to write in a stripped-down alphabet so a machine could read them,...
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2009-01-01
vSocial (2005 - 2009)
white-label video hosting from arizona, sold to publishers who wanted their own branded player without building one. it worked for a while, then youtube handed...
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2009-01-01
Ms. Dewey (2006 - 2009)
microsoft put an actress in a dark room and shot six hundred reaction clips across three days. you typed a word into live search and janina gavankar answered...
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2009-01-01
Nomade.fr (1996 - 2009)
nomade.fr opened on 2 july 1996 and spent seven years doing the thing google made unnecessary: paying people to read websites and write a sentence about each...
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2009-01-01
MAE-East (1992 - 2009)
mae-east was the place where the networks that made up the american internet agreed to pass each other packets, and through the middle of the nineties it was...
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2009-01-01
Flektor (2007 - 2009)
flektor let you pull photos and video into a browser page and cut them together with about a hundred effects. the finished piece was called a flek and it...
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2009-01-01
Veropedia (2007 - 2009)
a free advertising-supported encyclopedia that wrote nothing of its own. a small invited group of wikipedia editors picked articles that already met a standard...
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2009-01-01
GNU arch (2001 - 2009)
a distributed version control system written as a pile of shell scripts in 2001, years before the industry agreed that the central server was the problem....
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2009-01-01
Xohm (2007 - 2009)
sprint spent 2007 and 2008 building a fourth generation network and a brand name to sell it under. the name was xohm, it rhymed with home, and it went live in...
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2009-01-01
Norton SystemWorks (1998 - 2009)
norton systemworks was symantec's answer to the question every windows owner was asking in 1998, which was why the computer had gotten slow. it put norton...
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2009-01-01
QuickCam (1994 - 2009)
connectix shipped a hundred-dollar camera in 1994 that plugged into a macintosh serial port and produced sixteen shades of gray at 320 by 240. it was the first...
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2009-01-01
PC Card (PCMCIA) (1990 - 2009)
every laptop had the slot, usually two of them stacked, with a spring-loaded eject button beside it and a plastic blank wedged in to keep the dust out. the...
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2009-01-01
UIQ (2002 - 2009)
symbian shipped three provisional user interfaces and let the phone makers pick. nokia picked the one it controlled, called it series 60 and put it on...
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2009-01-01
TurboNick (2005 - 2009)
nickelodeon put full episodes on the open web in july 2005, free and with no cable login, and called it turbonick. it ran for four years on the theory that...
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2009-01-01
BuyMusic (2003 - 2009)
scott blum spent the summer of 2003 telling anyone who would listen that buy.com had built the world's largest music download store. buymusic opened on july 22...
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2009-01-01
Sony Rolly (2007 - 2009)
an egg with a wheel at each end and a pair of cup-shaped wings that opened and closed in time with the music. sony put it on sale in japan on 29 september 2007...
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2009-01-01
Konceptzia (1999 - 2009)
israel, 1999: a magazine about how to build websites, written in hebrew for the people building them. konceptzia ran ten years at exego.net and spun off more...
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2009-01-01
Incognito Entertainment (1999 - 2009)
sony bought incognito entertainment in august 2002 with fifty-one people inside it, and by 2009 there was almost nobody left to close. twisted metal: black in...
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2009-01-01
U3 (2004 - 2009)
in october 2005 a usb stick started arriving with a second personality: a small read-only cd drive welded to the front of it, put there so windows would...
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2009-01-01
Tailrank (2005 - 2009)
kevin burton had already co-founded rojo when he put tailrank into alpha on 21 september 2005. it crawled the blogs registered with it and worked out which...
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2009-01-01
Duepuntozero (2004 - 2009)
two sixteen-year-olds in milan built a social network in 2004 that had public likes on photographs and a one-way follow, years before instagram existed. it...
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2009-01-01
Net Detours (1995 - 2009)
james cook spent the back half of the nineties writing a weekly column about the useless parts of the web, with a fake professor of netology and a hardboiled...
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2009-01-01
Adventure Rock (2008 - 2009)
the strange thing about the bbc's virtual world for children is that there was nobody else in it. adventure rock gave a six to twelve year old an island to...
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2009-01-01
Podango (2006 - 2009)
bountiful, utah, is an unlikely address for a podcast empire, and by the autumn of 2007 podango had one: 1,300 podcasters spread across 250 themed stations,...
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2009-01-01
Norton AntiBot (2007 - 2009)
avg finished buying sana security on 16 january 2009, and symantec stopped selling norton antibot not long after, because the behavior engine inside the...
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2009-01-01
SuperDOT (1984 - 2009)
what killed it was a database migration, announced in a memo to member firms and carried out stock by stock through 2009. for twenty-five years superdot was...
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2009-01-01
Airhitch (1969 - 2009)
robert segelbaum started it in 1969 and the deal never really changed. you bought a window of dates and then showed up at an airport to take whatever empty...
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2009-01-01
Insoshi (2007 - 2009)
in december 2007 two former college roommates moved to silicon valley for y combinator's winter batch to build an open source social network in ruby on rails....
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2009
Hugo the TV Troll (1990 - 2009)
a child dialed a number and then steered a cartoon troll across a live television broadcast by pressing digits on the handset. the danish company behind it...
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2008-12-31
Tickle.com (eMode) (1999 - 2008)
emode.com launched in 1999 as a san francisco quiz site that ran on a single viral email to four hundred friends. it grew into millions of monthly visitors...
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2008-12-31
AOL Pictures (2000 - 2008)
aol pictures was the photo-storage and online-print arm of aol's consumer portal, descended from the 1997 you've got pictures kodak deal that scanned film...
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2008-12-31
Google Lively (2008 - 2008)
google lively was a web-based virtual environment built as a 20 percent project by niniane wang and her team. you installed a windows plugin and picked an...
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2008-12-31
A9.com (2003 - 2008)
a9 was amazon's 2003 attempt to be a search engine. it gave you multiple columns at once: web results from google on one side, amazon book search in the...
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2008-12-31
Xdrive (1999 - 2008)
xdrive was an online file storage service founded in 1999 in santa monica. aol acquired it on 4 august 2005 for around 30 million dollars and rolled it out as...
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2008-12-31
Cdigix (2002 - 2008)
cdigix sold subscription music access to american universities so the campus IT department could legally point students at a service that was not the napster...
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2008-12-31
Sharp Zaurus (2002 - 2008)
sharp shipped the sl-5500 zaurus in march 2002 as the first mass-market linux pda. you could log in as root and ssh into your machine over a cf wifi card....
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2008-12-31
Casio Cassiopeia (1997 - 2008)
casio's cassiopeia was the first hardware partner microsoft used to ship windows ce to a wide audience. the a-series handheld pcs of 1997 had small keyboards...
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2008-12-31
Names Database (2003 - 2008)
names database launched in 2003 with an offer stated plainly on the front page: hand over the email addresses of people you know and we will help you find the...
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2008-12-31
ABIT (1989 - 2008)
abit was the taipei motherboard company that moved the cpu multiplier off a row of jumpers and into the bios, which is the single change that turned...
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2008-12-31
VideoCipher (1983 - 2008)
videocipher was the analog scrambling system that closed off american satellite television. linkabit built it in 1983 and hbo switched it on full time on 15...
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2008-12-31
Motorola Razr V3 (2004 - 2008)
one hundred and thirty million units, and hardly any of them bought for what the phone actually did. the razr v3 went on sale in september 2004 with the...
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2008-12-31
Dark and Light (2006 - 2008)
a courtroom in france settled this one. npcube, a five-person studio on reunion island, shipped an mmo in june 2006 that promised a world of 39,000 square...
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2008-12-24
CastleCops (2002 - 2008)
paul laudanski took a job at microsoft in june 2008 and nobody took his. six months later the volunteer security community he and robin had run since 2002...
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2008-12-19
eyeSpot (2006 - 2008)
eyespot was a browser video-mashup tool out of san diego, built so you could mix clips and music together online and pass the result around. jim kaskade and...
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2008-12-19
Google Ride Finder (2005 - 2008)
between 2005 and 2008 google labs ran an experiment that showed you where the taxis actually were. ride finder pulled gps positions off participating taxi and...
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2008-12-18
Filterset.G (2004 - 2008)
before there was easylist there was one person's text file, updated weekly and downloaded by enough people to break the hosting bill under it. graham pierce...
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2008-12-16
Movielink (2002 - 2008)
hollywood's studio-cartel attempt at legal movie downloads, owned jointly by paramount, sony, mgm, universal, and warner bros. it ran from november 2002 to...
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2008-12-16
Flip.com (2007 - 2008)
condé nast spent two years trying to build a place where american teenage girls would make digital scrapbooks and show them to each other. flip.com came out of...
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2008-12-15
Pownce (2007 - 2008)
twitter rival from 2007. made by kevin rose (digg), leah culver, and daniel burka. you could share short messages, files, links, events. cleaner interface than...
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2008-12-15
iTVP (2005 - 2008)
twelve million złoty of polish science ministry money went into a television system that deliberately avoided the public internet, because in 2005 the polish...
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2008-12-12
MobLogic (2008 - 2008)
eight and a half months is the whole life of it. cbs bought wallstrip in may 2007 for about four million dollars and told the team to make more short web...
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2008-12-09
Caramail (1997 - 2008)
the french webmail and chat rooms service from 1997 to 2008. before MSN took over here, this is where french teenagers met strangers, sent first emails, and...
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2008-12-08
Stikkit (2006 - 2008)
a sticky note that read plain english and turned a date into a reminder on its own, built by rael dornfest at values of n. twitter bought the company in...
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2008-12-04
Infostore.org (2004 - 2008)
on 4 december 2008 the ukrainian interior ministry spent twelve hours inside an office on tverska street in kyiv and left with the machines. infostore.org had...
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2008-12-03
Yahoo LAUNCHcast (1999 - 2008)
launchcast started as the radio side of LAUNCH Media on november 11 1999, with todd beaupré and jeff boulter building a recommender that learned from your song...
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2008-12-03
Yahoo! Live (2008 - 2008)
yahoo opened a webcam broadcasting site on 6 february 2008 and it fell over the same evening, because there was not enough bandwidth standing behind it. the...
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2008-12-02
MP3.com (1997 - 2008)
this was the place where bands uploaded their own mp3s, before anyone really knew what to do about music on the internet. it ran for a few years. then the...
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2008-12-02
Entellium (2000 - 2008)
entellium sold customer relationship management software out of seattle and told its investors it was selling roughly four times as much of it as it was. paul...
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2008-12-02
WinFixer (2005 - 2008)
winfixer ran a scan nobody asked for and reported infections that were not there, then charged forty dollars to remove them. it arrived through ad networks...
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2008-12-01
Yahoo Kickstart (2007 - 2008)
yahoo kickstart was yahoo's 2007 attempt at a college alumni professional network. undergraduates got automatically placed into their university's page and...
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2008-12-01
Mixwit (2008 - 2008)
mixwit let you build a mixtape on the web as a little animated cassette you could embed anywhere, then fill it with songs streamed from around the internet. it...
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2008-12-01
幻蔵 (GENZO) (2004 - 2008)
gentosha comics started selling a manga magazine as a monthly download in november 2004, years before anyone would have called that a market. genzo was the...
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2008-11-28
MAGNA (2006 - 2008)
in 2006 almost no japanese publisher ran its own manga site, and gentosha comics ran three. magna was the free one, a monthly issue you downloaded on the 28th,...
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2008-11-28
Antics3D (2005 - 2008)
development costs that outran revenue closed antics technologies in 2008 and the software went with it. antics3d let a director drop characters into a set and...
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2008-11-24
SearchMash (2006 - 2008)
the logo was the experiment. google built a search site in october 2006 with its own name removed from every corner of it, on the theory that people rate an...
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2008-11-24
EstDomains (2004 - 2008)
icann does not often terminate a registrar, and in october 2008 it terminated this one over a single clause about convicted officers. estdomains was a delaware...
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2008-11-21
BBC Local Video (2005 - 2008)
the bbc wanted video journalism on around sixty of its local websites and costed the plan at up to sixty-eight million pounds across four years. regional...
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2008-11-18
Championship Gaming Series (2007 - 2008)
directv put more than fifty million dollars of news corporation money into turning competitive gaming into a television league with salaried city franchises...
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2008-11-14
Windows Marketplace (2004 - 2008)
windows marketplace was microsoft's first attempt at a centralized software store for windows, launched 12 october 2004 with 93,000 products and a...
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2008-11-13
Fire Joe Morgan (2005 - 2008)
on 13 november 2008, at 8:54 in the evening, three anonymous writers posted a goodbye and changed their own slogan into the past tense. for three and a half...
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2008-11-11
Yugo (1980 - 2008)
kragujevac took a fiat 128, cut the back off it, and built the result for twenty-eight years. malcolm bricklin brought it to the united states in 1986 at three...
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2008-11-04
megabbs (2000 - 2008)
the man who ran it quit because the police kept calling. megabbs was a 2channel clone that opened on 3 june 2000 and closed without warning eight and a half...
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2008-11-01
Sony EyeToy (2003 - 2008)
the eyetoy was a usb webcam for the playstation 2 that read color and motion from a couch, three years before nintendo's wii remote and seven before the xbox...
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2008-11-01
GameZnFlix (2004 - 2008)
franklin, kentucky is where somebody decided to fight netflix and gamefly at the same time, on postage, with a public shell listed at fractions of a cent. the...
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2008-11-01
ABBAMAIL (1997 - 2008)
two men in sydney who had run the australian abba fan club from 1976 to 1983 started a mailing list on 13 january 1997, because the list that already existed...
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2008-10-31
AOL Hometown (1998 - 2008)
aol hometown was the free web hosting service attached to aol subscriptions from 1998 to 2008. it offered drag-and-drop tools called "1-2-3 publish" and "easy...
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2008-10-31
eBay Express (2006 - 2008)
ebay express was a fixed-price marketplace that ebay launched in april 2006. it took the inventory ebay sellers had already posted with buy-it-now pricing and...
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2008-10-31
AOL Journals (2003 - 2008)
aol asked its members what the word blog meant to them, and the answers were bad enough that the product shipped in august 2003 under the name journals...
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2008-10-31
Digital Railroad (2003 - 2008)
on 28 october 2008 digital railroad told its members the company had shut down and they had around twenty four hours to get their images out. the servers...
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2008-10-30
BlogRush (2007 - 2008)
3.4 billion blog post headlines went through it in twelve months, which is a number that belongs to a successful product. john reese launched blogrush in...
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2008-10-24
MOPy fish (1997 - 2008)
ten million downloads by the year 2000 and an entry in the guinness book, for a screensaver whose actual job was to make you print more. hewlett-packard paid a...
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2008-10-20
JumpTV (2000 - 2008)
toronto, 2000: a broadcast lawyer named farrel miller started buying internet rights to national television channels nobody in north america could otherwise...
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2008-10-15
Adobe Ultra (2007 - 2008)
adobe bought serious magic in october 2006, shipped its keyer once as adobe ultra inside creative suite 3, and then left it out of creative suite 4 when that...
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2008-10-09
TXTMob (2004 - 2008)
tad hirsch wrote it as an mit doctoral student so that protesters at the two american party conventions of 2004 could text each other in groups. about five...
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2008-10-09
Amstrad (1968 - 2008)
alan sugar was twenty one in 1968, selling car aerials and cheap electrical goods out of a van, and the company he registered that year spent two decades...
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2008-10-06
Bolt.com (1996 - 2008)
bolt was one of the first sites to hand every teenager a real page of their own. it ran for over a decade as a us teen-and-college community. a 2006 universal...
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2008-10-05
Accoona (2004 - 2008)
a former american president lent it his face and a reigning world chess champion sat down against its toolbar on television. accoona spent four years insisting...
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2008-10-04
DarkMarket (2005 - 2008)
an fbi agent working out of pittsburgh spent two years inside the biggest english-language carding forum in the world as master splyntr, a spammer with...
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2008-10-01
MTV Overdrive (2005 - 2008)
mtv overdrive was mtv networks' first serious attempt at a broadband video portal, launched april 25 2005 with six channels of music videos, artist interviews,...
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2008-10-01
Google Web Accelerator (2005 - 2008)
a free program you installed to make web pages load faster, back when a lot of them still crawled. it compressed data and guessed which links you would click...
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2008-10-01
Netbul (1999 - 2008)
netbul opened in 1999 as the first real turkish portal, a yahoo-shaped directory somebody had built by hand, with a search box that could be told to look only...
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2008-10-01
Ciudad Internet (1996 - 2008)
argentina's biggest newspaper decided in 1996 that the phone line was worth owning, and put its name on a dial-up service and a portal at the same address. it...
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2008-10-01
DAG (2007 - 2008)
a telephone company and a newspaper publisher started a free daily together in may 2007, on the theory that a printed page could hand you off to a website and...
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2008-09-30
MusicMatch Jukebox (1997 - 2008)
musicmatch was the windows app that ripped a cd into mp3 and tagged it cleanly in one window. yahoo bought it for $160m in 2004 and rebranded it as yahoo music...
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2008-09-30
Yahoo Music Unlimited (2005 - 2008)
yahoo music unlimited was a subscription streaming service from 2005 to 2008 that ran on the musicmatch backbone yahoo bought the year before. the price was...
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2008-09-30
Vongo (2006 - 2008)
vongo was starz entertainment's first attempt at a direct-to-consumer streaming and download service, launched at ces in january 2006 with a thousand-movie...
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2008-09-30
Deepfish (2007 - 2008)
29 march 2007, three months before the first iphone shipped: microsoft live labs put out an invite-only preview of a mobile browser that did the work on a...
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2008-09-29
CMGI (1986 - 2008)
cmgi started as a company that sold mailing lists of university professors to textbook publishers and ended up, for about eighteen months, the purest way an...
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2008-09-28
Yahoo! Mash (2007 - 2008)
yahoo mash was the social network where your friends could edit your profile unless you blocked them. it was yahoo's fourth swing at the category after 360 and...
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2008-09-28
MuPAD (1992 - 2008)
paderborn, 1989: a research group starts building a computer algebra system meant to run on parallel hardware, which is where the name comes from. multi...
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2008-09-27
Galeon (2000 - 2008)
galeon was a gecko browser built for gnome by marco pesenti gritti, first released in june 2000, and for two years it was the quickest way to use the web on...
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2008-09-25
Washington Mutual (1889 - 2008)
on a thursday night, after the west coast branches had closed for the day, the office of thrift supervision took washington mutual away from its shareholders...
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2008-09-22
TagWorld (2005 - 2008)
tagworld was a 2005 myspace clone built by evan rifkin and fred krueger in los angeles, with a wysiwyg page editor and a widget platform that let users embed...
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2008-09-22
MatMice (2000 - 2008)
emily boyd wrote the software when she was sixteen and her two younger sisters did the graphics. what they made was geocities for children: a page builder...
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2008-09-18
Wallop (2003 - 2008)
wallop started in 2003 as a microsoft research social-network experiment, spun out as a silicon valley startup on 25 april 2006 with karl jacob as ceo, and ran...
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2008-09-15
SmarterChild (2001 - 2008)
the AIM bot from 2001. you added it to your buddy list and asked it stuff. weather, definitions, song lyrics, dirty jokes if you knew the trick. ActiveBuddy...
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2008-09-15
Lehman Brothers (1850 - 2008)
a dry goods store on commerce street in montgomery, alabama, taking raw cotton as payment because the customers had no cash to give. that was the 1840s, and...
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2008-09-04
Adobe FlashPaper (2003 - 2008)
flashpaper started life at a company called blue pacific software, got picked up by macromedia, and first shipped to the public bundled inside contribute 2 in...
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2008-09-04
Amazon Unbox (2006 - 2008)
amazon's first video store did not stream anything. you installed a windows program called the unbox video player, bought a film, waited for a few gigabytes of...
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2008-09-01
Wippit (2000 - 2008)
paul myers started wippit in 2000 on the idea that peer to peer file sharing could be made legal if somebody paid the labels first, which is not a sentence the...
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2008-09-01
SunCom Wireless (1999 - 2008)
suncom started in january 1999 as triton pcs, holding spectrum that at&t wireless had handed over across the carolinas and down into georgia, and selling...
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2008-09-01
Nintendo e-Reader (2001 - 2008)
the e-reader was a scanner that plugged into a game boy advance and read paper cards. you pulled a card through the slot and got a minigame, or sometimes a...
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2008-08-31
PlaysForSure (2004 - 2008)
playsforsure launched january 2004 as a microsoft certification program for portable media devices and online music stores using windows media drm. the promise...
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2008-08-26
DeRemate (1999 - 2008)
deremate launched in 1999 as the regional latin american online-auction marketplace competing with mercadolibre, founded by alec oxenford and others out of...
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2008-08-22
Helio (2005 - 2010)
helio was the sk telecom joint venture that tried to import the korean handset-and-service combo into the american MVNO market between 2006 and 2008. the ocean...
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2008-08-21
Biographicon (2008 - 2008)
a wiki for everybody, including the people wikipedia would have deleted. ethan herdrick and daniel terhorst opened it on 1 march 2008 with y combinator money...
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2008-08-15
theGlobe.com (1995 - 2008)
theglobe.com was the dot-com bubble's IPO mascot. two cornell undergraduates, stephan paternot and todd krizelman, launched it on april 1, 1995 as a...
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2008-08-12
Teleflip (2004 - 2008)
"we've gone as far as we can with our financial resources, and the piggy bank is empty." that was the chief executive writing to subscribers on 12 august 2008....
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2008-08-08
Linspire (2001 - 2008)
the desktop linux that walmart sold on $299 microtel pcs starting in 2002 with a wine compatibility layer that promised to run microsoft office. michael...
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2008-08-08
Streamload (1998 - 2008)
streamload was the 1998 cloud-storage pioneer steve iverson built out of his data-compression thesis work. the service got rebranded mediamax at demofall 05,...
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2008-08-07
Fury (2007 - 2008)
fury was an mmo with the world taken out of it. no quests and no leveling curve, only arenas where players fought each other with instant-cast spells and no...
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2008-08-06
I Am Rich (2008 - 2008)
armin heinrich put a glowing red gem on the app store for nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents, which was the highest price apple allowed,...
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2008-08-05
e-Bullion (2001 - 2008)
e-bullion let you hold a balance in grams of gold and wire it to anybody with an account, ten years before bitcoin made that idea sound modern. it grew to more...
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2008-08-04
Mercora (2004 - 2008)
mercora was a licensed peer-to-peer streaming radio service founded in 2003 by srivats sampath, the ex-mcafee.com and ex-netscape executive. it went live in...
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2008-08-01
The Sims Online (2002 - 2008)
the sims online launched december 17, 2002 from maxis and ea. it was the sims you knew from the boxed game, except your neighbors were other paying...
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2008-08-01
Sony SonicStage (2001 - 2008)
sonicstage was sony's attempt to be itunes. it managed atrac music files, tied them to your machine through openmg drm, and pushed them onto a walkman through...
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2008-08-01
lonelygirl15 (2006 - 2008)
lonelygirl15 launched 16 june 2006 as a youtube vlog from bree avery, a homeschooled teenager. the videos pulled into a slowly-developing cult conspiracy...
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2008-07-31
Windows Live Expo (2006 - 2008)
codenamed fremont, this was microsoft's attempt to beat craigslist by adding the one thing craigslist had deliberately refused to build, which was a social...
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2008-07-30
YouOS (2006 - 2008)
youos was a webshaka product, four y combinator founders in palo alto, and in 2006 it put a windowed desktop inside a browser tab at a time when that was close...
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2008-07-29
Scrabulous (2006 - 2008)
scrabulous was the unofficial scrabble that facebook picked up before hasbro did. two brothers in kolkata shipped it in 2006, it hit half a million monthly...
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2008-07-25
Redlasso (2005 - 2008)
redlasso recorded american television and radio off the air. it then gave bloggers a way to cut a piece out of that recording and drop it into a post. the free...
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2008-07-25
Omnidrive (2005 - 2008)
nik cubrilovic started omnidrive in wollongong in late 2004 and had twenty thousand private beta users across seventy countries before dropbox opened its own...
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2008-07-25
Colombo-BT (2006 - 2008)
the guardia di finanza of bergamo reached two administrators on 25 july 2008 and the servers went with them. colombo-bt was the italian bittorrent hub, inside...
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2008-07-20
Yael Mevakeret BaKolnoa (יעל מבקרת בקולנוע) (1998 - 2008)
june 1998, two students in israel, one who could write and one who could build the pages, put up the first hebrew site that existed for nothing but film...
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2008-07-17
PodTech.net (2005 - 2008)
podtech.net was a menlo park podcast and video studio founded in may 2005 by john furrier. the pitch was a tech-focused podcast network aimed at silicon valley...
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2008-07-15
Monitor110 (2003 - 2008)
jeff stewart started it in 2003 to sell wall street an early warning system built out of blogs and message boards. twenty million dollars later it had a...
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2008-07-09
Sierra Entertainment (1979 - 2008)
sierra started in 1979 in simi valley as on-line systems, founded by ken and roberta williams. roberta wrote mystery house in 1980, the first computer...
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2008-07-09
Apple iCards (2000 - 2008)
apple introduced icards on january 5, 2000 as one of the launch features of itools, the free @mac.com bundle steve jobs unveiled at macworld san francisco. it...
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2008-07-08
Usenet (the ISP-bundled era) (1980 - 2008)
the original distributed discussion network. text-only newsgroups about every possible topic. for thirty years you got nntp access free with your isp account....
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2008-07-04
CoolWebSearch (2003 - 2008)
coolwebsearch changed your homepage to coolwebsearch.com and then made itself extremely hard to take back off. webroot's audits in early 2005 found it on close...
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2008-07-02
AllOfMP3 (2000 - 2008)
allofmp3 was a russian music store that sold downloads at roughly ten cents a track. mediaservices inc launched it in 2000, paid royalties to a russian...
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2008-07-01
Powerset (2005 - 2008)
powerset was the semantic-search startup that promised to let you type a question instead of a keyword. barney pell founded it in 2005 with steve newcomb and...
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2008-07-01
Planet Internet (1995 - 2008)
for about a decade there was a species of company that sold you a dial-up line and also employed journalists to tell you what had happened that day. planet was...
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2008-07
The Lifehouse Method (2007 - 2008)
pete townshend wrote lifehouse in 1971 as a story about music generated from a person's own data, and the who could not build it because the machines did not...
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2008-06-30
COMIC SEED! (2002 - 2008)
penguin shobo went bankrupt on 28 october 2005 and most of its catalog went out of print with it. the one division still making money was a web comic magazine...
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2008-06-30
BrainBoost (2004 - 2008)
assaf rozenblatt spent 2004 and 2005 building a search engine that answered the question rather than listing pages that mentioned it, and it tested well enough...
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2008-06-24
Windows Live for TV (2007 - 2008)
codenamed nemo, then orbit, then shipped to the public as windows live for tv. the plan was to put messenger and spaces on the television through windows media...
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2008-06-23
6nergies.net (2004 - 2008)
the first professional social network in france, built by alain lefebvre from 2004 and named after the six degrees of separation. it reached more than 20,000...
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2008-06-18
MSN Radio (2004 - 2008)
june 18, 2008: microsoft switched the radio off inside msn music and left one line saying the service had been discontinued. for the previous eighteen months...
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2008-06-18
NetManage (1990 - 2008)
zvi alon, an engineer out of the technion, started netmanage in cupertino in 1990 and sold a tcp/ip stack for a version of windows that had no idea the...
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2008-06-13
Google Browser Sync (2006 - 2008)
a firefox extension out of google labs, free from 8 june 2006, that pushed your bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and open tabs to google's servers so a...
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2008-06-13
HD VMD (2007 - 2008)
twenty gigabytes stacked on four red-laser layers, sold in a player that cost one hundred and eighty-nine dollars with twenty films to its name. new medium...
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2008-06-12
Xgl (2006 - 2008)
february 2006, a novell demo showed a linux desktop rotating on the faces of a cube with windows you could see through, and for about eighteen months that clip...
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2008-06-12
Gobuntu (2007 - 2008)
mark shuttleworth wanted an ubuntu with nothing in it the free software foundation would refuse, and in october 2007 he got one. eight months later jono bacon...
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2008-06-05
Bidville (1999 - 2008)
bidville never reached turkey at any meaningful scale. it was one of the late-1990s eBay alternatives that the US trade press kept hopeful coverage on for...
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2008-06-02
Akimbo (2004 - 2008)
akimbo was a video-on-demand set-top box launched in october 2004 by former replaytv exec steve shannon, paired with a $200-300 thomson-built device and a...
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2008-06-01
Aluka (2003 - 2008)
aluka was an ithaka harbors project, started in 2003 on mellon and hewlett money, to scan the scholarly record of africa and put it back within reach of the...
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2008-05-31
Mondex (1990 - 2008)
mondex was a smart card stored value cash system invented at natwest in the uk in 1990 by tim jones and graham higgins. mastercard bought a fifty one percent...
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2008-05-31
Front Mission Online (2005 - 2008)
front mission online took a japanese tactics series about mechs called wanzers and turned it into a real time mmo on the playstation 2. it launched on 12 may...
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2008-05-30
QXL (1997 - 2008)
qxl was britain's big bet that europe would run its online auctions on a homegrown site instead of an american one. tim jackson, an ex-journalist, started it...
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2008-05-30
Bear Stearns (1923 - 2008)
two dollars a share, for a firm whose stock had been $172 sixteen months earlier and $93 six weeks earlier. that was the price jpmorgan agreed on sunday 16...
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2008-05-26
Atlas.cz (1997 - 2008)
a few people at a prague software firm built a search engine to show a client what microsoft's scripting language could do, and the demonstration turned into...
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2008-05-23
Microsoft Live Search Books (2006 - 2008)
microsoft's google books rival. launched in beta december 2006 with publisher partners including cambridge, harvard, oxford, mcgraw-hill, pearson, simon and...
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2008-05-23
Open Content Alliance (2005 - 2008)
the open content alliance was announced in october 2005 by yahoo and the internet archive with a row of university libraries behind them, as the open answer to...
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2008-05-22
MacMinute (2001 - 2008)
macminute was one of the pre-verge apple news blogs. stan flack ran it as a solo operation from prince edward island starting in may 2001, three months after...
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2008-05-21
Virtual Magic Kingdom (2005 - 2008)
VMK was disney's promo MMO for the 50th anniversary of disneyland. it ran from may '05 to may '08 as a sulake-built virtual theme park where kids walked an...
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2008-05-15
The All-Seeing Eye (2001 - 2008)
the all-seeing eye was a windows program that told you which game servers were alive and what your ping to them looked like, across dozens of games at once. a...
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2008-05-15
Brijit (2007 - 2008)
nearly sixteen thousand abstracts in seven months, every one of them a long magazine article cut to about a hundred words by a freelancer who got paid for the...
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2008-05-13
JetBrains Omea (2004 - 2008)
omea was jetbrains trying to sell software to somebody other than programmers, and it is the only time they ever seriously did. it swallowed your email and...
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2008-05-04
Marshallese Wikipedia (2004 - 2008)
the closure proposal opened in august 2007 with an inventory: one real article, and one translated prayer. eight months of voting followed, thirteen in favor...
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2008-05-02
Gemstar-TV Guide International (1986 - 2008)
seven point nine billion dollars bought a magazine, and the magazine was never the point. gemstar owned the patents on putting a television schedule onto a...
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2008-05-01
iFilm (1997 - 2008)
pre-youtube viral video destination. founded 1997 by raphael raphael as a filmmaker think tank, became one of the primary places where viral videos lived from...
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2008-04-30
tunespoon (2004 - 2008)
students at the hochschule furtwangen put an online music channel on the web in 2004, a year before youtube existed. tunespoon streamed music videos in a...
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2008-04-28
Adobe GoLive (1996 - 2008)
golive was Adobe's web authoring app from 1999 to 2008. it started life as a small mac-only HTML editor called GoLive CyberStudio. Adobe bought the company,...
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2008-04-23
Peerflix (2004 - 2008)
for 99 cents plus postage you put a dvd you were finished with in an envelope to a stranger, and a different stranger sent you one you actually wanted....
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2008-04-22
Morpheus (2001 - 2008)
morpheus was the streamcast networks brand of file-sharing client, originally a fasttrack frontend before the network owner cut it off and forced a rebuild on...
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2008-04-21
Gator / Claria (1998 - 2008)
gator started as a 1998 password autofill utility from a stanford-mba founder and an ex-symantec co-founder. by 2003 it was bundled into every free download...
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2008-04-08
Microsoft Visual Basic 6 (1998 - 2008)
visual basic 6 launched in mid 1998 and became the most popular programming language in the world by tiobe count for several years. microsoft ended mainstream...
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2008-04-07
Snocap (2002 - 2008)
snocap was shawn fanning's second act after napster. the plan was to take the peer-to-peer distribution mechanic and put a rights layer under it, so labels...
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2008-04-04
Radio.Blog.Club (2003 - 2008)
the french audio embed service of the mid-2000s. you uploaded an mp3, got a small flash player you could paste into your skyblog or any other blog, and the...
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2008-04-01
ASCII Corporation (1977 - 2008)
ascii started in 1977 as a computer magazine and became microsoft's first office outside america a year later. by 1980 its licensing of microsoft basic in...
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2008-04-01
ihug (1994 - 2008)
nick and tim wood opened an internet company in auckland in 1994 with eight thousand dollars borrowed from their father john. ihug sold the first flat rate...
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2008-03-31
Sony Connect Music Store (2004 - 2008)
sony connect was sony's may 2004 to march 2008 attempt at an itunes store. the catalog ran through the sonicstage windows client and only played back inside...
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2008-03-31
Canadian Health Network (1999 - 2008)
a national health information service run by the public health agency of canada from 1999, in both official languages, with 26 affiliated organizations...
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2008-03-31
The 9 on Yahoo (2006 - 2008)
nine web finds a day, numbered down the side of the video player, one of them usually a pepsi tenth sent in by somebody watching. yahoo put the show on its own...
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2008-03-31
TU-KA (1994 - 2008)
4,018,200 contracts at the end of june 2001, and the company that held them decided not to bid for a third generation license. tu-ka stayed on the old japanese...
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2008-03-31
Stormfront Studios (1988 - 2008)
fourteen million copies sold and over half a billion dollars at retail across twenty years, and the studio still could not survive its publisher going away....
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2008-03-30
Ricochet (1994 - 2008)
metricom put spread-spectrum radios on lampposts across silicon valley in 1994 and sold subscribers the first taste of always-on wireless internet at a real...
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2008-03-24
TorrentSpy (2003 - 2008)
torrentspy was one of the big torrent index sites of the 2003-2008 window. peak around 2007 it indexed over a million torrents and was running in the top 200...
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2008-03-24
Automatix (2006 - 2008)
ubuntu's own cto said in november 2006 that he could not recommend it and that machines which had used it could not be given a clean upgrade path. people...
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2008-03-19
Pay By Touch (2002 - 2008)
pay by touch bolted fingerprint readers onto supermarket checkouts across america and enrolled around three million people who liked the idea of leaving the...
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2008-03-15
Consumating (2005 - 2008)
consumating threw out the dating profile form and replaced it with tags. you described yourself in words and other people added words to you, and whatever...
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2008-03-14
Ezmo (2007 - 2008)
oslo built a music locker and ran out of road in nine months. ezmo took your itunes library, put it on a server and let you hand listening access to ten...
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2008-03-13
Capazoo (2006 - 2008)
capazoo raised more than twenty-five million dollars and never got past ten thousand users. the montreal site paid you for posting, in a currency called zoops...
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2008-03-06
WhenU SaveNow (2000 - 2008)
whenu save arrived bundled with free software you actually wanted and then served you pop-ups matched to whatever site you were looking at. the company said it...
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2008-03-05
Go!Zilla (1995 - 2008)
go!zilla was the loud one. it broke a file into pieces, pulled the pieces at the same time, and picked the download back up when the phone line dropped, which...
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2008-03-03
Talk City (1996 - 2008)
talk city launched in july 1996 as a chat service from liveworld productions, a campbell california startup founded by peter friedman and jenna woodul out of...
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2008-03-03
AllPeers (2006 - 2008)
on 2 march 2008 allpeers announced it was closing, and the service stopped the following day, eighteen months after the public beta. it was a firefox extension...
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2008-03-01
Netscape Navigator (1994 - 2008)
the first browser most people used. it was a real product you could buy in a shrink-wrapped box at the store. microsoft bundled internet explorer with windows...
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2008-03-01
Trinitron (1968 - 2008)
trinitron was sony's picture tube, and for most of forty years it was the one you wanted. it was announced in april 1968 with a single electron gun and a...
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2008-02-29
Stage6 (2006 - 2008)
stage6 was divx inc.'s answer to youtube: the same upload model but encoded in divx at up to 1080p. bandwidth costs ran around $1m a month and copyright...
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2008-02-29
ConnectU (2004 - 2008)
the winklevoss twins started designing harvardconnection with their classmate divya narendra in december 2002. they brought mark zuckerberg onto the project in...
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2008-02-27
Iron Lore Entertainment (2000 - 2008)
iron lore was the studio brian sullivan opened with paul chieffo in 2000 in maynard massachusetts after leaving ensemble. titan quest in june 2006 was their...
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2008-02-27
JotSpot (2004 - 2008)
jotspot was a hosted wiki built by joe kraus and graham spencer, the excite founders coming back for a second round with google money floating around. google...
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2008-02-25
Perpetual Entertainment (2002 - 2008)
perpetual took on two massively multiplayer games at once before it had shipped a single one. gods and heroes: rome rising was announced in march 2005 for...
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2008-02-22
Tekel (1932 - 2008)
the republic bought out the ottoman tobacco régie in 1925 and ran tobacco and alcohol as a state monopoly under the name tekel from 1932. it made the...
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2008-02-19
HD DVD (2006 - 2008)
hd dvd was the optical disc format toshiba and nec built to follow up dvd. blu-ray was sony's answer to the same question, and the consumer market got both at...
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2008-02-19
Sharper Image (1977 - 2008)
sharper image started in 1977 as richard thalheimer's san francisco mail-order side hustle selling a runner's chronograph out of his apartment. by the late...
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2008-02-19
PrivatePhone (2006 - 2008)
netzero switched off its voice business on 15 december 2007 and the free voicemail number went with it. for twenty months privatephone had given anyone who...
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2008-02-14
Think Secret (1999 - 2008)
nicholas ciarelli started think secret in 1999, at thirteen, and wrote it under the name nick deplume. it became the most accurate apple rumor site of its...
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2008-02-14
Yahoo! Design (2007 - 2008)
yahoo ran a design innovation team, called yHaus inside the building, and gave it a public site at design.yahoo.com to show nine data-visualization prototypes...
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2008-02-13
Ageia PhysX (2006 - 2008)
ageia sold an add-in card whose only job was physics. it reached shops in may 2006 at around two hundred and fifty dollars, from asus and bfg, and the launch...
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2008-02-11
Reeltime.tv (2005 - 2008)
melbourne had a download-to-own movie store running in February 2007, which put australia ahead of nearly everywhere outside the united states, and the pitch...
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2008-02-07
RawSugar (2005 - 2008)
palo alto, june 2005. ofer ben-shachar and a small team shipped rawsugar into the middle of the tagging boom, betting that if enough people labeled the web by...
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2008-02-01
Sony ImageStation (1997 - 2008)
imagestation was sony's online photo service. it launched in november 1997 with photonet as a joint venture, ran for a decade as sony's flickr-and-prints...
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2008-01-25
VerticalNet (1995 - 2008)
verticalnet ran 43 trade portals for industries nobody writes nostalgia posts about, water treatment and solid waste handling among them. the pitch was that...
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2008-01-17
WebSideStory (1996 - 2008)
websidestory was an early enterprise web analytics company, founded in san diego on 10 september 1996 by blaise barrelet. its two main products were hitbox, a...
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2008-01-15
ezboard (1996 - 2008)
ezboard was a free hosted-forum platform vanchau nguyen launched in 1996, written in smalltalk visualworks 3.1 with jay o'connor on a flat-file object store....
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2008-01-08
NetCaptor (1998 - 2008)
adam stiles wanted the tabs he already had in his html editor to exist in his browser, so he wrote them himself and published simulbrowse on 4 january 1998....
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2008-01-04
Total Hi Def (2007 - 2008)
warner home video stood up at ces in january 2007 and unveiled a disc with hd dvd on one face and blu-ray on the other, promised for the second half of that...
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2008-01-01
Court TV (1991 - 2008)
court tv was the cable channel that steven brill built around live american courtroom coverage between 1991 and 2008. the OJ simpson criminal trial in 1995 was...
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2008-01-01
Sconex (2004 - 2008)
sconex was a dorm-built high-school sn that timed its 2004 launch correctly, scaled to half a million registered users on word of mouth, and sold to alloy for...
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2008-01-01
Rojo (2004 - 2008)
rojo stood for rss with mojo, and the pitch was that reading feeds should behave like a network instead of an inbox. you tagged stories and handed them to...
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2008-01-01
Game Boy Micro (2005 - 2008)
game boy micro was nintendo shrinking the game boy advance down to roughly the size of an nes controller, with a two inch backlit screen and swappable...
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2008-01-01
Intel Viiv (2005 - 2008)
two years after intel announced it, viiv was a sticker on a computer that nobody in the shop could explain. the plan was centrino for the living room: certify...
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2008-01-01
PC-cillin (1990 - 2008)
los angeles in 1988, and a copy protection dongle whose profits paid for the pivot into antivirus. trend micro's first real product was named like a...
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2008-01-01
e-manga (1997 - 2008)
in 1997, a year before most people in my country had a modem, kodansha was charging 500 yen a month for manga that moved. e-manga started as morning online,...
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2008-01-01
Namesys (2000 - 2008)
reiserfs was the fast one, the journaling filesystem that beat ext3 on small files and shipped as the default on suse. the company behind it was effectively...
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2008-01-01
ThunderHawk (2001 - 2008)
$49.95 a year, or $5.95 a month, to look at the web on a phone in 2002. the handset never rendered anything: bitstream's servers fetched the page, laid it out...
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2008-01-01
System Commander (1993 - 2008)
v communications of san jose sold a boxed utility whose entire job was the three seconds before an operating system loads. system commander arrived in 1993,...
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2008
ScribbleWiki (2007 - 2008)
simon koldyk was nineteen when he started scribblewiki in a vancouver bedroom in june 2007 and funded it out of the proceeds of a previous site. eighteen...
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2007-12-31
astalavista.box.sk (1994 - 2007)
the warez search engine. you typed in a piece of software (photoshop, winrar, 3ds max, anything) and got a list of sites and FTPs that hosted the crack or...
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2007-12-31
Disney Mobile (US) (2006 - 2007)
disney mobile us was a family-mvno on sprint that disney ran for around 18 months. the pitch was parental controls and a child-safe phone for the under-12...
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2007-12-31
Nokia Communicator (1996 - 2007)
nokia's eleven-year keyboard-clamshell line. an attempt to make the phone a small computer for business users. it ran from the 9000 in 1996 through the e90 in...
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2007-12-31
Meetro (2005 - 2007)
a location-aware messenger four years before foursquare and eight years before the location tab on every social app. meetro launched 1 june 2005 out of...
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2007-12-31
The Cincinnati Post (1881 - 2007)
the cincinnati post was a scripps evening paper that ran from january 1881 to december 2007. it started life as the penny paper under the wellman brothers,...
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2007-12-31
Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (1996 - 2007)
the msjvm came with internet explorer 3 in 1996 and was the fastest way to run java on windows for about two years, which is not in dispute. what is in dispute...
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2007-12-31
Digital8 (1999 - 2007)
digital8 was sony putting the dv codec inside a hi8 cassette so that anyone with a shelf of 8mm tapes would not have to abandon it. at the bitstream level the...
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2007-12-31
DVD-Audio (1999 - 2007)
dvd-audio was the dvd forum's answer to the compact disc, specified in march 1999 because toshiba and the rest of the forum did not want to pay sony and...
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2007-12-31
BidPay (1999 - 2007)
bidpay solved the 1999 problem of paying a stranger for something you won in an auction, and it solved it with the post office. you handed over your card...
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2007-12-31
CNET Newsburst (2005 - 2007)
cnet put out its own web rss reader in february 2005, the same month ask jeeves bought bloglines, and ran it for not quite three years. by the end compete...
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2007-12-21
FUN Technologies (2002 - 2007)
a company built on one legal distinction: a game of skill is not gambling. fun technologies bought skilljam and then worldwinner and ran paid tournaments where...
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2007-12-15
MovieBeam (2003 - 2007)
moviebeam was disney's answer to video on demand before broadband was ready, and the answer was a box that pulled films out of the blank lines of a public...
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2007-12-11
Comic Gumbo (2007 - 2007)
forty eight issues in eleven months, then two hundred million yen of debt. comic gumbo was the world's first free weekly manga magazine, handed out from...
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2007-12-06
MyCoke / Coke Studios (2002 - 2007)
coke studios was a coca-cola corporate virtual world for american teenagers, built in 2002 by atlanta digital agency studiocom using the habbo engine licensed...
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2007-12-03
Geneon USA (1985 - 2007)
pioneer opened a laserdisc company in america in december 1985, and by 1993 its anime division was the reason tenchi muyo existed in english. dentsu bought the...
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2007-12-01
Microsoft Picture It! (1996 - 2007)
picture it! launched in september 1996 as microsoft's answer to the photoshop-is-for-professionals problem. it ran on pentium-class hardware with 8 megabytes...
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2007-12-01
TextAmerica (2002 - 2007)
textamerica was one of the first moblog sites, a place to send a photo straight from your phone to a public web page in 2002, years before that was normal....
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2007-12-01
Quigo (2000 - 2007)
yaron galai and oded itzhak started quigo in israel in 2000 and built adsonar, a contextual ad engine that read a page and matched an ad to what was on it. it...
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2007-12-01
AOL OpenRide (2006 - 2007)
fourteen months is a short life for software with a launch campaign behind it. openride arrived on 4 october 2006 as aol's answer to the question of what a...
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2007-11-29
KOL (AOL Kids Online) (2003 - 2007)
kol was the aol kids portal that launched in september 2003 as a rebrand of the older kids only channel, designed for six to twelve year olds and bundled free...
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2007-11-27
Minimo (2003 - 2007)
chris hofmann left netscape in 2003 and started a project to make gecko run on a handheld with sixty four megabytes of ram. nokia paid for much of it and doug...
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2007-11-21
Yukos (1993 - 2007)
the russian state took this one apart on purpose and never especially hid it. yukos came out of the 1995 loans-for-shares auctions, where mikhail...
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2007-11-12
ShareConnector (2002 - 2007)
shareconnector indexed ed2k links and stored nothing, which is why the criminal case against it kept falling apart. dutch investigators seized the servers in...
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2007-11-05
Siberian Wikipedia (2006 - 2007)
yaroslav zolotaryov, a businessman in tomsk, spent 2005 building a siberian language out of old settler dialects with tatar roots stirred through it, and in...
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2007-11-01
Geosign (2001 - 2007)
$160 million went into a company in Guelph, Ontario in March 2007, the largest venture investment made in canada that year, and eight months later there was no...
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2007-11-01
DotComedy (2006 - 2007)
november 9, 2006 to november 2007, almost to the day. nbc universal built a comedy channel for the web, commissioned eleven original series and shorts for it,...
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2007-11-01
Findory (2004 - 2007)
greg linden came out of amazon, where he worked on the recommendation engine, and spent the next four years in seattle on findory, a news front page that...
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2007-10-31
Yahoo Podcasts (2005 - 2007)
yahoo built a podcast directory in october 2005, when podcasting was eighteen months old and every large company was buying into it. the product did the...
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2007-10-31
Stylus Magazine (2002 - 2007)
most publications die of money. this one died because todd burns got off the subway one day and decided he did not want to do it anymore, which is what he told...
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2007-10-26
Sherlock (1998 - 2007)
apple's built-in mac search and internet-services tool, shipped with mac os 8.5 in 1998. sherlock 3 in 2002 added web channels for stocks and weather that...
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2007-10-26
URGE (2006 - 2007)
urge was the mtv networks subscription music store welded into windows media player 11 at the may 2006 launch. it shipped with the wmp11 install, opened a 99...
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2007-10-26
MTV Urge (2006 - 2007)
on 17 may 2006 microsoft shipped a music store built into windows media player 11 and let mtv stock the shelves. urge carried 2.4 million tracks and a $9.95...
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2007-10-25
Telenet Japan (1983 - 2007)
telenet japan spent twenty-four years making games that reached the west under somebody else's label. valis and cosmic fantasy were its own, and the wolf team...
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2007-10-23
OiNK's Pink Palace (2004 - 2007)
oink's pink palace was a private bittorrent tracker founded by alan ellis in may 2004. it ran out of northeast england and grew into a roughly 180,000-member...
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2007-10-19
Virgin Digital (2005 - 2007)
virgin digital was richard branson's answer to itunes, launched 2 september 2005 as a wma-drm music download store with a catalog of 2.5 million tracks. tracks...
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2007-10-18
TV Links (2006 - 2007)
tv links held no video. every link on it pointed at a file already sitting on youtube or dailymotion, and the site's entire contribution was knowing which link...
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2007-10-09
Shiny Entertainment (1993 - 2007)
laguna beach, october 1993. david perry left virgin games to run his own studio and spent the first two years on a cartoon earthworm wearing a robot suit....
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2007-10-05
Nico Nico Bookmark (2007 - 2007)
niwango took the comment layer from nico nico douga and tried to put it on the entire web. you submitted a url, the service grabbed a screenshot of the page,...
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2007-10-01
eConozco (2003 - 2007)
econozco was the spanish professional network from grupo galenicom, running from 2003 to 2007 as one of the earliest linkedin-shaped products in a non-english...
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2007-10-01
Business 2.0 (1998 - 2007)
business 2.0 launched in july 1998 to explain the new economy to the people who wanted to be inside it, and for two years it was so heavy with advertising that...
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2007-10-01
Direct Revenue (2002 - 2007)
direct revenue was an adware company with venture funding, a manhattan office and clients like american express and ford. its software arrived attached to free...
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2007-09-30
Dragon Magazine (1976 - 2007)
dragon was tsr's house magazine for dungeons and dragons. the first issue shipped june 1976 as the successor to the strategic review. paizo publishing held the...
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2007-09-30
S!ケータイ動画 (2004 - 2007)
vodafone japan built a video service in december 2004 that treated the phone as the worst part of the setup. you downloaded the file on a pc and carried it...
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2007-09-28
NetBank (1996 - 2007)
netbank started in february 1996 as atlanta internet bank, the first FDIC-insured online-only bank in the united states. it grew to about $2.5 billion in...
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2007-09-21
Opsware (1999 - 2007)
loudcloud opened on 9 september 1999 selling managed internet infrastructure by the month, which is close to what amazon would sell as a web service seven...
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2007-09-20
Yahoo! Photos (2000 - 2007)
yahoo photos launched on march 28 2000 as the photo tab inside yahoo mail, with unlimited storage at a time when one megabyte felt heroic. for the first half...
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2007-09-19
TimesSelect (2005 - 2007)
timesselect was the new york times' first big paywall. on september 19 2005 it locked the opinion columnists, the archive, and early sunday access behind...
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2007-09-19
BlackICE Defender (1998 - 2007)
twelve thousand machines was the entire vulnerable population, and the witty worm reached all of it in about forty-five minutes on the night of 19 march 2004,...
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2007-09-13
Movieland (2005 - 2007)
movieland sold movie downloads to people who had never asked for them, by installing software that filled the screen with a pop-up demanding $29.95 and would...
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2007-09-12
San Francisco Municipal Wireless (2004 - 2007)
on 6 november 2007 san francisco voted for free citywide wifi by 86,451 to 52,428, and the network it was voting for had been dead for eight weeks already....
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2007-09-05
Apple iPod Hi-Fi (2006 - 2007)
the ipod hi-fi was apple's home-stereo speaker for the 30-pin ipod dock. steve jobs announced it at a february 2006 town hall, called it audiophile-grade, and...
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2007-09-04
Palm Foleo (2007)
the palm foleo was announced by jeff hawkins on 30 may 2007 as a 10-inch linux subnotebook meant to be a bigger screen for the treo smartphone. it weighed...
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2007-09-01
Yahoo Oddpost (2002 - 2007)
oddpost was the four-dollar-a-month webmail that taught yahoo what mail could look like in a browser. it launched in april 2002 with ajax techniques and a...
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2007-09-01
WiseNut (2001 - 2007)
it launched in september 2001 with a crawler of its own and one real idea: every search came back sorted into topic groups instead of one flat list. the press...
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2007-09-01
Open eBook (1999 - 2007)
open ebook was the file format the electronic book industry agreed on before there was an electronic book industry. the open ebook forum published version 1.0...
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2007-09-01
Lektora (2004 - 2007)
an unpaid renewal did this one. lektora inc. shipped a french-language feed reader for internet explorer in 2004 and made 1.0 free and multilingual by march...
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2007-08-31
Auto Assault (2006 - 2007)
auto assault was the post-apocalyptic vehicular mmo from ncsoft and netdevil that lasted sixteen months. it shipped on 13 april 2006 with three factions, a...
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2007-08-24
Tegic Communications (1996 - 2007)
one press per letter. that was the entire product, and for about a decade it was the difference between a phone you could write on and a phone you could not....
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2007-08-17
GreenStone Media (2006 - 2007)
jane fonda put her name and her money on a talk radio network for women, with gloria steinem and robin morgan beside her, spun out of the women's media center...
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2007-08-15
AppleWorks (1991 - 2007)
it started as clarisworks in 1991, an all-in-one suite where word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, painting, database, and a terminal lived under one icon....
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2007-08-15
FuckedCompany.com (2000 - 2007)
fuckedcompany was a dot-com dead pool launched in may 2000 by philip j kaplan, who posted as pud. the site let users wager on which companies would fail next...
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2007-08-03
Adobe Authorware (1987 - 2007)
authorware was the icon-and-flowchart e-learning authoring tool of choice from the late eighties through the early two-thousands. michael allen launched it in...
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2007-08-01
Blingo (2004 - 2007)
blingo was the american search-and-sweepstakes hybrid that put a google search box on top of the publishers clearing house prize model. you entered a query...
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2007-08-01
CoralQQ (2001 - 2007)
shenzhen police arrested chen shoufu in beijing in august 2007 and took the servers. he had spent six years giving away a patched build of tencent qq that...
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2007-07-31
MusicNet (2001 - 2007)
musicnet was the second half of the major-label cartel attempt to build itunes before itunes existed. it shipped through aol with rationed streams and expiring...
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2007-07-31
Nikki Saito (日記才人) (1996 - 2007)
before search engines were any good, and before anyone in japan said the word blog, you found web diaries through a directory that let readers vote. it opened...
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2007-07-31
Tokimeki Memorial ONLINE (2006 - 2007)
1,200 yen every thirty days bought you a desk in a fictional japanese high school, where the thing you did in place of fighting monsters was go to class and...
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2007-07-29
Sichuan Yi Wikipedia (2004 - 2007)
a closure proposal went up on 10 july 2007 saying this wikipedia had never had activity beyond account registration and bots. the only objection anyone filed...
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2007-07-24
Herero Wikipedia (2004 - 2007)
zero. that is what hz.wikipedia.org reports when you ask it how many articles it has, and it is the only one of the seven language editions shut in 2007 that...
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2007-07-23
AWeb (1996 - 2007)
yvon rozijn wrote a web browser for the amiga in 1996, two years after commodore had gone bankrupt and the whole platform was supposed to be finished. aweb was...
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2007-07-16
SunRocket (2004 - 2007)
the offer was a year of unlimited home telephone for a hundred and ninety nine dollars, paid up front. that is a wonderful price for the customer and a loan...
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2007-07-10
Muscogee Wikipedia (2004 - 2007)
in june 2007 an editor called philip j opened a page on meta-wiki proposing that the muscogee wikipedia be closed, and the case was arithmetic rather than...
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2007-07-07
Builder.com (1997 - 2007)
on 3 july 2007 builder.com served its last homepage under its own name, and four days later the domain was redirecting to techrepublic. cnet had launched it in...
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2007-07-06
Backfence (2005 - 2007)
one of the earliest and loudest bets on citizen journalism: hand each town a website, let the neighbors report their own news, pay for it with classified ads....
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2007-07-03
Choctaw Wikipedia (2004 - 2007)
johannes rohr spent six months protecting pages on a wiki almost nobody was writing in, then took it to meta himself on 21 may 2007 and asked for it to be...
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2007-07-01
BurnLounge (2005 - 2007)
burnlounge sold you a digital music store with your name on it. packages ran from $29.95 to $429.95 a year and the storefronts were real, but retail music...
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2007-07-01
Stinkers Bad Movie Awards (1978 - 2007)
a bad-movie awards outfit started in 1978 by two former ushers from a pasadena theater, which makes it older than the golden raspberries and a great deal older...
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2007-07-01
Moviso (1993 - 2007)
most of the north american mobile content market ran through one company, and almost nobody knew its name, because moviso built other people's storefronts...
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2007-07-01
Osiolki.net (2003 - 2007)
internet explorer losing its majority is what ended osiolki.net, which has to be one of the stranger causes of death on this site. four people out of the...
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2007-07-01
Yahoo! News Underground (2007 - 2007)
brad miskell made a yahoo news series about american subcultures, shot it and edited it and reported it himself, and wrote original songs about the people in...
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2007-06-30
Webjay (2004 - 2007)
webjay was a playlist-sharing site that lucas gonze started in early 2004. you made a playlist by pasting in links to mp3 files that already existed somewhere...
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2007-06-30
magnet (1996 - 2007)
the n was for ntt and the s was for sanrio, and sanrio's president said he picked the name because a magnet has an n pole and an s pole. from november 1996...
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2007-06-29
Derive (1988 - 2007)
in 1977 a professor at the university of hawaii heard that a man in honolulu had lisp running on an intel 8080, and went to find him. david stoutemyer and...
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2007-06-16
Yahoo! Auctions (1998 - 2007)
yahoo auctions launched on september 14, 1998 as yahoo's answer to ebay. its main differentiator was free listings, with revenue coming from advertising...
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2007-06-04
LinkExchange (1996 - 2007)
linkexchange started in march 1996 as a banner-exchange cooperative for small personal and small-business websites that did not have ad budgets. you joined by...
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2007-06-01
Amp'd Mobile (2005 - 2007)
amp'd mobile was the youth-targeted MVNO that mtv and universal music funded between 2005 and 2007 to sell ringtones and short-form video to 18-to-35-year-olds...
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2007-06-01
Freeserve (1998 - 2007)
freeserve invented the uk free-isp model, sold at the peak of the dot-com bubble for one point six five billion pounds, then got passed through wanadoo and...
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2007-06-01
Koan (1994 - 2007)
a floppy disk published in april 1996 carried twelve pieces of music by brian eno that would never play the same way twice, along with the player that...
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2007-06-01
Linux Screen Reader (2006 - 2007)
ibm changed its mind about gnome accessibility on 31 may 2007, and the following afternoon peter parente wrote to five mailing lists at once to explain what...
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2007-05-29
World Chess Network (1997 - 2007)
a paid internet chess server from 1997, put together by master games international with money from the chess patron dato tan chin nam. it sold the room around...
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2007-05-18
Foetry.com (2004 - 2007)
foetry.com spent three years reading the winner lists and the judge lists of american poetry book contests and matching the names against each other. it found...
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2007-05-15
Adobe FreeHand (1988 - 2007)
freehand started at altsys in 1988 and passed through aldus and macromedia before adobe inherited it in the 2005 macromedia acquisition. by then adobe already...
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2007-05-14
Innertube (2006 - 2007)
cbs opened innertube on 5 may 2006 as its answer to youtube, a free advertiser-supported video channel living on cbs.com, carrying full episodes alongside...
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2007-04-29
Socialite Rank (2006 - 2007)
an anonymous blog that put twenty young manhattan socialites in numbered order every two weeks, from april 2006 to april 2007. the women in the rankings read...
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2007-04-27
grid.org (2001 - 2007)
a screensaver that did chemistry. you installed it, left the machine on, and while nobody was typing it tested drug-like molecules against protein targets and...
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2007-04-27
1mdc (2001 - 2007)
1mdc was digital gold that held no gold. you sent it e-gold and it credited you the same weight in its own units. because it was storing nothing itself, it...
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2007-04-23
Oregano (2000 - 2007)
a deputy mayor cut a tape to open a computer show in wakefield on 20 may 2000, and the product sharing top billing with the ceremony was a web browser. oregano...
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2007-04-16
Adobe ImageReady (1998 - 2007)
imageready was the half of photoshop that handled the web. animated gifs, sliced table-layout images, rollover hover states. for nine years it shipped as a...
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2007-04-01
Peppercoin (2001 - 2007)
peppercoin was an mit-spinout micropayment company silvio micali and ron rivest set up in waltham massachusetts in late 2001. the system batched small...
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2007-04-01
Telsim (1994 - 2007)
telsim was the other number. turkcell was 0532 and telsim was 0542, and for most of the 1990s that prefix was the whole of what anybody knew about somebody...
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2007-04-01
Weedshare (2003 - 2007)
a media player update decided the files had been tampered with, and four years of work stopped working. weedshare sold songs wrapped in a format that paid you...
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2007-03-31
Tales of Eternia ONLINE (2006 - 2007)
諸般の事情 is the reason namco gave, which comes out in english as various circumstances and explains nothing at all. this was the tales series' first mmorpg and...
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2007-03-20
BBC Jam (2006 - 2007)
the bbc built a free online curriculum for every school-age child in the country and spent ninety six million pounds of license fee money getting it there....
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2007-03-16
Micropal (1985 - 2007)
christopher poll started micropal in london in 1985 with six other people and a question nobody was answering properly, which was whether a given mutual fund...
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2007-03-13
Microsoft Visual FoxPro (1984 - 2007)
visual foxpro was the database-and-language combo that ran small accountancy and clinic software through the 90s and 2000s. fox software built it, microsoft...
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2007-03-13
AppForge (1999 - 2007)
visual basic programmers who wanted their software to run on a palm pilot bought crossfire, and crossfire phoned a license server every time anything was built...
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2007-03-12
AOL Music Now (2005 - 2007)
aol music now was a subscription music download store that aol acquired from circuit city in 2005 and operated for about sixteen months. in january 2007 aol...
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2007-03-01
Clover Studio (2004 - 2007)
clover studio was capcom letting its best directors run their own subsidiary for less than three years. it made okami and god hand back to back in 2006, both...
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2007-02-28
Hitel (1992 - 2007)
hitel was the largest of the four services that were the korean internet before the korean internet, a dial-up world of message boards and clubs you reached by...
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2007-02-26
Fametracker (1999 - 2007)
tara ariano and david t. cole started fametracker in 1999 out of toronto with adam sternbergh, a year after the same couple had started what became television...
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2007-02-10
Dragon's Gate (1990 - 2007)
dragon's gate opened to the public on genie in the spring of 1990 and ran for seventeen years as a text world with live game masters staging scenarios inside...
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2007-02-08
NTL (1992 - 2007)
ntl started in 1992 as an american company called international cabletel, buying up the fragmented british cable franchises one region at a time until it held...
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2007-02-08
Telewest (1992 - 2007)
telewest was the other british cable company, the one holding the half of the country ntl did not. it started as a croydon franchise in 1984 and spent the...
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2007-02-07
Singingfish (1999 - 2007)
singingfish crawled the web for sound and moving pictures instead of text, which in 1999 was a hard problem nobody else particularly wanted. it ended up as the...
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2007-02-06
Farallon Computing (1986 - 2007)
a berkeley user group built a kit in 1986 that ran appletalk down ordinary telephone wire, and reese jones turned it into a company. phonenet and timbuktu both...
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2007-02-01
HomeChoice (2000 - 2007)
homechoice was video on demand over a telephone line in 2000, which was several years before that sentence sounded reasonable to anyone. video networks limited...
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2007-02-01
Virgin.net (1996 - 2007)
ntl and richard branson's group opened an internet provider together in november 1996 and put the virgin name on the front, which in britain was worth more...
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2007-02-01
Globix (1989 - 2007)
globix started in manhattan selling apple hardware to printers and ended up owning twenty eight thousand miles of fiber and a million square feet of data...
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2007-02-01
Radio Free Virgin (1999 - 2007)
sixty-something channels, a downloadable player past a million installs within months of launching, and by march 2003 about 2.8 million unique listeners a...
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2007-02-01
Ghostzilla (2002 - 2007)
the problem it solved was the cubicle. ghostzilla drew a gecko browser inside the window of whatever you already had open, usually outlook, drained the color...
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2007-02-01
Neumu (2001 - 2007)
michael goldberg built the first web music magazine and then built a second one. neumu went up in june 2001 with a ten-point album scale whose bottom rung read...
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2007-01-30
3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet (1995 - 2007)
the windows pinball that came with every microsoft plus! pack and then every copy of windows from 98 through xp. you launched it because the start menu was...
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2007-01-30
Microsoft Clippy (1997 - 2007)
the animated paperclip in microsoft office. "it looks like you're writing a letter." nobody asked. everyone hated him. microsoft turned him off by default in...
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2007-01-30
Microsoft Plus! (1995 - 2007)
microsoft plus! was a paid windows add-on disc from 1995 to 2007. it gave you desktop themes and screen savers the base os shipped without, plus a handful of...
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2007-01-30
NetMeeting (1996 - 2007)
netmeeting was the icon nobody clicked. microsoft shipped it bundled with internet explorer 3 in may 1996, and for a decade it sat in the start menu of every...
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2007-01-30
Outlook Express (1996 - 2007)
outlook express was the email program preinstalled on every windows machine for ten years. nobody bought it because nobody had to, and nobody loved it because...
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2007-01-30
Active Desktop (1997 - 2007)
active desktop arrived inside internet explorer 4 in september 1997 and replaced the windows wallpaper layer with a browser. alongside it came the channel bar,...
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2007-01-30
Program Manager (1990 - 2007)
program manager is what windows booted into between 1990 and 1995. one large window holding smaller windows, each of them full of icons you had sorted into...
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2007-01-30
HyperTerminal (1995 - 2007)
microsoft did not write hyperterminal. it licensed a cut-down version of a michigan company's terminal program in 1995 and dropped it into accessories, where...
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2007-01-30
EAX (Environmental Audio Extensions) (1998 - 2007)
windows vista reached consumers on 30 january 2007 with the audio stack rewritten and the hardware path taken out, and every effect creative had spent nine...
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2007-01-30
NTBackup (1993 - 2007)
the bkf file outlived the program that wrote it, and that is the whole story. ntbackup shipped with windows nt on 27 july 1993, written originally by arcada...
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2007-01-30
ClipBook Viewer (1992 - 2007)
windows for workgroups 3.1 arrived in october 1992 with a program that let you name the thing you had just copied and then publish it to the office network...
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2007-01-30
Windows Address Book (1996 - 2007)
every windows machine between 1996 and vista kept its contacts in one file ending in .wab, and outlook express read it, and so did anything else that asked....
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2007-01-30
Windows File Protection (2000 - 2007)
dll hell was the name for what happened when an installer dropped an old system file on top of a newer one and took the machine down with it. microsoft's...
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2007-01-30
Direct Cable Connection (1995 - 2007)
a laplink parallel cable and two windows machines got you a network before an ethernet card was a given, and the wizard that set it up sat in accessories under...
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2007-01-26
BitPass (2002 - 2007)
bitpass was a mountain view micropayment startup kurt huang and gyuchang jun founded in 2002. the service let users prefund an account by credit card or paypal...
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2007-01-24
Ritual Entertainment (1996 - 2007)
dallas in 1996 was full of studios spun out of the quake and duke nukem level scene, and ritual was one of the good ones. it shipped sin six weeks ahead of...
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2007-01-15
Aucland (1999 - 2007)
fabrice grinda and sacha fosse-parisis launched aucland in april 1999 and within a year it was one of the three largest auction sites in europe, funded by...
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2007-01-12
Cingular Wireless (2000 - 2007)
cingular wireless was formed in april 2000 as a joint venture between sbc communications and bellsouth out of their respective wireless properties. it acquired...
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2007-01-08
NTK (1997 - 2007)
danny o'brien and dave green wrote a plain text email every friday for the people who worked in and around the british technology press, and for ten years it...
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2007-01-08
GlobeXplorer (1999 - 2007)
walnut creek, california, 1999. four executives out of a survey firm spun a nasa orthophoto project into the first business built on selling aerial and...
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2007-01-06
Coliseum Books (1974 - 2007)
the northwest corner of 57th street and broadway held a general bookstore from 1974 until the lease ran out at the end of january 2002. george leibson reopened...
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2007-01-05
eMule Paradise (2004 - 2007)
vincent valade started emule paradise in 2004 as a teenager and closed it on 5 january 2007, after 48 hours in police custody. the site listed edonkey links to...
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2007-01-05
Pluck (2005 - 2007)
october 2006 is when the consumer rss reader stopped being a business anybody wanted to be in, and pluck said so out loud before most of its competitors did....
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2007-01-01
Amazon zShops (1999 - 2007)
amazon zshops was bezos's second attempt at being more than a bookstore. it ran from september 1999 to roughly 2007 as a fixed-price third-party marketplace...
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2007-01-01
Bomis (1996 - 2007)
bomis was a san diego web portal founded by jimmy wales and two chicago friends in 1996. it ran webrings around a babe search engine for the revenue side....
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2007-01-01
PatroNet (1998 - 2007)
todd rundgren's 1998 subscription service, and the first place on the internet where you could pay a musician directly and in advance for records that did not...
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2007-01-01
IBM Microdrive (1998 - 2007)
ibm announced it on 9 september 1998 and shipped it the following june, a spinning hard disk small enough to sit in a compactflash type ii slot, 340 megabytes...
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2007-01-01
Feedster (2003 - 2007)
scott johnson started it in march 2003 and merged it three months later with francois schiettecatte's rss-search, and for about two years feedster was one of...
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2007-01-01
Game Boy Advance Video (2004 - 2007)
majesco put the first video paks on shelves on 12 may 2004: forty-odd minutes of american children's television on a light grey game boy cartridge for $9.95,...
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2007-01-01
3721 (Yahoo Assistant) (1998 - 2007)
3721 was the plug-in that taught china to hate plug-ins. zhou hongyi built it in 1998 so people could type a chinese word into internet explorer instead of a...
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2007-01-01
Todito.com (1999 - 2007)
todito was built in 1999 by a private university in monterrey and turned into one of mexico's largest consumer portals with television money behind it. the...
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2007-01-01
Bonus.com (1997 - 2007)
bonus.com opened in january 1997 with five hundred games and one idea: wrap the whole site in a fake browser so a child could not click their way out of it. it...
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2007-01-01
NetAid (1999 - 2007)
cisco and the un development programme built an anti poverty campaign around a webcast and put it on three stages across two continents at once on 9 october...
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2007-01-01
Server.com (1996 - 2007)
sean brunnock put a personal information manager on the web in september 1996 and spent the next six years adding to it, a threaded message board service one...
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2007-01-01
Esuvee (2005 - 2007)
in january 2005 the attorneys general of every american state put twenty-seven million dollars into a campaign about suv rollovers, and the money came out of a...
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2007-01-01
GoTrump.com (2006 - 2007)
gotrump.com was a travel booking site launched at trump tower on 24 january 2006 with the tagline "the art of the travel deal". underneath it was travelocity,...
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2007-01-01
Club Nokia (1997 - 2007)
club nokia was a handset manufacturer trying to sell you things directly, which the mobile operators were never going to allow. it started in 1997 as a product...
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2007-01-01
X.400 (1984 - 2007)
x.400 was the telecommunication union's design for electronic mail, published in 1984 and meant to be how the whole planet sent messages. it had message recall...
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2007-01-01
Abilene Network (1999 - 2007)
the abilene project started in april 1998, run by the university corporation for advanced internet development on fiber donated by qwest, with the operations...
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2007-01-01
HyperScan (2006 - 2007)
mattel's answer to the question nobody asked: what if a console made you buy trading cards to unlock the characters. an rfid reader sat in the lid and the...
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2007-01-01
Microsoft Fingerprint Reader (2004 - 2007)
"the fingerprint reader is not a security feature and is intended to be used for convenience only." that sentence was sitting in microsoft's own getting...
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2007-01-01
Visual J# (2002 - 2007)
sun microsystems sued microsoft over a java virtual machine that failed the compliance tests, and visual j# is what microsoft shipped once the settlement took...
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2007-01-01
IBM Workplace (2003 - 2007)
mike rhodin stood up at lotusphere in january 2007 and said the quiet part out loud: ibm had been confusing the hell out of its own customers. workplace was...
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2006-12-31
AOL CDs (1993 - 2006)
the free AOL signup discs that arrived in every american mailbox for over a decade. peak distribution was something like 1.2 billion CDs. they were free...
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2006-12-31
Microsoft FrontPage (1995 - 2006)
frontpage was the WYSIWYG editor that taught a generation of people how to build a webpage by dragging things on a canvas. vermeer technologies shipped version...
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2006-12-31
OS/2 (1987 - 2006)
os/2 was ibm's pc operating system, the one supposed to replace dos. ibm and microsoft started it together in 1985. they shipped 1.0 in december 1987 and split...
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2006-12-31
Sam Goody (1951 - 2006)
sam goody started as a manhattan discount record shop in 1951, became the largest mall music retail chain in the us by the mid-eighties under musicland...
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2006-12-31
Motorola ROKR E1 (2005 - 2006)
the rokr e1 launched september 7 2005 in a steve jobs special-event keynote, a motorola candybar handset running a version of itunes on its small color screen....
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2006-12-31
Mobile ESPN (2005 - 2006)
mobile espn was disney's MVNO experiment for the american sports-broadcast audience, live for around ten months in 2006 on the sprint ev-do network. the...
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2006-12-31
Apple iSight (2003 - 2006)
the small aluminum cylinder that clipped to the top of a powerbook lid via a magnetic mount and ran video over a single firewire cable. announced june 23 2003...
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2006-12-31
BowieNet (1998 - 2006)
bowienet was a real internet service provider owned by a rock musician. twenty dollars a month bought you dial-up access and an @davidbowie.com email address,...
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2006-12-31
Connexion by Boeing (2004 - 2006)
connexion by boeing put a steerable ku-band antenna on the roof of a widebody and gave passengers real broadband at cruising altitude, four years before anyone...
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2006-12-31
iRows (2006 - 2006)
january to december of one year is the entire life of it. two israeli developers built a spreadsheet that ran inside a browser tab in 2006, got written up as...
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2006-12-22
Tower Records (1960 - 2006)
tower records grew out of a drugstore in sacramento in 1960 when russ solomon started selling 45s out of his father's pharmacy, and by the 1990s the chain ran...
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2006-12-20
Emulation Zone (1996 - 2006)
started on 28 august 1996 as a bet among friends over who could build the best website, and it won by still being there ten years later. andy wolan, who signed...
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2006-12-14
All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP (2006 - 2006)
nine posts and one rap video, across twenty four days. two characters called charlie and jeremy spent late november 2006 writing in invented slang about how...
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2006-12-12
Ulead Systems (1989 - 2006)
ulead systems was founded in taipei on 5 august 1989 and spent seventeen years making the software everybody used and nobody discussed. gif animator built the...
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2006-12-12
InterVideo (1998 - 2006)
windvd came in the box. that was the whole business model and for about six years it was an excellent one, because windows could not play a dvd on its own and...
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2006-12-01
Save Toby (2005 - 2006)
save toby was a january 2005 hoax page where two anonymous webmasters claimed they would cook and eat a pet rabbit named toby if the internet did not send them...
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2006-12-01
Lucent Technologies (1996 - 2006)
lucent was the equipment half of at&t, cut loose in 1996 with the western electric factories and bell labs attached, and for four years it was the most widely...
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2006-12-01
IBM Home Page Reader (1998 - 2006)
home page reader was a browser that spoke the page out loud, built at ibm out of chieko asakawa's research in tokyo and sold from 1998 onward. the thing that...
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2006-12-01
Project Looking Glass (2003 - 2006)
project looking glass was sun microsystems' attempt at a three dimensional desktop, written in java on top of the java 3d api and shown off by jonathan...
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2006-12-01
Torget.se (1996 - 2006)
904 million kronor is what the swedish post office eventually admitted it had spent on a website meant to sell things. the visitors came for the chat and the...
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2006-12-01
Hogwarts.nu (2001 - 2006)
700,000 accounts, which in a 2004 survey put a harry potter fan site third in all of sweden, behind lunarstorm and playahead and ahead of everything else....
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2006-11-30
Computer Gaming World (1981 - 2006)
cgw was the long-running american pc-gaming monthly. founded by russell sipe in 1981 and acquired by ziff-davis in 1993, it ran twenty-five years and 268...
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2006-11-30
Google Answers (2002 - 2006)
google answers was the paid question-and-answer service google ran from 18 april 2002 to 30 november 2006. you wrote a question, you offered a bounty starting...
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2006-11-30
Melbourne House (1977 - 2006)
melbourne house was a london publisher run by two australians who had moved the other way, and its biggest game was a tolkien text adventure that sold over...
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2006-11-28
Novell Hula (2005 - 2006)
novell announced hula on 15 february 2005 at linuxworld in boston and dropped roughly two hundred thousand lines of its netmail code into the open under the...
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2006-11-20
Exabyte (1985 - 2006)
boulder, colorado, 1987: engineers out of storagetek worked out that the helical scan head sony had built for camcorders could write 2.3 gigabytes onto an 8mm...
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2006-11-14
MSN Music (2004 - 2006)
msn music opened september 1, 2004 as microsoft's branded download store, built on top of windows media drm and the playsforsure ecosystem and aimed straight...
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2006-11-14
Spectrum Information Technologies (1983 - 2006)
john sculley took this job five days after leaving apple and called it a little gem that fell in his lap. four months later he resigned and sued the chairman....
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2006-11-13
HotPrize (1999 - 2006)
"hotprize.com is no more!" said the front page on monday, 13 november 2006, adding a very slim chance of being reborn that never came. for seven years a...
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2006-11-01
Madchat.org (1997 - 2006)
a dark apache directory index with a cheshire cat quote pinned above it, and under that, nine years of everything the francophone underground had bothered to...
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2006-11-01
Audioblogger (2003 - 2006)
noah glass built a voicemail box that published to the web. you called a number from any phone and said whatever you wanted, and the recording turned up on...
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2006-10-31
Ogrish.com (2000 - 2006)
ogrish was the post-rotten shock site of the 2000-2006 window. the domain registered june 18, 2000. its peak content was war footage and execution videos from...
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2006-10-26
Diversity University (1993 - 2006)
jeanne mcwhorter built it in the summer of 1993 while she was a sociology graduate student, and it was the first moo made specifically for education. you...
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2006-10-24
Lik-Sang (1998 - 2006)
lik-sang was the hong kong import retailer founded in 1998. it sold region-free console hardware, mod chips, imported japanese games, and accessories to a...
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2006-10-20
USinternetworking (1998 - 2006)
in 1998 a company in annapolis decided that business software should be rented over a wire instead of installed off a disc, and the market agreed hard enough...
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2006-10-19
Deepnet Explorer (2004 - 2006)
version 1.5.3 beta 3 shipped on 19 october 2006 and nothing ever followed it. deepnet security in britain had built the first browser to pair a gnutella client...
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2006-10-18
Active Channel (1997 - 2006)
active channel was the push-technology bet microsoft shipped inside internet explorer 4 in september '97. the format underneath was called cdf, channel...
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2006-10-16
Cartoon Orbit (2000 - 2006)
cartoon orbit was the trading-card site cartoon network ran on cartoonnetwork.com from november 2000 to october 16 2006. the cards were called ctoons,...
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2006-10-14
MSN Chat (1995 - 2006)
msn chat was the room next to the messenger everyone actually used. microsoft ran open chat rooms for years, then got scared of who was walking into them and...
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2006-10-12
Wal-Marting Across America (2006 - 2006)
a freelance writer and a washington post staff photographer drove a rented rv from las vegas to georgia in the autumn of 2006, sleeping in walmart parking lots...
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2006-10-10
Writely (2005 - 2006)
writely was a browser-based word processor built by three people at upstartle in 2005, launched in august of that year with almost no marketing. it was one of...
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2006-10-01
Triton (2004 - 2006)
july 2006 was the month a digital storefront nobody had heard of got one of the biggest pc releases of the year. triton, built by digital interactive streams...
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2006-09-29
Siemens Mobile / BenQ-Siemens (1985 - 2006)
siemens made phones for twenty-one years and was fourth in the world at the start of the decade, behind nokia and motorola and whoever was third that quarter....
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2006-09-15
Nvu (2004 - 2006)
nvu was a free wysiwyg web page editor built on top of mozilla composer, paid for by linspire because desktop linux had nothing to put in front of somebody who...
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2006-09-14
Kuro (2000 - 2006)
feiliu networks launched kuro in taiwan in 2000 and switched the billing on in january 2001, ninety nine taiwan dollars a month for a file sharing client. at...
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2006-09-12
eDonkey2000 (2000 - 2006)
edonkey2000 was the first p2p client that pulled a file from many users at once instead of one. it ran on its own network alongside the official client and the...
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2006-09-12
Overnet (2002 - 2006)
the network under the network. overnet was metamachine's own client for the edonkey world, a serverless layer meant to route around the central servers that...
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2006-09-12
Foxnet (1991 - 2006)
in 1991 fox reached 91 percent of american television households, the worst coverage of the four big networks, because the small markets had no spare station...
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2006-09-01
Office Pirates (2006 - 2006)
time inc. built a website for american men aged 21 to 34 who were avoiding their jobs, staffed it with five people, launched it quietly in february 2006 and...
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2006-08-28
Netian (1998 - 2006)
netian opened in february 1998 as the first korean portal built around handing everyone a homepage, and it worked well enough to pass seven million registered...
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2006-08-26
Kiko (2005 - 2006)
$258,100 was the winning bid. google calendar shipped in april 2006 and kiko's signups stopped inside a season, so justin kan and emmett shear listed the whole...
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2006-08-24
SPEWS (2000 - 2006)
spews was a list of address ranges that a mail server could check before accepting a message. nobody knew who ran it and there was no way to appeal a listing....
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2006-08-18
Captain Copyright (2006 - 2006)
captain copyright was a cartoon superhero that access copyright, the canadian agency which collects reproduction royalties for publishers and writers, sent...
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2006-08-17
Daypop (2000 - 2006)
daypop was a blog and news search engine run as a one-man project by dan chan from late 2000, started during the us presidential election while dan was living...
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2006-08
Internacia Televido (2005 - 2006)
the first television channel in esperanto went live on 5 november 2005, streaming around the clock over the internet from sao paulo. it was built by flavio...
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2006-07-31
Adelphia Communications (1952 - 2006)
founded 1952 by gus and john rigas in coudersport pennsylvania after they bought a small cable franchise for three hundred dollars. by 1998 adelphia had more...
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2006-07-27
FastTrack (2001 - 2006)
a small estonian team wrote a file-sharing protocol that hid the index inside the users themselves, and for about three years it moved more music than napster...
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2006-07-25
Century China (2000 - 2006)
century china opened on 19 july 2000 as a place for chinese academics and writers to publish essays and argue about them in public, run by a beijing research...
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2006-07-23
Interactive Systems Corporation (1977 - 2006)
before 1977 there was exactly one place to get unix, and it was the company that wrote it. peter weiner changed that from an office in santa monica and built...
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2006-07-22
Dailysonic (2005 - 2006)
219 episodes between march 2005 and july 2006, promised monday to friday and delivered closer to three a week. dailysonic was a free audio magazine made by...
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2006-07-20
Varig (1927 - 2006)
otto ernst meyer founded varig in porto alegre on 7 may 1927 and for most of the twentieth century it was the only brazilian airline anyone outside brazil ever...
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2006-07-16
Democracy and Freedom Web (2001 - 2006)
democracy and freedom web was a mainland chinese political discussion site founded on 12 june 2001 by wu wei, a guangzhou writer who publishes as ye du. it...
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2006-07-11
Windows ME (2000 - 2006)
windows me shipped september 14 2000 as the consumer follow-up to windows 98. microsoft cut real-mode dos out of it to speed boot times and broke a long list...
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2006-07-11
Windows 98 (1998 - 2006)
june 1998 is when the home pc stopped being a machine you loaded programs onto and became a machine you connected. windows 98 made usb work without a fight and...
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2006-07-07
VK Mobile (2001 - 2006)
vk mobile was a south korean handset maker that began life in 1997 importing batteries for other people's phones and was selling its own by 2001. sales hit...
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2006-07-04
NPG Music Club (2001 - 2006)
july 2006: a british science publisher complains about three letters, and prince's subscription website is gone inside a day. his lawyer said the two events...
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2006-07-03
Keijibanteki Kotoba Uchu (掲示板的コトバ宇宙) (1999 - 2006)
three waseda students lost a school festival to a cancellation in 1998 and decided to build something ugly on purpose before they graduated. what came out in...
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2006-07-01
Bulldog Broadband (2000 - 2006)
bulldog put its own equipment inside bt exchanges in central london and sold people a line that did not run on bt wholesale terms, which in 2004 made it the...
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2006-07-01
de.lirio.us (2004 - 2006)
running a copy of del.icio.us on your own machine was the promise, and the code delivered on it. the hosted version at de.lirio.us is what buckled, under load...
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2006-06-30
Symantec WinFax PRO (1990 - 2006)
winfax was the windows fax stack that office pcs ran for fifteen years. delrina built it, symantec bought delrina, then quietly let the product rot once email...
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2006-06-19
MSN Gaming Zone (1996 - 2006)
msn gaming zone was microsoft's online gaming portal from 1996 to 2006. it started life as the village in 1996, got bought by microsoft and renamed the...
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2006-06-13
ART image file format (1992 - 2006)
a security patch killed this one. ms06-021 shipped on 13 june 2006 and internet explorer stopped drawing .art files from that day, because a malformed one...
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2006-06-12
Emagic (1992 - 2006)
rellingen, a small town outside hamburg, is where logic came from. gerhard lengeling and chris adam founded emagic there in september 1992 and spent a decade...
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2006-06-09
Doctor Fun (1993 - 2006)
520 weeks was the number dave farley promised himself, and he hit it, though ten years' worth of weeks took nearly thirteen calendar years to deliver. doctor...
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2006-06-09
Libranet (1999 - 2006)
a father and son in vancouver sold a debian desktop for ninety dollars a copy and enough people bought it to keep the lights on for six years. jon danzig was...
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2006-06-06
6bone (1996 - 2006)
6bone was a practice internet, a second network stitched on top of the real one so engineers could test ipv6 before anybody's life depended on it. it started...
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2006-06-01
Wanadoo (1996 - 2006)
wanadoo was france telecom's consumer internet brand, launched in may 1996. it grew into the largest french isp, bought freeserve in 2000 to become the largest...
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2006-05-25
Juniper Bank (2000 - 2006)
richard vague opened juniper bank in wilmington, delaware in january 2000 with money from benchmark capital and a plan that had no branches anywhere in it. the...
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2006-05-19
Maxtor Corporation (1982 - 2006)
the first drive out the door in 1983 was designed to hold 190 megabytes and shipped at 140, because the heads were not ready and the company took what it could...
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2006-05-17
Blue Frog (2005 - 2006)
"blue found the right solution to stop spam, and i can't let this continue." a spammer calling himself pharmamaster typed that into an icq window in may 2006,...
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2006-05-10
Rockstar Vienna (1993 - 2006)
on the night of 9 may 2006 take-two closed its vienna studio, and the hundred and ten people who worked there found out the next morning, when security guards...
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2006-05-08
Google Deskbar (2003 - 2006)
the windows taskbar was contested ground in 2003, and google took a piece of it. no browser, no page load, just control alt g and a small window that closed...
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2006-05-01
Eudora (1988 - 2006)
eudora was the email client steve dorner wrote at the university of illinois in 1988, named after the southern writer eudora welty. qualcomm bought it in 1991...
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2006-05-01
Blogdex (2001 - 2006)
a graduate student at the media lab pointed a crawler at every weblog he could find and counted which links they were handing to each other. the front page was...
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2006-04-26
Videoway (1989 - 2006)
illico took the subscribers one neighborhood at a time from 1999 onward, and the last videoway terminals were collected in april 2006. what videotron had put...
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2006-04-21
Mozilla Application Suite (1998 - 2006)
the whole internet as one program. browser, mail and news reader, page editor, irc client, address book, all of it out of the netscape communicator source code...
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2006-04-03
SoftICE (1987 - 2006)
a kernel debugger written in 386 assembly by two people at numega in 1987, sold for $386 as a joke about the processor it needed. it halted the entire...
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2006-04-01
Internet Underground Music Archive (1993 - 2006)
iuma was the first place on the internet where unsigned bands could upload music and have anyone download it. three uc santa cruz students built it in 1993,...
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2006-04-01
nowthatsfuckedup.com (2004 - 2006)
chris wilson ran an amateur pornography site out of lakeland, florida. soldiers in iraq and afghanistan could not get their cards through his payment...
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2006-04-01
Mathsoft (1984 - 2006)
a page of engineering arithmetic looks like a page of engineering arithmetic, which sounds trivial until you remember that in 1986 every other calculation tool...
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2006-04-01
yellowTAB (2001 - 2006)
mannheim, 2001: a small german company got hold of the last unreleased build of beos and started selling it in a box as zeta, on shopping television, to people...
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2006-03-31
Sony AIBO (original line, 1999-2006) (1999 - 2006)
the first aibo, the ers-110, shipped on may 11 1999 in japan at 250000 yen and at 2500 dollars in the us. the line ran through several generations, ers-210,...
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2006-03-31
NIFTY-Serve (1987 - 2006)
nifty-serve sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. it was the japanese answer to compuserve, started 1987 by...
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2006-03-31
Namco (1955 - 2006)
masaya nakamura put two coin operated rocking horses on a department store roof in yokohama in 1955 and ended up owning the arcade business. pac-man came out...
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2006-03-31
Minolta (1928 - 2006)
minolta started in osaka in 1928 as a japanese-german camera shop and spent most of the twentieth century as one of the names that mattered. the maxxum 7000 in...
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2006-03-28
Zeal (1999 - 2006)
zeal was a web directory written by unpaid volunteers who earned points toward donations to charities they chose themselves. you passed a test before you could...
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2006-03-17
AOL Brasil (1999 - 2006)
aol brasil was the brazilian arm of aol latin america, the joint venture between aol time warner and venezuelan grupo cisneros with banco itau holding a...
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2006-03-08
PopTop Software (1993 - 2006)
phil steinmeyer started poptop in 1993 in fenton, missouri, and wrote most of railroad tycoon ii himself. it shipped in 1998 under the gathering of developers...
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2006-03-03
Bonsai Kitten (2000 - 2006)
tens of thousands of furious emails had arrived by february 2001, the boston fbi field office served mit with a grand jury subpoena, and the humane society...
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2006-03-01
Diary-X (2000 - 2006)
diary-x is remembered less for how it lived than for how it died. one hard drive failed in early 2006. there was no backup. 120,000 diaries evaporated...
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2006-03-01
Takara (1955 - 2006)
takara made licca-chan dolls and the transforming robot toys that hasbro licensed and renamed transformers in 1984, which means most of the world owned its...
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2006-02-28
WebCT (1996 - 2006)
the first widely deployed web-based course management system for higher education. murray goldberg started it at the university of british columbia and...
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2006-02-26
Teoma (2001 - 2006)
a search engine that ranked pages by authority inside a subject, not across the whole web. teoma came out of rutgers in 2001 with a smart idea about hubs and...
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2006-02-24
Nokia N-Gage (2003 - 2006)
the n-gage was nokia's phone-and-game-boy hybrid. it had a side-mounted speaker that made you hold it sideways against your face to take calls, which became...
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2006-02-22
China Worker Net (2005 - 2006)
china worker net, at zggr.org, was a left-wing chinese site founded on may day 2005 in beijing by a group who called themselves socialists, edited by yan...
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2006-02-22
Communist Party People Net (2005 - 2006)
communist party people net ran at gcdr.com.cn, a maoist site put up by a group who described themselves as believers in communism, with a...
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2006-02-14
JAMDAT Mobile (2000 - 2006)
jamdat was the largest mobile games publisher in the world for about two years, back when a mobile game meant a java file bought off a carrier menu for three...
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2006-02-14
Sleepycat Software (1996 - 2006)
carlisle, massachusetts, 1996: margo seltzer and keith bostic start a company because netscape wants a better version of the database library they wrote at...
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2006-02-06
Gizmondo (2005 - 2006)
gizmondo was a windows ce handheld game console with gps, a camera, a sim slot, and a business model that involved subsidizing the hardware with delivery of...
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2006-02-01
3Dlabs (1994 - 2006)
3dlabs spent the late 90s and early 2000s building the gpus that ran professional cad and 3d animation. the wildcat line lived in solidworks and maya...
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2006-01-31
Internet Explorer for Mac (1996 - 2006)
internet explorer for mac was a real separate browser, not a port. it had its own rendering engine called tasman that was more standards compliant than the...
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2006-01-31
Digital Anvil (1996 - 2006)
chris roberts walked out of origin systems and opened digital anvil in austin on 8 april 1996, with his brother erin, six other wing commander people and...
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2006-01-31
Siebel Systems (1993 - 2006)
forty five percent of the crm market in 2002, and no longer a company four years later. thomas siebel left an executive job at oracle in 1993 to build the...
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2006-01-27
Western Union Telegram (1851 - 2006)
the telegram was the first message that could arrive without anyone carrying it, and western union ran that business in america for a century and a half. in...
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2006-01-26
QRIO (2000 - 2006)
qrio was sony's second robot and the one that never got a price tag. it stood 60 centimeters and weighed 7.3 kilos. on 18 december 2003 it became the first...
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2006-01-23
Marconi (1897 - 2006)
a hundred year old name and £2.6 billion in cash, spent inside eighteen months on two american equipment makers at the peak of the telecoms bubble. gec renamed...
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2006-01-12
UDDI Business Registry (2001 - 2006)
the uddi business registry was a public directory where any company could publish a machine-readable description of its web services and any other company...
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2006-01-10
Alias|Wavefront (1995 - 2006)
silicon graphics owned two rival 3d houses and merged them on 7 february 1995, because microsoft had just bought softimage and sgi wanted one answer to that...
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2006-01-01
Trio (1994 - 2006)
trio was a us cable channel built around tv-about-tv. it ran behind-the-scenes documentaries and network-history pieces plus recovered-from-the-vault series...
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2006-01-01
ImaHima (1999 - 2006)
imahima was a mobile-phone-only social service in japan, launched in 1999 by neeraj jhanji and a small team in tokyo. the name meant 'are you free now', and...
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2006-01-01
Infopop (UBB.classic) (1996 - 2006)
ubb.classic was a perl bulletin board engine that ted o'neil released on 7 may 1996. it ran on flat files and a cgi-bin install and at one point sat under a...
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2006-01-01
Windows Messenger (2001 - 2006)
windows messenger was the one that came in the box and lost anyway. microsoft built it into windows xp as the clean, corporate-friendly version of msn...
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2006-01-01
SmartMedia (1995 - 2006)
toshiba announced it on 15 may 1995 under the name solid state floppy disk card, which is what it looked like and what it was meant to replace. it went into...
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2006-01-01
Uproar.com (1999 - 2006)
uproar.com sold the television game show with the studio taken out of it. the company licensed family feud and match game from pearson, put them in a browser...
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2006-01-01
OzEmail (1992 - 2006)
ozemail started in 1992 as an email service with eight staff and became the loudest name in australian dial-up. it was the first australian technology stock to...
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2006-01-01
Purple Skirt (1999 - 2006)
tracey ullman launched a fashion site in november 1999, at the last moment when a famous person with an idea could get a retail website funded without being...
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2006-01-01
AOL Explorer (2005 - 2006)
aol released a free tabbed browser in july 2005 and built it on trident, the rendering engine inside internet explorer. it could do that because microsoft had...
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2006-01-01
TUNeZINE (2001 - 2006)
zouhair yahyaoui started tunezine in july 2001, not long after finishing an economics degree, and signed everything ettounsi, the tunisian. the site published...
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2006-01-01
Thrunet (1996 - 2006)
in 1998 a korean household could buy roughly a megabit over cable television wiring while most of the world was still listening to a modem negotiate. thrunet...
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2006-01-01
바로타 (BAROTA) (2000 - 2006)
korea's railway agency did not have enough computers in 2000. rather than make everyone queue behind one overloaded website, it stood up a second one at...
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2006
Davilex Games (1995 - 2006)
103,000 copies in nine months of 1998, in germany alone, for a budget racing game about driving down a motorway. davilex was an accounting-software company in...
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2005-12-31
Diamond Rio PMP300 (1998 - 2005)
the diamond rio pmp300 was the first mass-market portable mp3 player. 32 megabytes of internal flash, with a smartmedia slot for another 32. the riaa sued to...
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2005-12-31
NeoPlanet (1997 - 2005)
neoplanet was a trident-shell browser released in 1997 by bigfoot international, a new york company that licensed the internet explorer rendering engine and...
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2005-12-31
Rio Karma (2003 - 2005)
the 20gb audiophile mp3 player rio shipped in august 2003 with proper gapless playback, ogg vorbis and flac decoding in firmware, a 5-band parametric eq plus...
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2005-12-31
Sega Pico (1993 - 2005)
sega pico was a kids edutainment console built on mega drive hardware, sold like a toy, played through a hardback book whose pages turned the cartridge into...
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2005-12-31
Microsoft Threedegrees (2003 - 2005)
threedegrees was a 2003 microsoft p2p add-on to msn messenger built by the netgen team, an internal startup of recent college graduates working out of a...
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2005-12-31
Patagon.com (1997 - 2005)
patagon was the first major online brokerage built for the latin american retail investor. wenceslao casares started it in buenos aires in 1997. on 9 march...
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2005-12-31
SpeechBot (1999 - 2005)
compaq's research lab put speechbot on the web at the end of 1999, running speech recognition across public radio archives so you could search the words inside...
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2005-12-31
Danmønt (1992 - 2005)
denmark built a prepaid chip card for the payments too small to be worth a debit card, and put readers in railway ticket machines and payphones. you bought one...
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2005-12-31
IBM ViaVoice (1997 - 2005)
ibm viavoice arrived in august 1997 at 199 dollars and asked you to sit and read prepared sentences aloud for an hour before it would transcribe anything. it...
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2005-12-28
SCI FICTION (2000 - 2005)
the sci-fi channel hired ellen datlow, gave her a corner of scifi.com and let her buy short fiction at professional rates for five and a half years. it won the...
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2005-12-20
AOL Media Player (2005 - 2005)
aol released the media player beta on 13 april 2005 after three years of development inside the aol client group. the playback engine was codenamed unagi and...
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2005-12-19
ReplayTV (1999 - 2005)
replaytv shipped a dvr that skipped commercials automatically and let you send recorded shows to other replaytv owners over the internet. hollywood sued it out...
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2005-12-12
Working Designs (1986 - 2005)
working designs was the cult north american localizer that put japanese rpgs on disc-based consoles with full english voice acting and elaborate boxed...
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2005-12-03
Macromedia (1992 - 2005)
one hundred million people had installed shockwave and flash by the end of 1999, which is how a company that started out selling cd-rom authoring software...
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2005-12-01
Digital Audio Tape (1987 - 2005)
dat was a perfect digital copy on a tape half the size of a cassette, and the american record industry understood what that meant before the public got a...
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2005-12-01
eXeem (2005 - 2005)
on 19 december 2004 suprnova.org went dark and took the largest torrent index on the internet with it. five weeks later the replacement arrived, closed source...
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2005-11-30
Sygate Personal Firewall (2000 - 2005)
sygate personal firewall was the free outbound firewall people installed instead of trusting windows, grown out of a program for sharing one modem across a...
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2005-11-30
Sakura Wars Online (2001 - 2005)
sega walked out of the console business in january 2001 and shipped this in december. two dreamcast discs went on sale the same day, one set in the imperial...
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2005-11-22
Virgin Interactive (1983 - 2005)
virgin games started in london in 1983 inside richard branson's group and spent the next twenty years being bought and renamed by people who wanted something...
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2005-11-20
COMDEX (1979 - 2005)
comdex opened in 1979 as an exhibition for computer dealers and grew into the week every november when the entire industry moved to las vegas. two hundred and...
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2005-11-15
Sony BMG XCP (2005 - 2005)
xcp was the first 4 internet copy-protection software that sony bmg shipped on around 2 million audio cds across 52 titles in 2005. on october 31 mark...
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2005-11-14
i2hub (2004 - 2005)
i2hub only worked if your machine sat on a university network, because it ran over internet2, the research backbone american campuses had been given for...
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2005-11-07
Grokster (2001 - 2005)
grokster was the us-branded fasttrack client that existed mainly to be the supreme court's test case. it never had napster's name or kazaa's reach, but the...
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2005-11-01
CWShredder (2003 - 2005)
merijn bellekom wrote cwshredder as a dutch student, because coolwebsearch had gotten past everything else, and for about a year it was the only thing that...
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2005-10-08
EB Games (US brand) (1977 - 2005)
electronics boutique started as a calculator and gadget kiosk in the king of prussia mall in 1977, founded by james j. kim. it rebranded to eb games in 2000 as...
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2005-10-06
GoTo.com / Overture Services (1997 - 2005)
the first company to make money on paid search clicks. bill gross at idealab spun out goto.com in 1997 and ran the first live ppc auction in february 1998. the...
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2005-10-01
Coktel Vision (1984 - 2005)
coktel vision was two companies wearing one name. one of them made adventure games with a french sense of humor and the other made adibou, which had passed a...
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2005-10-01
VisualBoyAdvance (1999 - 2005)
a game boy emulator written by one person under the handle forgotten, which is the entire biography anybody ever got. it ran the game boy and everything after...
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2005-10-01
SoapCity (1998 - 2005)
sony pictures built soapcity as the web half of a soap opera cable channel that never launched, beaten to air by disney's soapnet and blocked by contracts nbc...
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2005-10-01
Metrowerks (1985 - 2005)
freescale took the metrowerks name off the door in october 2005, six years after motorola had bought the company for 95 million dollars. it began in 1985 in...
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2005-09-30
Contax (1932 - 2005)
contax started in 1932 as zeiss ikon's answer to leica and came back in 1975 as a japanese body with german glass in front of it, styled by porsche design and...
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2005-09-30
Steel Battalion: Line of Contact (2004 - 2005)
capcom gave notice that between 10am and noon pacific on friday 30 september 2005 it would end the online campaign of steel battalion: line of contact, because...
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2005-09-26
Ehoron.com (2004 - 2005)
ehoron.com was a mongolian-language online forum for ethnic mongolian students in inner mongolia. it ran for exactly one year before chinese state authorities...
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2005-09-21
WinMX (2000 - 2005)
winmx was a windows program that did one job. it found mp3s on other people's computers and let you queue them up. the interface was ugly and the queue could...
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2005-09-20
Mindpixel (2000 - 2005)
chris mckinstry spent five years asking volunteers to write one-line statements that any adult would answer the same way, then had other volunteers vote on...
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2005-09-14
PalmSource (2002 - 2005)
palmsource was the half of palm that built the operating system, after the hardware half was renamed palmone and walked off to make devices. the split was...
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2005-09-14
UserLinux (2003 - 2005)
bruce perens spent late 2003 describing a debian for businesses that would come with certifications and paid support and cost nothing to install, and two years...
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2005-09-13
Totality Corporation (1999 - 2005)
it started in san francisco in 1999 as mimecom and sold remote management of the servers and applications underneath large e-commerce sites. in 2000 it raised...
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2005-09-01
Banner Ad Museum (2000 - 2005)
in september 2005 a crawler that had been visiting almost every week started getting a 404 where a museum used to be. for five years banneradmuseum.com had...
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2005-08-31
Storage Technology Corporation (1969 - 2005)
the whole company rested on one bet: a tape drive fifteen percent cheaper than ibm's would sell against ibm. that arithmetic worked for a decade, and then $250...
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2005-08-22
Humongous Entertainment (1992 - 2005)
humongous entertainment was a kids' point-and-click studio in bothell, washington that built putt-putt, pajama sam, freddi fish, spy fox and the backyard...
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2005-08-17
DVD Shrink (2003 - 2005)
dvd shrink was a one megabyte windows executable that took a dual layer retail dvd and threw away enough bitrate to make it fit on a 4.7 gb blank. the region...
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2005-08-07
Klingon Wikipedia (2004 - 2005)
brion vibber sent four lines to the wikipedia-l mailing list on 7 august 2005. he had locked tlh.wikipedia.org at jimmy's request, it stayed readable but was...
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2005-08-01
Blizzard North (1993 - 2005)
in june 2003 four executives sent one email to vivendi asking for financial protection and a straight answer about whether blizzard was being sold. vivendi...
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2005-07-31
Tapwave Zodiac (2003 - 2005)
the tapwave zodiac was the palm os handheld that wanted to be a console. it shipped on 1 november 2003 with twin analog controls and a 480x320 color screen,...
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2005-07-29
CodeWarrior (1993 - 2005)
codewarrior was an integrated development environment from metrowerks, a montreal-based startup, first shipped december 23 1993. it was the ide that compiled...
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2005-07-27
Granville Technology Group (1994 - 2005)
britain's largest computer manufacturer was a mail-order operation in a converted mill town in lancashire, selling under the names time and tiny to people...
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2005-07-01
NeoModus Direct Connect (1999 - 2005)
jon hess wrote direct connect in 1999 while he was still in high school, and paid for it with an ad banner sitting inside the client window. the network he...
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2005-07-01
Cellular Digital Packet Data (1993 - 2005)
cdpd was a way of moving data over a phone network built for voice. it hunted for the channels nobody was talking on and pushed packets through them at 19.2...
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2005-07-01
Wildfire Communications (1994 - 2005)
bill warner had already built the avid editing system when he started wildfire communications in 1992, and what shipped in october 1994 was a voice you called...
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2005-07-01
MyOwnEmail (1997 - 2005)
two hundred domain names and a mascot called m.o.e. were the whole product, and in 1997 that was enough to let you be somebody at an address nobody else had....
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2005-06-29
Sendo (1998 - 2005)
a birmingham handset maker that built cheap phones for operators and then bet its future on being first out with microsoft's smartphone platform. microsoft...
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2005-06-28
Keyhole EarthViewer (2001 - 2005)
earthviewer was google earth four years before google owned it. from 2001 you paid a yearly fee for a program that streamed satellite imagery off a distant...
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2005-06-17
Reflect.com (1999 - 2005)
reflect was procter & gamble's late-dot-com bet on mass-customization. it launched in late 1999 and offered around fifty thousand variations of cosmetic and...
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2005-06-16
China Public Opinion Supervision Net (2003 - 2005)
china public opinion supervision net, at yuluncn.com, was a one-man anti-corruption site founded on 1 october 2003 by li xinde, a reporter since the 1980s. it...
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2005-06-13
TV Tome (2000 - 2005)
john nestoriak iii opened tv tome on 11 july 2000 and gave the work away to volunteers, one editor per show, writing episode guides for american television...
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2005-06-06
Espotting Media (2000 - 2005)
two men in their twenties left an advertising agency in the middle of the dot-com crash and started selling keywords in london, which in 2000 was a business...
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2005-06-06
DVD Decrypter (2001 - 2005)
dvd decrypter was one man's freeware and the default way a windows machine turned a disc into a file. it read a retail dvd and wrote out an image with the copy...
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2005-06-01
Telerate (1969 - 2005)
a 21 year old named neil hirsch worked out in 1969 that bond prices lived inside telephone calls and could live on a screen instead. for two decades telerate...
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2005-06-01
FingerWorks (1998 - 2005)
wayne westerman could not type without pain, so his doctoral work at delaware became a flat surface that read all ten fingers at once and turned gestures into...
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2005-06-01
TheFeature (2000 - 2005)
howard rheingold and justin hall spent the early 2000s writing about the mobile internet on a website nokia paid for, which reads stranger in 2026 than it did...
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2005-05-27
AgfaPhoto (2004 - 2005)
agfaphoto was the consumer film half of agfa, sold off in a management buyout on 2 november 2004 and insolvent by 27 may 2005. it inherited a film and...
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2005-05-25
EliteTorrents (2003 - 2005)
elitetorrents was the biggest private bittorrent tracker in the world for about two years, and it ended six days after an admin posted a workprint of revenge...
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2005-04-26
Adobe Streamline (1989 - 2005)
adobe streamline was a single-purpose mac utility that turned a scanned bitmap into vector artwork using bezier traces. it shipped at macworld san francisco in...
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2005-04-09
MovieCD (1996 - 2005)
scottsdale, arizona, november 1996: sirius publishing announces a way to sell feature films on ordinary compact discs, playable in software on a 486 with no...
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2005-04-08
Rover (1878 - 2005)
ten pounds is what bmw charged the phoenix consortium for mg rover in may 2000, and it was not a bargain. the company had started as a coventry bicycle works...
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2005-04-07
Liberate Technologies (1996 - 2005)
oracle spun a division out in april 1996 to build software for the network computer, the cheap terminal larry ellison was certain would replace the pc. it did...
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2005-04-06
CherryOS (2004 - 2005)
on 12 october 2004 a company in lahaina, hawaii opened pre-orders for a windows program that would run mac os x at eighty percent of the host machine's speed....
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2005-04-01
Team Silent (1996 - 2005)
on 1 april 2005 konami swapped one share of konami computer entertainment tokyo for one share of itself, and the subsidiary stopped existing. team silent was...
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2005-03-15
CU-SeeMe (1993 - 2005)
cu-seeme was the first video call most people ever saw. tim dorcey wrote it at cornell and it went out free in april 1993, a small gray picture that ran on any...
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2005-03-10
Groove Networks (1997 - 2005)
ray ozzie decided in the late nineties that the file server was the problem, and built a collaboration tool with no server in it at all. the workspace lived on...
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2005-03-01
Games Domain (1994 - 2005)
a birmingham developer named dave stanworth put games domain online in march 1994, which made it older than most of the industry it covered. it ran a downloads...
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2005-02-24
Troika Games (1998 - 2005)
three of the people behind the original fallout walked out of interplay on april fools day 1998 and named the studio after the russian word for a set of three....
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2005-02-10
LokiTorrent (2004 - 2005)
lokitorrent was a bittorrent tracker with about 680,000 registered members that spent two months publicly refusing to fold. the mpaa sent a cease and desist in...
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2005-02-09
Ion Storm (1996 - 2005)
john romero and tom hall left id software in 1996 and took the 54th floor of a dallas skyscraper before they had shipped anything. the ad said john romero was...
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2005-02-01
Sony Clié (2000 - 2005)
the clié was sony's palmos pda line. it launched in japan in september 2000 and reached north america in 2002, running palm os over sony's own jog dial...
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2005-02-01
HitClips (2000 - 2005)
a portable player that played one minute of one song, in mono, off a removable plastic chip you bought separately at target. the songs were the radio edits of...
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2005-02-01
EarthStation 5 (2003 - 2005)
earthstation 5 announced itself in june 2003 as a file-sharing network operating out of jenin refugee camp #23 in the west bank, on the argument that american...
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2005-01-14
Media Lab Europe (2000 - 2005)
january 2005 is when the irish government and mit stopped being able to agree on a second funding model, and the board of media lab europe put the lab into...
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2005-01-03
nCUBE (1983 - 2005)
cable television is where the hypercube ended up. five intel engineers left for beaverton, oregon in 1983 to build parallel machines wired as binary n-cubes,...
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2005-01-01
UUNET (1987 - 2005)
uunet ran the wires that the early commercial internet sat on. it started as a usenet feed for unix sysadmins, became the largest us isp by traffic in the mid...
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2005-01-01
GP32 (2001 - 2005)
i missed the gp32. the korean linux handheld from game park shipped in november 2001 and almost nobody outside of the homebrew forums had one. by 2007 the...
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2005-01-01
Ritmoteca.com (1998 - 2005)
a store that sold music by the track before anyone thought people would pay for it that way. ninety-nine cents a song, or nine ninety-nine for an mp3 album you...
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2005-01-01
Adobe Type Manager (1989 - 2005)
adobe shipped atm in 1989 because apple and microsoft had just gone public with truetype and adobe needed an answer that worked on the screen instead of in the...
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2005-01-01
Titus Interactive (1985 - 2005)
titus was a french publisher that spent twenty years being competent and unglamorous, and is now remembered almost entirely for one nintendo 64 game about...
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2005-01-01
Telegard (1986 - 2005)
telegard came out of a copy of wayne bell's wwiv source that nobody had cleared with anybody, and then passed through four more sets of hands, a lawsuit and a...
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2005-01-01
The Romp (2000 - 2005)
fifteen million dollars of private money went into a website that made flash cartoons, and for about a year it looked like the right call: 600,000 registered...
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2005-01-01
ELORG (1971 - 2005)
moscow, 1971: the soviet ministry of foreign trade opened one office holding a monopoly on every computer that crossed the border in either direction, and...
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2005-01-01
Streamwaves (1999 - 2005)
dallas, 1999. jeff tribble and daniel hexter wanted a legal answer to napster, and what they built ran entirely inside a browser with nothing to install. emi...
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2005-01-01
MarthaTalks.com (2003 - 2005)
martha stewart was indicted on 4 june 2003 and had a website of her own up the same day. it carried her own letters alongside the briefs her lawyers filed, and...
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2004-12-31
Adobe PageMaker (1985 - 2004)
pagemaker is the reason desktop publishing exists as a phrase. it walked into 1985 next to the laserwriter and turned the mac into the layout machine for every...
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2004-12-31
HotJava (1995 - 2004)
sun wrote a web browser in its own brand new language to prove the language was good for something, and for a short window it was the only browser on earth...
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2004-12-31
Usina do Som (2000 - 2004)
sixteen million reais of grupo abril's money went into usina do som, which opened on 19 march 2000 and let anyone in brazil assemble a radio station out of its...
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2004-12-31
TC Works Spark (1999 - 2004)
may 1999, and tc works had spent years selling plug-ins that ran inside other people's software before it tried shipping an application of its own. spark was a...
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2004-12-19
SuprNova.org (2002 - 2004)
suprnova was the front door to bittorrent for a year and a half. before isohunt, before mininova, before piratebay had its meme phase, suprnova was where you...
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2004-12-16
OS/2 e-Zine (1995 - 2004)
16 december 2004 is the date on the last issue, and nothing in it says goodbye. the editor apologizes for being busy, and then the issue runs a review of an...
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2004-12-15
CNNfn (1995 - 2004)
cnnfn was cnn's nine-year attempt to compete with cnbc for the american financial-news cable audience between 1995 and 2004. the channel struggled to get...
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2004-12-14
Finreactor (2003 - 2004)
the finnish national bureau of investigation took the servers on 14 december 2004, acting on a complaint filed for microsoft and adobe among others. what they...
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2004-12-09
Entoi (2003 - 2004)
nhn built entoi as its third pillar next to naver and hangame and staffed it from five people up to a hundred. the idea was that you posted and other people...
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2004-12-01
Adobe Atmosphere (1999 - 2004)
adobe atmosphere was a browser plug-in for navigating 3d worlds in internet explorer. the technology came from attitude software's 3d anarchy, acquired by...
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2004-12-01
SoundEdit 16 (1988 - 2004)
soundedit 16 was the macromedia mac audio editor for the shockwave-and-director generation. its lineage started with steve capps coding the original soundedit...
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2004-11-24
Karelia Watson (2001 - 2004)
watson was the $30 mac os x utility dan wood at karelia software shipped on november 27 2001. the pitch was internet content through a familiar mac-style...
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2004-11-23
Cdandco (1995 - 2004)
the commercial court put cdandco into receivership on 18 april 2001 and handed the business to rue du commerce two months after that. before the fall it had...
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2004-11-22
Yahoo! PayDirect (2000 - 2004)
yahoo paydirect was yahoo's attempt at a person-to-person payment service during the paypal era. it launched in march 2000 with cibc national bank as the...
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2004-11-12
Nullsoft (1997 - 2004)
in march 2000 justin frankel published gnutella on his employer's website with a note reading see, aol can bring you good things. aol had it pulled the same...
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2004-11-11
Audion (1999 - 2004)
audion was the panic mp3 player on mac os 9 and os x. apple sat down with panic to talk acquisition and the meeting fell through over a scheduling conflict....
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2004-11-02
Game Neverending (2002 - 2004)
vancouver, 2002: a tiny company started building a massively multiplayer game with no winning condition, where you made objects by combining other objects and...
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2004-10-31
Argonaut Games (1982 - 2004)
the london game studio jez san founded in february 1982 at age 16, named after his initials and the jason myth. peaked in 1993 when its custom super fx chip...
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2004-10-26
ShadowCrew (2002 - 2004)
around four thousand accounts on a forum where stolen card numbers were sold in batches and a designated reviewer tested a sample before the seller was allowed...
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2004-10-20
Bloomba (2003 - 2004)
bloomba was a windows email client whose entire argument was that finding an old message should be instant. stata labs shipped it in october 2003, and pc...
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2004-10-14
Jasc Paint Shop Pro (1990 - 2004)
jasc paint shop pro was the windows shareware photoshop alternative. robert voit started it as a gif2pcx file converter in august 1990 in minneapolis. jasc inc...
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2004-10-14
Jasc Software (1991 - 2004)
on 14 october 2004 corel bought a 120-person company in eden prairie, minnesota that was doing more than thirty million dollars a year selling software by...
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2004-10-06
Commerce One (1994 - 2004)
commerce one was the loudest bubble-era b2b exchange story. founded in 1994 as distrivision, renamed in 1997, ipo'd in july 1999 and rose 190 percent on the...
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2004-09-22
Earth & Beyond (2002 - 2004)
earth and beyond was westwood's last shipped game. ea published it in september 2002 with three races and three professions in a deep-space sandbox aimed at...
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2004-09-09
Gathering of Developers (1998 - 2004)
a rented parking lot across the street from e3, with free barbecue and a stage on it, was most of the marketing budget. gathering of developers opened in...
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2004-09-01
Acclaim Entertainment (1987 - 2004)
acclaim entertainment was a long island console publisher founded in 1987 by greg fischbach, robert holmes, and james scoroposki. it ran the home-port pipeline...
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2004-08-31
Palm.net (1999 - 2004)
in may 1999 palm shipped a handheld with an aerial you flipped up to reach the internet, two years before anyone here could do the equivalent with a phone....
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2004-08-31
마이엠 (MyM) (2004 - 2004)
one hundred megabytes of free email in february 2004, when hotmail was still handing out two. mym opened on the 9th after eighteen months of preparation by...
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2004-08-30
TerraVista (1997 - 2004)
the portuguese state spun up a free hosting portal in 1997 so portuguese people could put a homepage on the new internet. it passed through jazztel, ya.com,...
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2004-08-17
Netscape Composer (1997 - 2004)
netscape composer was a web page editor that arrived as a side effect of installing a browser. it came with communicator 4.0 in june 1997, out of the editor...
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2004-08-01
TeleGarden (1995 - 2004)
ken goldberg and joseph santarromana pointed an industrial robot arm at a tray of soil in 1995 and handed the controls to anyone with a web browser. you could...
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2004-07-31
WON.net (1998 - 2004)
won was the matchmaking spine behind half-life's first six years online. valve built steam in secret while still on sierra's publishing deal, then patched its...
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2004-07-15
Marimba (Castanet) (1996 - 2004)
the silicon valley startup founded by kim polese and three java engineers from sun who left in february '96 to build push tech. castanet pushed software...
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2004-07-01
Delphine Software International (1988 - 2004)
delphine software was paid for by piano records. paul de senneville produced richard clayderman, and in 1988 he put the money from that into a paris game...
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2004-07-01
Smilebit (2000 - 2004)
on 1 july 2004 sega pulled six studio subsidiaries back into itself in a single movement, and smilebit was one of them, four years old to the day. it had been...
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2004-06-24
WEP (1997 - 2004)
wep shipped inside the original 802.11 standard in 1997 and its name was the entire promise: not strong encryption, just as private as a cable. it ran rc4 with...
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2004-06-21
Brightmail (1998 - 2004)
two million email addresses existed for no purpose except to be spammed. brightmail ran them as a probe network, watched what landed in them, and pushed...
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2004-06-01
TheSpark.com (1999 - 2004)
thespark was four harvard students being funny on the web in 1999. it ran snarky personality quizzes and humor pieces, and almost as a side project it...
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2004-06-01
U-matic (1971 - 2004)
u-matic was the first videocassette that worked as a product, three quarters of an inch of tape in a shell you dropped into a slot instead of threading a reel...
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2004-06-01
Microsoft bCentral (1999 - 2004)
redmond paid 265 million dollars for linkexchange in november 1998 and needed somewhere to put it. bcentral opened in september 1999 as microsoft's...
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2004-05-28
TechTV (1998 - 2004)
the cable channel about being on a computer. ziff-davis launched it as zdtv in may 1998 and renamed it techtv in 2000. peaked at 43 million us households with...
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2004-05-05
NGSCB (Palladium) (2002 - 2004)
microsoft unveiled palladium in june 2002 through a magazine article, then renamed it next-generation secure computing base in january 2003. the plan was a...
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2004-05-01
Papyrus Design Group (1987 - 2004)
seventeen years of one idea, held without blinking: that a racing game should model the car rather than the feeling of the car. david kaemmer and omar khudari...
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2004-05-01
Microsoft Broadband Networking (2002 - 2004)
in july 2002 microsoft said out loud that home networking was too hard to use, and then did the microsoft thing about it: built the hardware itself. base...
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2004-05
Xelibri (2003 - 2004)
in january 2003 siemens announced it would sell mobile phones the way a clothing label sells clothes, in seasonal collections that were supposed to go out of...
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2004-04-30
Red Hat Linux (1995 - 2004)
for most of a decade red hat linux was what people meant when they said linux. it came in a cardboard box with printed manuals and a support number, and it...
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2004-04-29
Oldsmobile (1897 - 2004)
thirty five million cars over one hundred and six years, from a curved-dash runabout built on a moving assembly line a decade before ford used one, to a red...
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2004-04-01
Impressions Games (1989 - 2004)
david lester founded impressions in britain in 1989 and sold it to sierra in 1995. from an office in cambridge, massachusetts it made caesar iii and pharaoh,...
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2004-03-15
HyperCard (1987 - 2004)
hypercard was apple's pre-web hypermedia stack. you laid out cards full of buttons and pictures, and you wrote little hypertalk scripts to link them together....
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2004-03-10
ShareReactor (2001 - 2004)
sharereactor held no files. it held ed2k links, which are text, and the reason people used it was that somebody had checked them first. the edonkey network was...
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2004-03-02
Beonex Communicator (2000 - 2004)
ben bucksch wanted a mozilla suite you could hand to someone who actually needed privacy, with kerberos and openpgp wired in rather than bolted on afterward....
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2004-03-01
Netscape Netcenter (1997 - 2004)
netscape netcenter was the portal netscape built on top of its own browser's default homepage in 1997. at peak in 1998 it had around twenty million monthly...
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2004-03-01
Nutuge.com (2002 - 2004)
nutuge.com was a mongolian-language site about the history and present of the mongols, run from inner mongolia by govruud huuchinhuu. nutag is the mongolian...
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2004-03-01
Trellix (1995 - 2004)
dan bricklin wrote visicalc in 1979 and then spent the second half of the nineties on trellix, a program that built web sites out of a map of linked pages...
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2004-03-01
Tymnet (1971 - 2004)
tymnet was the road underneath a lot of things people remember better than the road. it started inside tymshare in 1971 as a way to get customers onto a...
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2004-02-21
Whitehouse.com (1997 - 2004)
the most famous mistype on the late-1990s american web. dan parisi bought the domain in 1997, briefly ran it as a political-satire idea, then turned it into a...
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2004-02-14
VDMSound (2000 - 2004)
vlad romascanu started it in montreal in 1998 because he wanted to capture the midi music out of dos games as a file, and it grew into the thing that gave an...
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2004-02-12
Origin Systems (1983 - 2004)
origin systems was founded on march 4 1983 by richard garriott (lord british) with his brother robert and father owen. across two decades it shipped the ultima...
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2004-02-01
BonziBuddy (1999 - 2004)
bonzi was a purple cartoon gorilla that lived on your windows desktop, told you the time, sang dumb little songs, and quietly collected information from your...
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2004-02-01
Easy CD Creator (1996 - 2004)
adaptec bought corel's cd creator in june 1996 and merged it with easy-cd pro, the software it had picked up from incat systems the year before, and the...
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2004-01-23
BarrysWorld (1998 - 2004)
a few people running clan servers in britain turned them into a public service in 1998 and gave away free game hosting to anybody with a modem. to pay for it...
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2004-01-16
Legend Entertainment (1989 - 2004)
legend entertainment was started in 1989 by two people who had just watched infocom close, and its whole argument was that the text adventure did not have to...
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2004-01-15
Speak Freely (1991 - 2004)
speak freely was free software for talking over the internet, written by john walker, the autodesk co-founder, and posted to usenet in 1991. it carried...
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2004-01-14
goatse.cx (1999 - 2004)
the shock url that ran for five years on christmas island's .cx cctld. one image, one filename, hundreds of millions of links sent under false labels. the...
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2004-01-07
RealOne Player (2001 - 2004)
realone player was the brand realnetworks used between december 2001 and january 2004 for its merged player-jukebox application. it carried the goldpass...
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2004-01-05
AmphetaDesk (2001 - 2004)
one person wrote a news reader in perl because every existing one annoyed him and none of them were usable by his mother. it installed as a tiny server on your...
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2004-01-01
Microsoft Train Simulator (2001 - 2004)
microsoft train simulator was a june 2001 sim from kuju entertainment in godalming, published by microsoft games studio. six routes across austria and japan...
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2004-01-01
Photo CD (1992 - 2004)
photo cd was kodak's 1992 attempt to put your photographs onto a cd-rom. you dropped off a roll of 35mm film at a participating lab, paid roughly three dollars...
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2004-01-01
Millicent (1995 - 2004)
micropayments for the web, designed at digital equipment in the mid nineties by people who understood that credit card fees would never let you charge a tenth...
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2004-01-01
Castlewood Orb (1999 - 2004)
ex-syquest engineers founded castlewood in 1996 and shipped the orb in 1999 with a 2.2 gigabyte removable hard disk cartridge. a 5.7 gigabyte version followed...
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2004-01-01
The Bitmap Brothers (1987 - 2004)
the wapping-based amiga and atari st studio three young british programmers founded in 1987. ran best-selling 16-bit titles through the early 1990s with a...
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2004-01-01
Odigo Messenger (1999 - 2004)
a 1999 israeli messenger that bridged icq and yahoo into one client. its 'people-search' would put you in a chat with strangers who happened to be on the same...
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2004-01-01
Ananova (2000 - 2010)
ananova was a computer-generated newsreader with green hair, launched in 2000 by the uk press association and sold to orange for ninety-five million pounds...
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2004-01-01
Comet Cursor (1997 - 2004)
comet cursor was a free download from the late 90s that let a website change your mouse pointer into its own little branded shape. for a few years it was...
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2004-01-01
VRML (1994 - 2004)
the 3D web that everyone described in 1996 and almost nobody could load. vrml let you write worlds you walked through in a browser, spinning logos and boxy...
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2004-01-01
Media Whores Online (2000 - 2004)
media whores online was an anonymous american political site that spent four years accusing named reporters of working for the other team. nobody ever...
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2004-01-01
TapCIS (1981 - 2004)
tapcis existed because compuserve charged by the hour. you wrote your mail and your forum replies offline in a dos program and pressed one key. it dialed in,...
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2004-01-01
The Hive (1997 - 2004)
a texan named hobart huson, writing as strike, opened a forum in 1997 for people who wanted to argue about the practical chemistry of drugs. it ran for seven...
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2004-01-01
Visual J++ (1996 - 2004)
microsoft announced in december 1995 that it was licensing java from sun and shipped its own compiler ten months later. then it added windows-only extensions...
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2004-01-01
Planet Hot Wheels (2001 - 2004)
planet hot wheels was mattel's online racing world, launched in 2001 for windows and mac. you raced for credits and spent them on cars and parts, and specially...
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2004-01-01
Immunix (1998 - 2004)
portland, oregon, 1998: a research group spins out of a graduate project to sell a linux you cannot easily break into. immunix was red hat with the compiler...
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2004-01-01
Camera Image File Format (1997 - 2004)
february 1997: canon publishes a raw file specification and hands its upkeep to a body called the ciff forum. the format became .crw, the container early canon...
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2004-01-01
ANT Fresco (1994 - 2004)
a cambridge company that had been making ethernet cards for the acorn archimedes wrote the first real web browser for risc os, then spent ten years selling it...
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2003-12-31
Iomega Zip Disk (1995 - 2003)
the zip disk was iomega's bet that the next floppy would also be a floppy, only fatter. it briefly worked. then cd-r media got cheap and the click-of-death...
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2003-12-31
Microsoft 3D Movie Maker (1995 - 2003)
3d movie maker was a kids' animation studio microsoft shipped on a CD-ROM in 1995. it ran on windows 95, used the BRender 3d engine, let an eight-year-old...
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2003-12-31
Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1985 - 2003)
grolier shipped the first cd-rom encyclopedia in 1985 under the new grolier electronic encyclopedia name, then rebranded the multimedia version in 1995. it...
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2003-12-31
Imation SuperDisk LS-120 (1996 - 2003)
imation launched the superdisk ls-120 in 1996, a 120 megabyte diskette format from 3m's storage spinoff with panasonic manufacturing the drive. it read regular...
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2003-12-31
Sun Cobalt Qube (1998 - 2003)
the cobalt qube was a small blue cube that ran red hat linux as a turnkey web server. you plugged it in, opened a browser to an ip on your lan, ran through a...
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2003-12-31
Cybiko (2000 - 2003)
cybiko was a teen-targeted handheld that paired a rubber qwerty keyboard with a 100-meter peer-to-peer radio so kids in the same school hallway could text each...
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2003-12-31
WonderSwan (1999 - 2003)
wonderswan was the last handheld gunpei yokoi worked on before he died in a 1997 car accident. bandai shipped it posthumously in march 1999 at ¥4,800, ran it...
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2003-12-31
New World Computing (1984 - 2003)
new world computing was the agoura hills studio jon van caneghem set up in 1984. it shipped might and magic 1 in 1986 and heroes of might and magic 1 in 1995....
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2003-12-31
JenniCam (1996 - 2003)
jennicam was a 24/7 webcam jennifer ringley pointed at her dickinson college dorm room on 14 april 1996. the image refreshed every three minutes and ran for...
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2003-12-31
Silmarils (1987 - 2003)
silmarils was two brothers who had been writing games since 1983 on trs-80s and orics, and who turned it into a company in october 1987 in a town east of...
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2003-12-31
Modern Humorist (2000 - 2003)
modern humorist was a comedy web magazine run out of dumbo in brooklyn by john aboud and michael colton, two harvard lampoon alumni who turned a parody of talk...
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2003-12-31
Sony Mavica (1981 - 2003)
every digital camera of the late 1990s had the same unsolved problem, which was getting the picture out of it. sony's answer was to put a 3.5 inch floppy drive...
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2003-12-31
Berkeley Softworks (1983 - 2003)
brian dougherty walked out of the imagic collapse with roughly a hundred thousand dollars to his name and started again two blocks from his old campus. what he...
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2003-12-22
Microsoft Smart Display (2003 - 2003)
microsoft smart display, codenamed mira, was a battery-powered wireless touchscreen monitor that ran windows ce and acted as a remote thin client for the pc on...
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2003-12-22
Wink Communications (1994 - 2003)
directv declined to renew, the carriage agreement ran out on 22 december 2003, and opentv deactivated about 10.4 million wink-enabled set-top boxes at once....
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2003-12-08
Black Isle Studios (1996 - 2003)
black isle studios was the small interplay division that made the original two fallout games and planescape torment, three of the most-cited western rpgs of...
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2003-12-07
Kazaa Lite (2002 - 2003)
kazaa lite was kazaa with the spyware removed, built in april 2002 by people who never gave their names and never charged anything. it ran on the same network...
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2003-12-01
Dotmusic (1995 - 2003)
music week, the british record industry's trade paper, put a site online on 1 june 1995 and relaunched it in december 1998 for fans rather than for the trade....
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2003-11-19
Digex (1991 - 2003)
digex started in a maryland basement in 1991 as one of the east coast's first commercial internet providers, and ended up running the websites of martha...
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2003-11-15
Adobe LiveMotion (2000 - 2003)
adobe shipped livemotion in 2000 as the alternative to macromedia flash. it had an after-effects-style timeline and a vector engine that could export to swf....
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2003-11-09
c2it (2000 - 2003)
the largest consumer bank in the world decided in 2000 that payments between two people were a bank's business and that paypal was a passing condition. it...
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2003-11-06
Compile (1982 - 2003)
compile spent the eighties making shoot em ups for the msx and the pc engine, then in 1991 released puyo puyo, which became one of the largest puzzle games in...
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2003-11-03
Mucky Foot Productions (1997 - 2003)
there is an illness in two point hospital called mucky feet. it is named for a guildford studio that opened in january 1997 with four people out of bullfrog...
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2003-10-29
Handspring (1998 - 2003)
priced at twenty dollars on 20 june 2000, open at twenty seven the following morning, and worth 3.6 billion dollars by the closing bell. two years and two...
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2003-10-21
Microsoft Photo Editor (1996 - 2003)
photo editor was the small image program that opened when you double-clicked a picture embedded in a word or powerpoint file. it shipped with office 97 in late...
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2003-10-01
J-Sky (1999 - 2003)
j-sky was the mobile internet service j-phone launched in december 1999, ten months after docomo's i-mode and into a market that already had two walled gardens...
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2003-10-01
J-Phone (1999 - 2003)
j-phone was the third carrier in japan and it won the one argument that mattered outside japan. in november 2000 it shipped a handset from sharp with a camera...
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2003-10-01
MSN Companion (2000 - 2003)
$199 on the shelf, $790 in mandatory dial-up before you got there. microsoft unveiled the msn companion at comdex in november 1999 and the first unit, compaq's...
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2003-09-30
SegaNet (2000 - 2003)
seganet was sega's bet that a console could be its own internet provider. for a year it worked. phantasy star online ran on low-latency dedicated servers...
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2003-09-30
NEC PC-9800 Series (1982 - 2003)
nec shipped the pc-9801 in october 1982 and then spent a decade owning japanese computing, past sixty percent of the market by 1991. the reason was writing. an...
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2003-09-26
Nupedia (2000 - 2003)
nupedia launched in march 2000 in san diego under bomis, with jimmy wales as funder and larry sanger as editor-in-chief, running a seven-step peer-review...
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2003-09-01
Blogger Pro (2002 - 2003)
thirty-five dollars a year, and it is what kept the lights on at pyra labs when the crash had taken everything else. spellchecking and drafts sat behind that...
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2003-08-29
Motor City Online (2001 - 2003)
motor city online was a subscription racing mmo from ea seattle, released on october 29 2001. it had started inside the need for speed series as need for...
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2003-08-27
RealPC (1997 - 2003)
a new chief executive at fwb software opened the books in august 2003 and found that the mac os x version of realpc, promised for that summer with 3d...
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2003-08-24
HotDog (1994 - 2003)
hotdog was an html editor first released june 1994 by a 22-year-old australian developer named steve outtrim. he founded sausage software in melbourne in 1995...
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2003-08-11
SpeechWorks (1994 - 2003)
boston, 1994, two founders and a company called applied language technologies. it renamed itself speechworks and spent nine years selling the thing that made...
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2003-08-03
Listen.com (1998 - 2003)
listen.com was the music search engine that turned into rhapsody. rob reid founded the company in 1998 in san francisco. the rhapsody on-demand service...
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2003-08-01
Connectix (1988 - 2003)
a gray plastic sphere the size of a golf ball, plugged into the back of a mac, shipping in august 1994 for under a hundred dollars. that was the quickcam and...
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2003-08-01
PsychoExGirlfriend.com (2001 - 2003)
fifty voicemail messages, each between forty-five seconds and two minutes, uploaded in the spring of 2001 by a man calling himself mark. it became one of the...
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2003-07-16
Rocket eBook (1998 - 2003)
nuvomedia shipped the rocket ebook in late 1998, five years before the kindle, out of a two-person palo alto startup founded by martin eberhard and marc...
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2003-07-15
Transformation Story Archive (1995 - 2003)
the transformation story archive was collecting amateur fiction about people turning into other things by may 1995, which makes it the oldest archive of its...
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2003-07-08
Roger Wilco (1999 - 2003)
roger wilco was the freeware voice-chat client that put voice on a 56k modem in 1999 before any pc shooter shipped voice chat of its own. resounding technology...
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2003-07-03
Casady & Greene (1984 - 2003)
nineteen years of boxed macintosh software ended on 3 july 2003. the publisher that put crystal quest in front of every mac ii buyer and sold soundjam mp to...
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2003-07-01
StarSight Telecast (1986 - 2003)
somewhere in your city a pbs station was broadcasting the week's television schedule in the invisible lines above the picture, and if you owned the right...
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2003-07-01
ACTV, Inc. (1989 - 2003)
in july 1989 a delaware corporation was formed in new york to sell a thing television could not yet do, and it kept selling it for fourteen years without ever...
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2003-06-30
MCI Mail (1983 - 2003)
the first commercial american email service. launched in 1983 by mci to attach a mailbox to a long-distance phone bill. lived twenty years, killed by free...
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2003-06-30
election.com (1999 - 2003)
election.com ran the arizona democratic presidential primary in march 2000, which let registered democrats cast a real ballot from a browser and had it...
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2003-06-30
Dow Jones News/Retrieval (1973 - 2003)
dow jones put the wall street journal on a wire in 1973 and charged by the minute to read it, which worked because the person reading was on the clock anyway...
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2003-06-25
Data East (1976 - 2003)
data east made arcade games for twenty seven years and is remembered for burgertime and karate champ, which undersells a catalog of about a hundred and fifty...
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2003-06-03
MNG (2001 - 2003)
on 27 february 2003 a mozilla developer filed a bug noting that the mng decoder was about the size of every other image decoder in the browser put together....
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2003-06-01
Brunching Shuttlecocks (1997 - 2003)
lore sjöberg and dave neilsen launched brunching shuttlecocks in june 1997 as one of the early text-and-image personal humor sites that pre-dated modern blogs....
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2003-06-01
New Internet Computer (2000 - 2003)
larry ellison spent the second half of the nineties insisting that the personal computer was too complicated and too expensive and that the network would do...
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2003-06-01
NetSlaves (1998 - 2003)
netslaves went up in october 1998 after new york book agents told steve baldwin and bill lessard that their idea worked better as a magazine article. so they...
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2003-06-01
eBituaries (2000 - 2003)
a hosting company switched the domain off in june 2003, and that was the end of ebituaries, which had spent three years selling people a web page for someone...
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2003-05-31
WASTE (2003 - 2003)
justin frankel posted waste on the nullsoft website on 28 may 2003 and aol took it down three days later, replacing the download with a notice telling anyone...
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2003-05-28
The 3DO Company (1991 - 2003)
the 3do company was trip hawkins's post-ea second act, set up in september 1991 around a licensed console-standard model for the 3do interactive multiplayer....
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2003-05-27
Nando Times (1994 - 2003)
in 1994 the associated press did not have a website and neither did reuters. a newspaper in raleigh, north carolina put a desk of editors on its own wire feed...
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2003-05-20
ZoneJeuX (1999 - 2003)
ten point six million euros went into it and it never found a way to pay for itself. launched by a belgacom subsidiary in november 1999, zonejeux was where...
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2003-05-19
Pressplay (2001 - 2003)
pressplay was the major labels trying to build the legal music store they should have built four years earlier and refusing to make it good. downloads expired...
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2003-05-19
Cool Edit Pro (1995 - 2003)
the shareware-then-commercial windows audio editor syntrillium shipped from 1995, with cool edit pro arriving for multitrack work and the brand peaking at...
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2003-05-16
Archos Jukebox (2000 - 2003)
archos put a six gigabyte hard drive inside a plastic brick and shipped it on 9 december 2000, ten months before the ipod was announced. it mounted as an...
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2003-05-13
iLoo (2003 - 2003)
msn uk announced on 30 april 2003 that it was building a portable toilet with a wireless broadband connection and a screen in it, for the british summer...
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2003-05-07
Bethlehem Steel (1857 - 2003)
the towers of the golden gate bridge were fabricated from plate rolled by a company in the lehigh valley that also delivered 1,121 ships during the second...
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2003-05-06
Linux Router Project (1997 - 2003)
one point four four megabytes was the entire budget, and dave cinege got a working router into it in 1997. the linux router project turned a dead 486 with two...
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2003-05-01
Gremlin Interactive (1984 - 2003)
gremlin started above a computer shop in sheffield in 1984 and lasted nineteen years, which almost nobody in the british software business managed. it went...
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2003-04-30
TVGoHome (1999 - 2003)
tvgohome was the satirical fake tv listings site charlie brooker ran from september 1999 to april 2003, formatted to mock the british radio times print...
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2003-04-30
Billpoint (1998 - 2003)
billpoint was ebay's own payment service, bought in 1999 and relaunched in 2000 as a joint venture with wells fargo, sitting on the buttons of the largest...
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2003-04-30
PlaceWare (1996 - 2003)
in march 1997, when most people's connection to the internet was a modem making a noise, placeware shipped a product that put several hundred people into one...
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2003-04-23
Oingo (1998 - 2003)
two caltech graduates built a search engine that matched meanings instead of words, using a princeton lexicon that had taken fifteen years to assemble, and...
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2003-04-08
Mac OS Runtime for Java (1997 - 2003)
january 1997, and the macintosh had its own java virtual machine, written by apple rather than licensed from sun. it implemented jdk 1.0.2, shipped inside mac...
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2003-04-01
Multimania (1997 - 2003)
the GeoCities of france. free web hosting in exchange for a banner ad at the top of your page. millions of personal homepages, fan sites, and embarrassing...
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2003-04-01
All Your Base Are Belong To Us (1991 - 2003)
the sentence was printed into a mega drive shooter in july 1991 by somebody at toaplan who did not speak much english, and it sat there for a decade before...
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2003-04-01
Enix (1975 - 2003)
enix started in 1975 as a company that printed real estate classifieds and got into games in 1982 by running a programming contest. the people who won it built...
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2003-04
TWICS (1982 - 2003)
in 1993 a nonprofit language school in tokyo leased a line from a small american company and became the first place in japan where an ordinary person could buy...
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2003-03-31
Westwood Studios (1985 - 2003)
westwood was founded in 1985 in las vegas by brett sperry and louis castle, originally as westwood associates. dune ii in 1992 effectively defined the...
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2003-03-31
Fathom.com (2000 - 2003)
twenty five million dollars of columbia university money went into fathom, and by some accounts closer to thirty. sixty five thousand people made an account...
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2003-03-31
Game Boy (1989 - 2003)
gunpei yokoi's rule was to take old cheap technology and use it somewhere nobody had thought to put it. the game boy had a worse screen than the lynx and the...
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2003-03-19
Inktomi (1996 - 2003)
inktomi was a 1996 spinoff out of uc berkeley, founded by eric brewer and paul gauthier on the premise that you could parallelize a web index across cheap...
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2003-03-09
Digitiser (1993 - 2003)
paul rose and tim moore wrote a daily video game magazine inside a television signal for ten years under the names mr biffo and mr hairs, and never once put...
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2003-02-25
divine, inc. (1999 - 2003)
a man who had just sold his software company for three and a half billion dollars built an incubator in chicago and put thirty-eight people on the board, one...
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2003-02-17
Pyra Labs (1999 - 2003)
pyra labs was a four-person company that built blogger out of leftover code for a project-management tool nobody wanted. it ran out of money in 2001, lost...
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2003-02-07
Atari Games (1984 - 2003)
when warner cut atari in half in 1984 it sold the home division to jack tramiel and kept the arcade cabinets, and the part it kept was renamed atari games. it...
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2003-02-06
Kakuto Chojin: Back Alley Brutal (2002 - 2003)
seven seconds of quranic recitation, lifted off a german sample library cd from 1995, sat underneath the theme music of a character named asad. microsoft's own...
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2003-01-31
Sputnik7 (1999 - 2003)
the streaming music video site that wanted to be MTV on the web in 1999. curated channels for indie rock, electronic, hip-hop, anime. the bandwidth costs were...
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2003-01-31
Microsoft Entertainment Pack (1990 - 2003)
the box where freecell and jezzball came from before they were free with windows. microsoft sold four entertainment packs from 1990 to 1992, then the best of...
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2003-01-31
SAPARi (1997 - 2003)
6 february 1997 is early for a graphical chat world with avatars you could dress, and sony shipped it preinstalled on vaio laptops for four years, which got it...
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2003-01-23
PGPfone (1995 - 2003)
on 23 january 2003 a network manager at mit opened a word processor, typed two sentences saying the software was no longer being distributed and probably would...
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2003-01-16
Northern Light (1997 - 2003)
the search engine that grouped your results into folders. it indexed the open web and a separate "special collection" of paid premium content (papers,...
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2003-01-15
Liquid Audio (1996 - 2003)
liquid audio tried to ship a secure-download music store in 1996, four years before napster proved nobody wanted to pay or wait. the platform sat at the...
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2003-01-01
Vizzavi (2000 - 2003)
vizzavi was one of the most expensive startups in internet history and almost nobody remembers using it. in 2000 vodafone and vivendi poured a planned 1.6...
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2003-01-01
Sir-Tech (1979 - 2003)
sir-tech was a family business in ogdensburg, new york that published a dungeon game for the apple ii in 1981 and accidentally set the template for the...
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2003-01-01
Xupiter (2002 - 2003)
xupiter was the toolbar that taught a generation of windows users what a browser hijacker was. it arrived through an activex install on a page you did not mean...
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2003-01-01
Arianna (1996 - 2003)
italy got its own crawler in 1996, out of a university department in pisa and a portal called italia on line. for a few years arianna was where the italian web...
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2003-01-01
PIRCH (1995 - 2003)
pirch was the other irc client. northwest computer services shipped it as shareware, and the last build, pirch98, arrived in 1998 with nothing after it. the...
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2003-01-01
XyWrite (1982 - 2003)
dave erickson and john hild left atex and founded xyquest in june 1982, shipping xywrite that september as a personal computer version of the mainframe...
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2003-01-01
HomeRF (1998 - 2003)
more than a hundred companies signed up in 1998 to a radio standard for the house, one that carried voice and data on the same link so a cordless phone and a...
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2003-01-01
ClarkNet (1993 - 2003)
a cow barn on a farm in howard county, maryland held the machines for the first internet provider the baltimore area ever had. jamie clark was deaf and so were...
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2003-01-01
GirlGeeks (1998 - 2003)
two filmmakers started girlgeeks in 1998 as a documentary about women in computing, and the original name carried a question mark. the site outlived both the...
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2003-01-01
Lovemail (1998 - 2003)
a cartoon heart with wings, and the word lovemail under it. the site opened in 1998 promising free postcards with poems written specially for it, became a free...
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2003-01-01
Travel Companion Exchange (1982 - 2003)
jens jurgen ran a matching service out of long island from 1982 and would not move it onto the internet, because he did not trust the web with his members'...
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2002-12-31
Lotus Word Pro (Ami Pro) (1988 - 2002)
ami pro was the first fully functional word processor for windows, shipped by samna corporation in 1988, a year before microsoft word for windows even existed....
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2002-12-31
Pokémon Mini (2001 - 2002)
the pokemon mini was the smallest cartridge-based system nintendo ever shipped. seventy grams. a 96 by 64 monochrome lcd. inside the case sat a rumble motor...
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2002-12-31
HP Jornada (1998 - 2002)
hp shipped the jornada 820 in 1998 as a clamshell windows ce handheld pc with a real keyboard for execs and field engineers. the line ran through the 720...
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2002-12-31
CliqueMusic (2000 - 2002)
cliquemusic launched on 18 may 2000 with a million dollars behind it and most of brazil's serious music critics on the masthead, and for two years it was the...
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2002-12-31
Quintet (1989 - 2002)
quintet was founded in april 1989 by two people who had left nihon falcom after making ys, and for six years everything it built came out through enix on the...
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2002-12-31
Psikyo (1992 - 2002)
psikyo was ten years of vertically scrolling shooters made in kyoto by people who had left video system after building aero fighters there. the games are short...
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2002-12-31
Iobox (1999 - 2002)
jari ovaskainen sold his car to put the first hundred and twenty thousand dollars into a finnish startup that put email and a portal onto wap phones. nineteen...
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2002-12-31
Poo-Chi (2000 - 2002)
ten million of them went out the door in eight months at $24.99 each, which is how a plastic dog with red led eyes for a face became the toy that saved...
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2002-12-18
Mobile Adapter GB (2001 - 2002)
mobile adapter gb was a cable and a cartridge that let a game boy color or a game boy advance dial out through a japanese mobile phone. it shipped on 27...
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2002-12-13
Constellation 3D (1996 - 2002)
one hundred and forty gigabytes on a single disc, announced in a year when a dvd held four and a half. constellation 3d demonstrated a fifty gigabyte prototype...
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2002-12-12
MapBlast (1996 - 2002)
mapblast was the other map site, the one you went to when mapquest was slow or wrong. vicinity corporation ran it from 1996 and syndicated the same maps out to...
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2002-12-04
Aimster (Madster) (2000 - 2002)
aimster was a file-sharing tool that piggybacked on aol instant messenger buddy lists, built by rensselaer polytechnic professor john deep in august 2000 and...
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2002-12-01
Lokau (1999 - 2002)
lokau was the brazilian auction site that launched in july 1999 from sao paulo. iBest bought it in 2001 and made it the portal's exclusive auctions channel. in...
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2002-12-01
Gobe Software (1997 - 2002)
the people who wrote clarisworks left claris, moved to portland and built the office suite that beos did not have. gobe productive shipped in august 1998 and...
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2002-11-15
Quam (2001 - 2002)
16.45 billion marks bought a german 3G license in august 2000. the company that paid it, a joint venture between telefonica and sonera trading as quam,...
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2002-11-06
LetsBuyIt.com (1999 - 2002)
the swedish group-buying dot-com johan stael von holstein founded in april 1999. floated on the german neuer markt in july 2000 just after the dot-com crash...
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2002-11-01
CDNow (1994 - 2002)
cdnow was the first place you could buy a cd online with a credit card, before amazon had a music store and before napster made the whole question moot. it ran...
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2002-11-01
AOL TV (2000 - 2002)
webtv already existed and was already not working, and that did not stop aol from shipping its own version in june 2000. aol tv was a philips set-top box...
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2002-10-23
Intertainer (1996 - 2002)
jonathan taplin started intertainer in 1996 and had movies running over cable and dsl lines into american homes while most of the country was still on a modem....
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2002-10-18
DataPlay (1998 - 2002)
dataplay was a 32 millimeter optical disc in a cartridge, 500 megabytes across two sides, designed to replace the cd with something the size of a coin. it...
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2002-10-01
Teledesic (1994 - 2003)
teledesic was announced in march 1994 as the internet-in-the-sky company. bill gates and craig mccaw each put five million dollars in. the plan was 840...
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2002-10-01
Cryo Interactive (1992 - 2002)
cryo was the french studio that decided adventure games should be about places rather than puzzles, and then went and made them with the people who own the...
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2002-10-01
Corel Ventura (1986 - 2002)
three engineers out of digital research built ventura publisher and xerox put it out at the end of 1986, which made it the first serious desktop publishing...
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2002-09-27
Viant (1996 - 2002)
june 1999 to september 2002 is the whole arc: an ipo, a market cap over two billion dollars by christmas, then three years of layoffs and a stock-for-stock...
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2002-09-18
General Magic (1990 - 2002)
general magic was a 1990 spinoff out of apple, founded by marc porat with bill atkinson and andy hertzfeld. it built magic cap, a pda operating system with a...
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2002-09-12
PurchasePro.com (1997 - 2002)
charles e. johnson jr was worth about 1.26 billion dollars on paper in december 1999, three months after taking a las vegas company public on the idea that...
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2002-09-11
Adequacy.org (2001 - 2002)
adequacy.org opened on 4 july 2001 with the slogan news for grown-ups and a masthead of people who had spent years trolling slashdot. the method was to write...
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2002-09-09
Datek Online (1996 - 2002)
datek online sold stock trades over the web for $9.99 at a point when a full-service broker still charged you a hundred dollars and a phone call, and it got...
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2002-09-05
Lante (1984 - 2002)
fifty four dollars and ninety four cents on 11 february 2000, up from a twenty dollar offer price, one of the loudest first days of the entire bubble. lante...
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2002-09-04
VoiceStream Wireless (1994 - 2002)
voicestream was the american carrier that bet on gsm while the rest of the country was split between cdma and tdma. that bet is the whole reason deutsche...
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2002-09-01
Broadcast.com (1995 - 2002)
broadcast.com was the streaming portal yahoo bought for about $5.7 billion in stock in july 1999, the most expensive acquisition in yahoo's history at the...
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2002-09-01
Internet Explorer for UNIX (1997 - 2002)
microsoft's browser for solaris and hp-ux, given away free for the x window system from november 1997. it existed because netscape held something like 85...
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2002-08-31
Arthur Andersen (1913 - 2002)
on 14 march 2002 the justice department indicted an accounting firm rather than the people inside it, and the clients began leaving that same week. the...
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2002-08-19
BeSeen (1998 - 2002)
looksmart bought a texas company ten weeks after it incorporated and got a brand that handed out chat rooms and counters to anyone with a home page. four years...
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2002-08-01
Yahoo! Internet Life (1995 - 2002)
yahoo internet life was a monthly print magazine about the internet, published by ziff davis between fall 1995 and august 2002. it started as zd internet life...
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2002-08-01
Presto Studios (1992 - 2002)
presto studios incorporated in san diego in july 1992 so that a group of people in their twenties could finish a time travel adventure nobody wanted to...
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2002-08-01
TrueType core fonts for the Web (1996 - 2002)
in 1996 microsoft began handing out eleven typefaces at no charge, for windows and for the macintosh, so a page could be designed at one end and arrive looking...
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2002-07-21
WorldCom (1983 - 2006)
worldcom was a long-distance reseller that bernie ebbers built out of a hattiesburg coffee shop in 1983 and grew into the second-largest carrier in the us on a...
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2002-07-17
Apple iTools (2000 - 2002)
itools was apple's first bundled online service, introduced by steve jobs at macworld san francisco in january 2000. it gave mac users a free mac.com email...
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2002-07-16
Scient (1997 - 2002)
eric greenberg walked out of viant in 1997 with a severance check and used it to fund the firm that would spend the next three years beating viant. by the...
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2002-07-08
Adobe PhotoDeluxe (1996 - 2002)
photodeluxe was the cd-rom adobe gave away with scanners so the box would feel full. version 1.0 sold over a million copies, version 2.0 was the best-selling...
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2002-07-02
Ebone (1992 - 2002)
europe's national research networks agreed a shared backbone at a ripe meeting in geneva in 1991 and had it running the next year on 256 kbit/s links. ten...
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2002-07-01
StarMedia (1996 - 2002)
starmedia was the pan-latin-american portal play, in spanish and portuguese, founded in august 1996 by fernando espuelas and jack chen in new york. it floated...
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2002-07-01
PocketStation (1999 - 2002)
the pocketstation was a playstation memory card with a tiny screen and an infrared port, released in japan on 23 january 1999 for 3,000 yen. compatible games...
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2002-06-30
Direct Hit (1998 - 2002)
direct hit launched in april 1998 from boston, founded by gary culliss and mike cassidy. its pitch was that the rank of a result came from how often searchers...
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2002-06-30
Quiero TV (2000 - 2002)
quiero tv started broadcasting in may 2000 and tried to sell spain pay television through the aerial already on the roof, instead of a dish or a cable. the...
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2002-06-28
RealNames (1996 - 2002)
realnames sold you your own name in the address bar of internet explorer, which worked because it had bought the address bar of internet explorer. microsoft...
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2002-06-27
Netscape Online (1999 - 2002)
aol bought netscape in 1999 and used the name in britain to run a free isp against freeserve. there was no subscription, because the phone company handed the...
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2002-06-05
ManBeef.com (2001 - 2002)
manbeef.com went up on 4 january 2001 selling human flesh by the cut, with recipes underneath and a merchandise page at the back, and none of it was real. the...
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2002-06-03
Napster (1999 - 2002)
shawn fanning was 19 when he wrote it in his college dorm. the site let anyone share mp3s with anyone else. between 1999 and 2001 it had 80 million users. the...
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2002-06-01
Security First Network Bank (1995 - 2002)
security first network bank opened on 18 october 1995 with a web page and nothing else. the office of thrift supervision had never chartered a bank that...
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2002-05-31
KPNQwest (1999 - 2002)
kpn and qwest set up a company in 1999 to lay fiber rings across europe and sell capacity on them. by 2000 the network was reckoned to be carrying more than...
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2002-05-30
Caldera OpenLinux (1997 - 2002)
caldera openlinux was the late nineties business-targeted linux distribution from caldera systems in orem utah, descended from german lst software's distro and...
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2002-05-30
Dingo Blue (1999 - 2002)
a gas company that had been lighting sydney since 1837 bought an internet and telephone brand in december 2000 for 22 million dollars, on the theory that a...
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2002-05-22
Mac OS 9 (1999 - 2002)
mac os 9 was the last of the classic mac os releases, the end of the system 7 lineage that had been running on apple machines since 1991. it shipped in october...
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2002-05-20
Dancing Baby (1996 - 2002)
the dancing baby was never meant to be seen by the public. it was a sample file bundled with character studio in august 1996 to show off what the software...
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2002-05-01
Cool Beans World (2001 - 2002)
a sheffield animation studio built a subscription website of moving comics in 2001 and got pat mills, simon bisley, kevin o'neill and clive barker to work on...
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2002-05-01
ITV Digital (1998 - 2002)
ondigital launched in november 1998 as the first pay-tv platform that came in through the ordinary aerial on your roof, which was meant to be its advantage...
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2002-04-30
Majestic (2001 - 2002)
electronic arts spent around twenty million dollars on a game with almost no screen. it reached you by telephone and by fax, in the middle of an ordinary...
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2002-04-29
Medyakronik (2000 - 2002)
medyakronik read every turkish daily newspaper each morning and published the criticism the same afternoon, which nobody in turkey had been doing at that speed...
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2002-04-15
iPlanet (1999 - 2002)
aol bought netscape in 1999 and handed the server software straight to sun microsystems. the three year joint venture that came out of that sold web servers...
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2002-04-11
Microsoft Hailstorm (2001 - 2002)
hailstorm was bill gates pitching, in march 2001, a microsoft-run cloud that would hold your contacts, calendar, mail and notifications, with passport as the...
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2002-04-11
Kalisto Entertainment (1990 - 2002)
kalisto was a bordeaux studio started by a nineteen year old in 1990 that ended up listed on the paris stock exchange nine years later, at close to the worst...
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2002-04-04
SceneOne (1999 - 2002)
flextech built an entertainment listings service in february 1999 and then spent three years pushing it through every screen a cable company could reach. the...
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2002-04-01
ICL (1968 - 2002)
the british government built a computer company in 1968 by merging what was left of the domestic industry into a single firm, then pointed it at ibm. it worked...
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2002-04-01
Sneak Prevue (1991 - 2002)
a laserdisc player sat in the cable headend with an amiga 2000 beside it, and a satellite feed told both machines what tonight's pay-per-view lineup was and...
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2002-03-31
Service Merchandise (1934 - 2002)
service merchandise opened as a tennessee five-and-dime in 1934 and rebuilt itself in 1960 as a catalog-showroom chain where customers wrote item numbers on...
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2002-03-31
CAPTAIN (1984 - 2002)
nippon telegraph and telephone's videotex system, announced in 1978 and on sale from november 1984. japanese needs thousands of characters, so captain did not...
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2002-03-31
Netsgo (1997 - 2002)
june 1997, and sk telecom put a service on the phone lines that was half web portal and half korean pc communication network, with its own browser shipped on a...
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2002-03-31
Swissair (1931 - 2002)
chf 123 million was still in the accounts on 2 october 2001, which ernst & young established afterwards. it did not matter at 15:45 that afternoon, when the...
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2002-03-27
ChickClick (1998 - 2002)
heidi swanson pitched a network of girl-run websites to imagine media in 1998 and got funded, which in that particular year was not a hard sell. chickclick...
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2002-03-15
HoTMetaL (1994 - 2002)
the first html editor anybody sold for money, out of toronto in 1994, built on top of an sgml engine that had been written for a stricter kind of document....
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2002-03-04
Ansett Australia (1936 - 2002)
reg ansett was licensed off the hamilton to melbourne road route in 1935, so he bought an aircraft and flew it instead, starting on 17 february 1936. sixty...
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2002-03-01
Sonique (1998 - 2002)
sonique was the other winamp. mediascience built it in bozeman montana, lycos bought the company for thirty-eight million dollars in 1999, and the final 1.96...
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2002-03-01
Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia (1989 - 2002)
the first multimedia cd-rom encyclopedia, shipped by compton's newmedia in 1989 under encyclopaedia britannica's parent ownership. ownership passed through...
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2002-03-01
GooglyMinotaur (2001 - 2002)
a record label paid for a chatbot to sell an album and ended up operating one of the most used pieces of software radiohead ever had their name on. it arrived...
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2002-03
INteRNeTTo (1995 - 2002)
fifteen million forints is what the editorial staff offered idg hungary for the magazine they were already writing, in april 1999. idg said no, and every one...
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2002-02-28
Dreamarena (1999 - 2002)
three hundred thousand registrations across europe by september 2000, and every one of them reached the network by letting a console dial a phone number sega...
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2002-02-13
Microsoft Visual InterDev (1997 - 2002)
visual interdev 1.0 shipped march 1997 inside the professional and enterprise editions of visual studio 97. it was microsoft's first integrated ide for...
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2002-02-08
ArsDigita (1997 - 2002)
thirty-eight million dollars arrived in 2000 and the founders were out of the management structure within months. arsdigita sold database-backed community...
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2002-02-07
NextCard (1996 - 2002)
nextcard was the first credit card you could apply for on a web page and be approved for while the page was still open. jeremy and molly lent started it in...
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2002-02-01
OpenNap (1999 - 2002)
opennap was an open-source server implementation of the napster protocol, reverse-engineered in 1999 by a developer nicknamed drscholl with help from a small...
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2002-01-31
Loki Entertainment (1998 - 2002)
loki was a lawyer's idea: buy the linux rights to windows games and ship them in boxes. scott draeker started it in november 1998 in tustin, california, and...
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2002-01-24
Beyond.com (1994 - 2002)
beyond.com started life in 1994 as software.net, the first serious attempt to sell programs over the wire instead of in a box on a shelf. by 1999 it had passed...
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2002-01-22
Microsoft UltimateTV (2001 - 2002)
ultimatetv was microsoft's dvr-and-internet box for directv satellite, released march 2001 with sony and rca hardware partners. it had a dual satellite tuner...
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2002-01-18
Talk (1999 - 2002)
a mayor refused them a pier in brooklyn because the first issue's cover was hillary clinton, who was about to run against him, so they rented liberty island...
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2002-01-12
MightyWords (2000 - 2002)
barnes & noble put twenty million dollars into mightywords in june 2000 and owned fifty-three percent of it by september. the company sold documents longer...
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2002-01-08
Cadê? (1995 - 2002)
in september 1995 two electrical engineering students in são paulo built a search engine for the brazilian web. by 2001 it was the largest search site in...
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2002-01-01
Delphi (1983 - ~2002)
the boston online service that started in 1981 as a hypertext encyclopedia and grew into a peer of compuserve. wes kussmaul ran it. news corp bought it in...
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2002-01-01
Blaxxun Contact (1998 - 2002)
a 3d browser plugin out of munich that you installed once to walk around cybertown or a bmw configurator inside your netscape window. it tried to render the...
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2002-01-01
Iomega Jaz (1995 - 2002)
iomega launched the jaz drive in december 1995 with a 1 gigabyte removable cartridge that read and wrote at hard drive speeds. it was the high end of the zip...
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2002-01-01
Procomm Plus (1985 - 2002)
the dos and windows terminal emulator datastorm technologies shipped through the late 80s and 90s. it ran bbs sessions over modems and automated logins to...
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2002-01-01
Conflict Catcher (1992 - 2002)
the mac os classic extension manager casady and greene shipped from 1992 to handle the boot-time chaos of competing inits and control panels. jeff robbin wrote...
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2002-01-01
Netpliance i-Opener (1999 - 2002)
the i-opener was a $99 kitchen-counter internet appliance from netpliance, a texas startup that shipped the device in november 1999 at a loss-leader price...
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2002-01-01
İxir (1999 - 2002)
ixir was doğuş holding's consumer internet brand, an isp with a portal bolted to it, and for two years it bought more turkish television time than any of its...
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2002-01-01
Handspring Visor (1999 - 2002)
the people who made the palmpilot walked out of palm and built a better palm. the visor was cheaper and it synced over usb while palm was still on a serial...
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2002-01-01
a2b music (1998 - 2002)
at&t labs invented the codec that digital music actually runs on, then built a store around it that locked every file to the machine it landed on. a2b was...
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2002-01-01
Lokace (1994 - 2002)
lokace went up in 1994 as the first search engine anyone built in france, out of a group of seven people whose next product was caramail. it crawled french...
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2002-01-01
Eurocheque (1969 - 2002)
eurocheque was a paper cheque you could write in a foreign country and have a foreign shopkeeper actually accept, because a plastic guarantee card in your...
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2002-01-01
Next Generation (1995 - 2002)
next generation ran eighty-five issues from january 1995 to january 2002, published by imagine media in brisbane, california and sharing a house style with...
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2002-01-01
Aureate / Radiate (1998 - 2002)
steve gibson spent early 2000 disassembling a dll that had arrived on his machine inside a piece of shareware and stayed there after the shareware was gone. he...
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2002-01-01
Boardwatch (1987 - 2002)
jack rickard published it out of lakewood, colorado, every month from 1987, and for a decade its pages were where the american bbs world kept its phone...
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2002-01-01
Yahoo Clubs (1998 - 2002)
a club page in 1999 was a message board with a chat room attached to it, a photo album and a list of everyone who had joined, and yahoo would give you one for...
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2002-01-01
E-mu Systems (1971 - 2002)
seven thousand nine hundred dollars was a lot to ask for a keyboard in 1981 and a bargain for a sampler, because the machine everybody compared it to cost...
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2002-01-01
DR-WebSpyder (1997 - 2002)
caldera uk took michal polak's arachne, bolted novell's networking onto it, and shipped a dos web browser that could boot from one floppy on a 386 without...
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2002
Fatbrain.com (1983 - 2002)
a bookstore opened in sunnyvale in march 1983 selling nothing but computer books, down the road from where fry's would open two years later. it registered...
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2001-12-31
CueCat (2000 - 2001)
the cat-shaped barcode reader. dotcom-era brain product. you would get one free with your wired or forbes magazine. you scanned a barcode in a print ad. your...
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2001-12-31
Microsoft Comic Chat (1996 - 2001)
microsoft comic chat was an irc client that turned your text conversation into a comic strip with cartoon avatars. david kurlander's team at microsoft research...
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2001-12-31
The Palace (1995 - 2001)
the graphical chat platform from 1995. you joined a "palace," which was a set of 2D rooms with painted backgrounds. you saw yourself and other users as small...
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2001-12-31
Bullfrog Productions (1987 - 2001)
bullfrog productions invented the god game with populous in 1989 and ran a six-year streak of management sims and strategy titles that nobody has matched since...
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2001-12-31
Bildschirmtext (BTX) (1983 - 2001)
bildschirmtext was the german national videotex service. the federal post minister christian schwarz-schilling pressed a button at the ifa fair in west berlin...
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2001-12-31
GeoWorks Ensemble (1990 - 2001)
geoworks ensemble was berkeley softworks' bet that the millions of 286 boxes on desks in 1990 deserved a real gui without buying a new pc. it ran on dos, drew...
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2001-12-31
Attic Entertainment Software (1990 - 2001)
attic was three equal partners in albstadt, a small town in swabia, who spent the nineties turning germany's own tabletop role playing system into computer...
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2001-12-31
Secret Service (1993 - 2001)
secret service put the first cover disk and then the first cover cd into polish kiosks, and it ran the first manga coverage the country had ever seen in print....
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2001-12-31
Windows 95 (1995 - 2001)
a million copies moved in four days, and microsoft had paid for the moment in advance: a rolling stones song, the empire state building lit in four colors,...
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2001-12-31
MS-DOS (1981 - 2001)
twenty five thousand dollars bought microsoft an operating system somebody else had written, and the ibm contract stacked on top of it did the rest. for two...
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2001-12-31
Mythos Games (1988 - 2001)
a publisher that stopped writing checks in april 2001 is what killed mythos games, and the project it stopped paying for was a 3d remake of x-com by the people...
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2001-12-19
Egghead.com (1984 - 2001)
victor alhadeff opened the first egghead software store in bellevue washington in 1984 with backing from paul allen. by 1989 the chain had 206 stores up and...
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2001-12-18
AdCritic.com (1999 - 2001)
two hundred thousand people registered to watch advertising nobody was paying them to watch, which sounds like a business and was not one. every view was a...
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2001-12-14
Demirbank (1953 - 2001)
halit cıngıllıoğlu ran a bank his family had founded in istanbul in 1953 with money from iron merchants, and by 2000 it had 198 branches and stood fifth among...
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2001-12-07
OmniSky (1999 - 2001)
omnisky put a radio on the back of a palm v and charged thirty nine ninety five a month for as much data as you could pull through it. that was 2000, when most...
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2001-12-07
Netcentives (1996 - 2001)
$72 million came in at the october 1999 ipo and the stock touched eighty dollars a share. two years later the same stock was sixty-nine cents and the company...
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2001-12-07
Asiaweek (1975 - 2001)
four editors in twenty-six years, and the last of them signed the closing notice herself. asiaweek was time inc's english-language newsweekly for asia,...
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2001-12-05
MediaBrowser (2000 - 2001)
mark c. brown's company sold one idea, which was internet explorer with somebody else's artwork wrapped around it. nintendo liked that idea enough to put...
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2001-12-04
RealJukebox (1999 - 2001)
realjukebox was realnetworks' mp3 ripper and organizer, released in may 1999 for windows. by november 1999 a security researcher caught it sending unique user...
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2001-12-02
Enron (1985 - 2001)
andrew fastow ran the off-balance-sheet partnerships that held enron's debt, and he ran some of them for his own account. the company booked nearly $101...
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2001-12-01
DrKoop.com (1998 - 2001)
drkoop.com was a dot-com health portal fronted by c. everett koop, the bowtie us surgeon general from the eighties. it launched as personal medical records inc...
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2001-12-01
PhotoPoint (1998 - 2001)
photopoint was one of the first places you could put your photographs on the internet for free, and by the end it held more than ten million of them for about...
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2001-12-01
Saturn Communications (1994 - 2001)
the kapiti coast, north of wellington, is where somebody first put a wire into new zealand houses that did not belong to telecom. kiwi cable started there in...
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2001-12-01
TWA (1930 - 2001)
carl icahn took control of twa in 1985 and took it private three years later, leaving the airline roughly $540 million deeper in debt. the carrier that had...
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2001-12-01
Enciklopedio Kalblanda (1996 - 2001)
stefano kalb registered mebsuta.com on 11 january 1996 and spent the next five years writing an encyclopedia in esperanto, by himself, one article at a time....
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2001-12-01
iPublish (2000 - 2001)
thirteen million dollars bought time warner an e-book imprint and about eighteen months of it. the writers did the reading for free: you rated other people's...
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2001-12-01
iName (1995 - 2001)
two men bought twelve hundred domain names in the mid nineties and had to find a way to pay the renewal fees, so they gave away email addresses on them. the...
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2001-11-29
Segfault (1998 - 2001)
segfault was a parody of slashdot running slashdot's own machinery. readers submitted the stories and editors picked them. the front page filled with fake tech...
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2001-11-20
SafeWeb (2000 - 2003)
safeweb was a box on a web page. you typed an address into it and the site fetched that page for you over ssl, so anyone watching your line saw one encrypted...
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2001-11-13
BeOS (1995 - 2001)
beos was the cult operating system from be inc., the company started by ex-apple executive jean-louis gassée in 1990. it shipped first on the bebox in october...
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2001-11-13
Be Inc. (1990 - 2001)
palm paid about eleven million dollars for what was left of be in august 2001, and the shareholders voted the company out of existence that november. eleven...
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2001-11-08
HeadHunter.NET (1996 - 2001)
184,153 job listings and 340,463 resumes, counted on the homepage in january 2000, which was the entire pitch: a board big enough that you did not need a...
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2001-11-07
Sabena (1923 - 2001)
a recapitalization was signed in july 2001 and the money never moved. that is the whole ending. belgium's flag carrier had spent six years under swissair...
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2001-11-06
Mr. Showbiz (1995 - 2001)
mr. showbiz went live on 1 may 1995, built in seattle by starwave, the company paul allen founded to find out what media on the internet was going to look...
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2001-11-01
Cyberian Outpost (1995 - 2001)
the connecticut e-tailer that sold computer hardware in eleven languages to a hundred and forty countries before the bubble burst. the 1999 super bowl...
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2001-11-01
8848.com (1999 - 2001)
8848 opened on 18 may 1999 and was the first online store in china with real inventory behind it, named for the height of everest in meters. by early 2000 it...
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2001-11-01
Sportal (1998 - 2001)
sportal was a british company that built and ran the official websites of europe's biggest football clubs, founded by rob hersov in the late nineties under the...
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2001-11-01
Zip.net (1998 - 2001)
zip.net was brazil's first free webmail and then, for about three years, one of the country's largest portals. marcos de moraes launched zipmail in august 1998...
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2001-11-01
Myth: The Fallen Lords (1997 - 2001)
bungie.net was built to run the multiplayer for a 1997 game about dwarves rolling satchel charges down hills, and it is now the backend for destiny. myth lost...
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2001-11
bleem! (1999 - 2001)
bleem! was a playstation emulator sold in a box on a shelf while the playstation was still the console everybody owned. it read your own discs and ran them on...
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2001-10-31
Inside.com (2000 - 2001)
inside.com was a media-industry trade journalism subscription site from kurt andersen and michael hirschorn. it launched in may 2000 on $35 million of dot-com...
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2001-10-30
Neo Geo Pocket Color (1999 - 2001)
neo geo pocket color was snk's 16-bit color handheld with a microswitched mini-joystick that arcade purists actually liked. it launched in japan in march 1999...
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2001-10-25
DriveSpace (1993 - 2001)
microsoft shipped doublespace with ms-dos 6.0 in march 1993, and it doubled the space on a hard disk by compressing everything into one hidden file that...
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2001-10-25
3D Maze (1995 - 2001)
3d maze is what your monitor did when you walked away from it. a randomly generated brick corridor with a camera moving through it on its own, and a...
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2001-10-25
Cardfile (1985 - 2001)
the address book that shipped inside windows for sixteen years, built on the idea of a wooden box of index cards. you typed a name on the index line and...
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2001-10-25
Lernout & Hauspie (1987 - 2001)
ypres, a small town in west flanders better known for a war, spent the nineties building the company that was going to own the human voice. lernout & hauspie...
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2001-10-24
NetRadio.com (1995 - 2001)
netradio.com was the first internet-only radio network. it launched in october 1995 from eden prairie minnesota with realaudio streams and grew to 125 stations...
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2001-10-19
Open Market (1994 - 2001)
in may 1996 a cambridge software company sold shares to the public, more than doubled on the first day and closed with a market capitalization of 1.2 billion...
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2001-10-11
Polaroid Corporation (1937 - 2001)
polaroid was edwin land's 1937 cambridge optics company that built the instant camera as a consumer product after his daughter asked in 1944 why she could not...
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2001-10-11
Bert is Evil (1997 - 2001)
bert is evil went up on 30 march 1997, a page of manufactured photographic evidence that the sesame street character had been present at the worst events of...
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2001-10-09
MobileStar (1998 - 2001)
mobilestar built the first serious public wi-fi network in america and signed starbucks in january 2001, which meant paying for a wired t1 line into every...
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2001-10-03
first-e (1999 - 2001)
first-e opened in september 1999 as europe's first internet-only bank, run out of dublin by an irish incubator called enba, trading on a banking license that...
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2001-10-01
Excite@Home (1996 - 2001)
excite@home was the company that made cable broadband real in the us before cable broadband was a thing. then it paid $6.7 billion for the excite portal right...
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2001-10-01
Excite (1995 - 2001)
excite was one of the half-dozen us portals you saw on every late-90s magazine cover. six stanford undergrads built it. by 1997 it was the sixth-most-visited...
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2001-10-01
PictureTel (1984 - 2001)
two mit students and their professor started it in august 1984 to sell the first commercial codec that could push moving pictures down a dial-up isdn line. by...
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2001-10-01
LineOne (1997 - 2001)
lineone was the internet arriving free inside a sunday newspaper. bt built it in 1997 with two newspaper groups behind it and pushed the setup software into...
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2001-10-01
Headbone Zone (1997 - 2001)
susan lammers left microsoft after eight years, put her own money into a children's cd-rom studio in seattle, and ended up building a website that mattered...
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2001-10-01
Brill's Content (1998 - 2001)
brill's content launched in june 1998 as a monthly magazine that covered the american press the way the american press covered everybody else. steven brill had...
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2001-10-01
Microsoft BackOffice Server (1994 - 2001)
by late 1994 microsoft had a server operating system and a growing pile of server products that ran on top of it, and no single thing to sell a company that...
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2001-10-01
Silicon Alley Reporter (1996 - 2001)
jason calacanis started silicon alley reporter in 1996 as a small magazine about a few blocks of manhattan that had decided they were an industry. at the top...
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2001-10-01
Mademoiselle (1935 - 2001)
sylvia plath spent a month of 1953 as a guest editor here and turned it into the opening of the bell jar, which is more literary afterlife than most magazines...
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2001-09-30
Hotline (1997 - 2001)
hotline was what mac users used to share files between 1997 and 2001, before napster made the same thing easier on every other platform. a 17-year-old...
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2001-09-28
Contentville (2000 - 2001)
cbs took thirty-five percent of contentville and paid for it in advertising inventory rather than cash, forty million dollars of airtime over three years. nbc...
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2001-09-26
e-Stamp.com (1999 - 2001)
e-stamp shipped postage to a PC over a phone line in 1999. it was the first company the USPS approved for internet postage, and it shipped a usb hardware vault...
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2001-09-26
Exodus Communications (1994 - 2001)
two engineers started a company in 1994 on the idea that other people's servers belonged in a building with better power and better bandwidth than any office...
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2001-09-21
El Sitio (1997 - 2001)
el sitio was the argentine answer to the late-nineties latin american portal race. roberto vivo-chaneton and roberto cibrian-campoy founded it in 1997 in...
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2001-09-21
biztravel.com (1996 - 2001)
in the week after 11 september 2001, bookings fell by as much as seventy percent and a travel company in philadelphia closed the site it had bought two years...
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2001-09-14
Netfolio (1999 - 2001)
james o'shaughnessy wrote what works on wall street, sold his mutual fund family in 2000, and put the proceeds behind an idea he called the personal fund: your...
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2001-09-13
Sony eVilla (2001 - 2001)
the sony evilla was a kitchen internet appliance with a vertical crt and a beos-derived operating system, priced at $499 plus $21.95 a month for the bundled...
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2001-09-06
Great Bridge (2000 - 2001)
norfolk, virginia is not where you expect the first commercial postgresql to come from, but that is where a newspaper conglomerate put fifteen months of money...
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2001-09-01
Wingspan Bank (1999 - 2001)
bank one built an internet-only bank in 1999 and pointed the advertising at itself: if your bank could start over, this is what it would be. it spent something...
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2001-09-01
Rhythms NetConnections (1997 - 2001)
catherine hapka left us west in 1997 to build a company that sold dsl to businesses, and for two years it worked. microsoft and the investment arm of mci...
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2001-09-01
Orientation.com (1996 - 2001)
thirty-two country doors, from albania to uganda, under a logo that read think globally, search locally. it began in 1996 as asia's web directory and grew into...
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2001-08-31
Grand Royal (1992 - 2001)
three rappers from new york ran a record label for nine years and a magazine for four of them, and the magazine is the part that got into the dictionary. issue...
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2001-08-30
Corel Linux (1999 - 2001)
michael cowpland stood at a comdex booth in november 1999 and said that dos had its ten years, windows had its ten years, and linux was next. the product...
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2001-08-29
BlueLight.com (1999 - 2001)
a big-box retailer decided to give away internet access so people would shop at its stores, then discovered that free dial-up brings you everyone except the...
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2001-08-27
Chromatis Networks (1997 - 2001)
four and a half billion dollars in lucent stock, paid in june 2000 for a two-year-old company that had yet to sell its product, and fifteen months later the...
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2001-08-26
Beenz.com (1998 - 2001)
beenz tried to be money for the web before money for the web was a thing anyone had figured out. it raised about $100m, signed up 15 country offices, printed...
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2001-08-26
Flooz.com (1999 - 2001)
flooz wanted to be a parallel currency for the web. you bought credits with a card or received them as a corporate gift voucher, then you spent the balance at...
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2001-08-24
FrontPage Express (1997 - 2001)
frontpage express was the free wysiwyg html editor microsoft shipped with internet explorer 4 and 5. it was a cut-down version of frontpage 97, bundled to make...
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2001-08-22
Trojan Room coffee pot (1991 - 2001)
the trojan room coffee pot was the world's first webcam. two cambridge researchers, quentin stafford-fraser and paul jardetzky, pointed a frame-grabber camera...
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2001-08-20
ListBot (1998 - 2001)
submit it! built a free mailing list host, linkexchange absorbed it in june 1998, and microsoft owned it by november of the same year. by january 2000 it was...
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2001-08-16
The Industry Standard (1998 - 2001)
the magazine that got fat on the dot-com boom and died when it ended. the industry standard launched in 1998 as a weekly print magazine about the internet...
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2001-08-14
Dynamix (1984 - 2001)
ninety-seven people lost their jobs in eugene, oregon on 14 august 2001, less than five months after they shipped tribes 2. dynamix had spent seventeen years...
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2001-08-01
InternetCash.com (1999 - 2001)
internetcash was a new york prepaid-card company that launched in april 1999 under charles doherty and yiannis tsiounis. shoppers bought a card in store,...
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2001-08-01
SportBrain (2000 - 2001)
thirty-six thousand people bought a ninety-nine dollar pedometer that phoned a website every night, and when the company ran out of money they wrote in...
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2001-08-01
dotDoomed.com (2001 - 2001)
eighty thousand ratings in six months, all of them answering one question: is this company doomed or is it doing well. dotdoomed.com kept an alphabetical...
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2001-07-21
FreeDiskSpace.com (1999 - 2001)
three hundred megabytes was an absurd amount of room in 1999, enough that the site listed warez in its own keywords to explain who it was really for....
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2001-07-16
Micrografx (1982 - 2001)
paul and george grayson founded micrografx in richardson, texas in 1982 and shipped in*a*vision for windows 1.0 in 1986, which made it one of the very few...
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2001-07-12
Psion Series 5 (1997 - 2001)
psion shipped the series 5 in 1997 with a slide-out keyboard better than any pda before or since. it ran epoc32, the os that would later become symbian. by...
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2001-07-12
HomeRuns.com (1996 - 2001)
homeruns began in 1996 as an experiment by hannaford bros, a supermarket chain that wanted to know whether people would order groceries through a web browser....
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2001-07-09
Webvan (1996 - 2001)
webvan was supposed to deliver your groceries to your front door inside a 30-minute window. it raised hundreds of millions in venture capital, IPO'd in late...
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2001-07-03
Power Mac G4 Cube (2000 - 2001)
apple announced the cube on july 19 2000 and suspended production on july 3 2001. somewhere around 150,000 units shipped against an internal projection of...
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2001-07-02
Yupi.com (1996 - 2001)
$150 million went into a spanish language portal in miami beach between 1996 and 1999, and something like $50 million came back out in 2001 when a microsoft...
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2001-07-02
Zing.com (1998 - 2001)
fifty three million dollars of venture money bought four million members and no way to charge any of them. kleiner perkins and alloy led the rounds, media...
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2001-07-01
FamilyPC (1994 - 2001)
familypc was the disney and ziff davis joint-venture monthly that ran from august 1994 to july 2001, aimed at american households buying their first home pc...
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2001-07-01
iBazar (1998 - 2001)
ibazar was the european person-to-person online auction site that beat ebay to the french market by three years and led the peer-to-peer auction category in...
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2001-07-01
Mahir "I Kiss You" (1999 - 2001)
mahir cagri's homepage was one of the first things the whole internet forwarded to itself for a laugh. a man from izmir put up a cheerful, broken-english page...
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2001-07-01
The Beast (2001 - 2001)
microsoft hid a game inside the credits of an a.i. trailer and waited for someone to notice a therapist who did not exist. about a hundred people found it in...
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2001-07-01
Ready2shop.com (1999 - 2001)
ready2shop.com was a british fashion advice site founded in november 1999 by trinny woodall and susannah constantine, backed by j.h. whitney and atlas venture....
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2001-07-01
Informix Corporation (1980 - 2001)
$250 million of sales that were never made is what ended it. roger sippl put $200,000 of his own money into relational database systems in 1980 and shipped a...
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2001-06-30
Connectix Virtual Game Station (1999 - 2001)
connectix put a playstation inside a macintosh for forty-nine dollars in january 1999, and sony sued three weeks later. the ninth circuit ruled in february...
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2001-06-28
Plymouth (1928 - 2001)
973,000 cars in the 1973 model year, 108,546 in 2000. chrysler launched the brand in 1928 to take the cheap end of the market off chevrolet and ford, held...
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2001-06-26
HomeGrocer.com (1997 - 2001)
terry drayton and three co-founders started homegrocer in 1997 in bellevue washington with peach-decorated refrigerated trucks and a same-day grocery model. it...
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2001-06-21
Yupi (1996 - 2001)
yupi was one of the big spanish-language web portals of the late 1990s, run out of miami beach with offices across latin america and spain. founded in 1996, it...
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2001-06-18
Women's WIRE (1993 - 2001)
two women who met on the well built the first commercial online service aimed at women, launched it in october 1993 with five hundred members, and charged...
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2001-06-15
Farmclub.com (1999 - 2001)
jimmy iovine and doug morris announced it on 9 november 1999: a record label wired to a website, with a television show on top. unsigned bands uploaded songs...
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2001-06-08
Suck.com (1995 - 2001)
suck.com was the first web zine that ran on a daily schedule, and the first that took the internet seriously enough to make fun of it well. joey anuff and carl...
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2001-06-08
Automatic Media (2000 - 2001)
automatic media was what happened when two of the best-known webzines on the english-language web stopped being able to pay for themselves separately. suck.com...
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2001-06-06
BitMagic (1998 - 2001)
amsterdam, june 1998: michiel frackers and francisco van jole set up a company to push two or three minutes of animated entertainment onto your desktop every...
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2001-06-01
Mplayer.com (1996 - 2001)
mplayer was the leading dial-up multiplayer service in north america between 1996 and 2001. mpath interactive launched it as a paid offering in late 1996 and...
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2001-06-01
PSINet (1989 - 2001)
psinet was one of the first companies to sell access to the public internet for money. it grew from a kitchen-table operation in northern virginia into the...
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2001-06-01
3Com Audrey (2000 - 2001)
the audrey was 3com's $499 kitchen internet appliance from the ergo brand, a touchscreen tablet with qnx underneath and five pastel color options designed to...
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2001-06-01
Feed Magazine (1995 - 2001)
feed magazine was one of the first webzines that took original writing on the web seriously. stefanie syman and steven berlin johnson launched it in may 1995...
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2001-06-01
PeopleSound (1999 - 2001)
peoplesound was a london music site that let you stream and download tracks from mostly unsigned artists, and for a short window in 1999 and 2000 it was the...
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2001-06-01
SoundJam MP (1999 - 2001)
soundjam mp was the best mp3 player on the mac at the turn of the century, the app that took ninety percent of that small market. apple bought it quietly in...
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2001-06-01
X.com (1999 - 2001)
x.com launched on 7 december 1999 in palo alto as an online bank that also sold mutual funds and would move money to another person if you typed their email...
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2001-06-01
PC Player (1992 - 2001)
a german pc games magazine started in december 1992 by two editors who wanted to write about games for adults, and inside eighteen months it was selling...
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2001-06-01
Wall of Sound (1996 - 2001)
paul allen's starwave built a music magazine inside a seattle office tower and staffed it with people who had written for print. wall of sound ran reviews that...
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2001-05-31
Magellan Internet Guide (1995 - 2001)
magellan was a human-edited web directory with star-rated reviews, launched in august 1995 by the mckinley group out of berkeley. it had editorial staff who...
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2001-05-31
Microsoft PhotoDraw (1999 - 2001)
photodraw was microsoft's attempt at a small-business image editor that sat between photoshop and illustrator. it shipped in june 1999 inside office 2000...
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2001-05-31
Microsoft Binder (1995 - 2001)
binder was a windows app that let you stitch a word document, an excel sheet and a powerpoint deck into one .obd file with a tab for each. it shipped with...
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2001-05-31
Micron Electronics (1995 - 2001)
micron electronics was the pc company micron technology assembled around zeos in 1995 and stopped wanting by 2001. it sold desktops over the phone out of...
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2001-05-31
Microsoft GIF Animator (1996 - 2001)
microsoft gif animator was a 523 kb freeware program from 1996 that stacked still images into one gif89a file and let you set how many times it looped. it...
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2001-05-29
One.Tel (1995 - 2001)
jodee rich and brad keeling started one.tel in sydney in 1995 with about five million dollars and turned it into australia's fourth telephone company by...
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2001-05-18
SDMI (1999 - 2001)
the record industry built a standards body in 1999 to produce music that would refuse to play unless it was licensed, and put over two hundred companies in the...
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2001-05-16
CyberRebate (1998 - 2001)
joel granik incorporated cyberrebate on may 16, 1998 with joseph lichter plus athan vadiakas as cofounders. the company listed consumer goods at three to ten...
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2001-05-15
Eazel (1999 - 2001)
eazel was founded in august 1999 by andy hertzfeld, who had written large parts of the original macintosh system software, on the theory that linux would never...
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2001-05-07
Bibliofind (1996 - 2001)
in march 2001 bibliofind said somebody had been inside its servers since october and had taken about 98,000 credit card numbers. two months later the site was...
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2001-05-07
The Santa Cruz Operation (1979 - 2001)
caldera systems bought a unix business in may 2001 and got the seller's name thrown in with it, which is why the company that spent nine years suing ibm over...
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2001-05-01
Daily Radar (1999 - 2001)
daily radar was the imagine media dot-com era entertainment portal, launched october 1999, killed on 1 may 2001. it tried to be an ign peer for male-skew...
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2001-04-29
My Netscape Network (1999 - 2001)
dan libby wrote a format in march 1999 so that outside websites could push their headlines into a box on netscape's portal page, called it rdf site summary,...
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2001-04-27
Quokka Sports (1996 - 2001)
a company founded to cover a yacht race by sending home the instrument readings, which turned into the argument that any sports event is a data stream and that...
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2001-04-25
Stormix (1999 - 2001)
february 1999, in a tower in vancouver, a web host spun out a linux company and spent two years turning debian into something you could buy off a shelf. it...
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2001-04-18
Winstar Communications (1993 - 2001)
winstar sold bandwidth to office buildings over millimeter wave radio instead of over fiber, which in practice meant a small dish on your roof pointed at...
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2001-04-15
WebRing (1995 - 2001)
webring was the discovery layer of the early web. sage weil wrote the original cgi as a high-school project in 1994 and incorporated it as a company in june...
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2001-04-15
eCircles (1998 - 2001)
a private, invite-only site where families and friend groups kept photo albums and a shared calendar in one closed space, years before facebook made all of...
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2001-04-13
Themestream (1999 - 2001)
ten cents landed in your account every time a stranger opened a page you had written. that was the whole offer, and by 2001 more than forty thousand people had...
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2001-04-12
marchFIRST (2000 - 2001)
in december 1999 a chicago consultancy called whittman-hart agreed to buy a california web shop called usweb/cks in a stock deal worth 5.7 billion dollars. the...
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2001-04-11
Kozmo.com (1998 - 2001)
kozmo promised free one-hour delivery of videos and pints of ice cream, by bike messenger, in eleven american cities. the unit economics never worked. they...
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2001-04-11
WTLS (1999 - 2001)
the final specification runs to 106 pages. five days after approving it the wap forum approved a fifteen page document telling everyone to use ordinary tls...
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2001-04-09
NBCi (1999 - 2001)
NBCi was an old tv network's attempt to be a web portal in 1999, stitched together from snap.com plus xoom.com plus a webmail buy and IPO'd at $76 a share....
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2001-04-08
Grendel (1998 - 2001)
jamie zawinski put grendel on the internet on 8 september 1998 with a line that doubled as an epitaph: nobody is actively maintaining it, but there it is. this...
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2001-04-06
Indrema (2000 - 2001)
indrema was a linux console announced in march 2000 and buried thirteen months later without a single unit reaching a shelf. the l600 was going to cost two...
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2001-04-05
Great Plains Software (1981 - 2001)
fargo, north dakota is where a billion dollar accounting software company came from, which almost nobody outside the midwest believed until microsoft wrote the...
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2001-04-04
News.nl (2000 - 2001)
de telegraaf launched a free evening paper in august 2000 and named it after a web address, which tells you the year without anything else needing to be said....
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2001-04-04
Berkeley Software Design (1991 - 2001)
rick adams and five members of berkeley's computer systems research group started it in 1991 to sell commercially what the university had been giving away....
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2001-04-01
EToys.com (1997 - 2001)
etoys was the first online toy store to matter. it went public on january 4 1999 at twenty dollars and closed the day at seventy-six. for a few months in 1999...
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2001-04-01
Xoom (the original) (1996 - 2001)
the third or fourth tier free homepage host of the late 1990s. behind geocities and tripod in scale but in the same business: a free url like...
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2001-04-01
Third Voice (1999 - 2001)
third voice was an internet explorer browser plug-in launched in may 1999 by a menlo park startup of the same name. it let any user post sticky notes on any...
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2001-04-01
CrossPad (1998 - 2001)
a pen company and ibm built a clipboard that watched you write. the pen had ink in it and a radio transmitter in the barrel, so the pad underneath knew where...
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2001-03-31
Sega Dreamcast (1998 - 2001)
the dreamcast was the console that introduced built-in modems and online matchmaking to a living-room audience, two years before microsoft and sony figured out...
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2001-03-30
Sega VMU (1998 - 2001)
the vmu was a dreamcast memory card with a 48 by 32 pixel screen, four buttons and a speaker, and it slotted face-out into a window in the controller so you...
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2001-03-29
CompuBank (1998 - 2001)
compubank opened in houston in october 1998 as the first american bank the comptroller of the currency chartered to operate solely on the internet. it never...
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2001-03-22
NorthPoint Communications (1997 - 2001)
northpoint was one of the companies trying to build the broadband internet before the big phone carriers bothered. it was a dsl wholesaler, it ran the lines...
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2001-03-21
Kerbango (1998 - 2001)
a california startup built the first stand-alone internet radio. it took best of show at ces 2001 with an amazon pre-order page already waiting. 3com had...
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2001-03-20
Allaire Corporation (1995 - 2001)
two brothers in minneapolis wrote a tool in 1995 for the problem everyone building a website was about to have, which was getting a database onto a page...
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2001-03-19
Windows Magazine (1990 - 2001)
james fawcette founded windows magazine in 1990 and cmp media bought it a year later. by 1999 it was moving eight hundred thousand paid copies a month on a...
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2001-03-12
PlanetRx (1998 - 2001)
planetrx was one of the online drugstores the late nineties produced on the theory that americans would rather order a prescription from a website than walk...
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2001-03-11
CyberCash (1994 - 2001)
cybercash was the 1994 startup that wanted to be the credit-card layer of the early web, before visa and mastercard had figured out their own online story. its...
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2001-03-08
Xircom (1988 - 2001)
thousand oaks, california, 1988: dirk gates and kirk mathews worked out how to get a laptop onto an office network through its printer port, which nobody else...
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2001-03-05
MacWEEK (1987 - 2001)
apple called it macleak, and apple employees kept feeding it anyway. the free san francisco weekly ran a back-page rumor column signed by a person who did not...
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2001-03-01
GovWorks.com (1998 - 2001)
govworks raised seventy million dollars to let americans pay parking tickets through a website. the camera crew filming it for a sundance doc kept rolling...
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2001-03-01
WinFiles.com (1994 - 2001)
steve jenkins registered windows95.com in 1994 and built the directory people went to when a piece of hardware in their machine had no disk. shareware and...
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2001-03-01
Microsoft V-Chat (1995 - 2001)
microsoft shipped a chat client where the room was a place you moved around in, and it did it in december 1995, before most people had seen a web browser....
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2001-03-01
Popular Power (2000 - 2001)
marc hedlund and nelson minar started popular power in january 2000 on a simple trade: install a java client, let it use your processor while you were not...
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2001-03-01
Buena Vista Internet Group (1997 - 2001)
disney gathered its online units under one name in the late nineties and called it buena vista internet group. when the infoseek purchase closed in july 1999...
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2001-03-01
Strategic Simulations (1979 - 2001)
joel billings started ssi in mountain view in 1979 to sell wargames to people who already played wargames on paper, and computer bismarck shipped for the apple...
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2001-03-01
govWorks (1998 - 2001)
a film crew was in the room for most of it, which is the only reason anybody remembers a company that sold municipal payment software. kaleil isaza tuzman, tom...
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2001-03-01
Red Orb Entertainment (1997 - 2001)
redorb is broderbund with the first six letters read backwards, which tells you roughly how much thought went into separating the games from the schoolroom...
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2001-03-01
WhirlGirl (1997 - 2001)
david b. williams launched a superhero webcomic in 1997 built out of still panels and looping sound, because a 1997 modem could not carry anything better. by...
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2001-03-01
Geocast Network Systems (1999 - 2001)
the plan needed a box under your desk with a television antenna on it and a hard disk inside, filling itself overnight with video you had not asked for yet....
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2001-03-01
DoDots (1999 - 2001)
fifty companies and four hundred independent developers were building on it when the money stopped. dodots took the chrome off a website, shrank what was left...
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2001-03-01
Winfire (1999 - 2001)
a toolbar was supposed to pay for your broadband. winfire shipped its first browser assistant in august 1999, a small bar that docked in the windows taskbar...
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2001-03-01
Display PostScript (1987 - 2001)
on a next cube the window on screen and the page in the printer were drawn by the same interpreter, running the same language, which in 1987 was close to a...
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2001-02-28
AllAdvantage (1999 - 2001)
alladvantage was the most plausible-sounding bad idea of the 1999 internet: install a desktop ad bar on your browser, and we will pay you per hour you spend...
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2001-02-28
Nintendo 64DD (1999 - 2001)
nintendo spent four years promising a magnetic disk drive that would bolt under the n64 and give it writable storage plus a dial-up service. it shipped in...
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2001-02-28
Randnet (1999 - 2001)
nintendo put a disk drive under the n64 and then refused to sell it as a disk drive. you subscribed to randnet instead, in yen, by mail order, and the hardware...
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2001-02-28
Natural Wonders (1986 - 2001)
a bankruptcy judge in oakland authorized the going-out-of-business sales on 28 february 2001, ten weeks after the chapter 11 filing and five months after the...
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2001-02-28
CalendarCentral (1997 - 2001)
on 1 february 2001 a small company in research triangle park shipped version 4.0 of its web calendar. on the 21st it issued a press release saying it was...
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2001-02-16
Broadband Sports (1998 - 2001)
a santa monica content network for jock-blogging that started life as athlete direct. it raised more than $60 million, locked in the digital rights for more...
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2001-02-15
Bridge Information Systems (1974 - 2001)
$275 million for knight-ridder financial in 1996, nine more companies after that, then dow jones telerate in 1998 for $510 million. bridge information systems...
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2001-02-12
Deja News (1995 - 2001)
the searchable archive of usenet, the part of the internet most people had stopped looking at by the time deja news made it searchable. google bought it for...
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2001-02-01
Infoseek (1994 - 2001)
i remember infoseek from the 1998-1999 dial-up window. you tried altavista first, then infoseek if altavista was slow that day. it had a clean interface and a...
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2001-02-01
MVP.com (1999 - 2001)
mvp.com was three of the most famous athletes in the world lending their faces to an online sporting-goods store. the money was real, sixty-five million from...
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2001-02-01
Icebox.com (1999 - 2001)
icebox.com was a web animation studio staffed out of the simpsons writers room, funded like a dot-com and run like a network. it launched on 1 june 1999, put...
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2001-02-01
ZapMe! (1996 - 2001)
a california company that handed american schools a free computer lab and a satellite connection, and took the corner of every screen as payment. by late 2000...
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2001-02-01
Entertaindom (1999 - 2001)
kevin tsujihara took this site over in april 2000, twelve years before he ran warner bros outright. entertaindom was time warner's attempt to build an...
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2001-02
NetKing (1995 - 2001)
yitzhak rabin was shot on 4 november 1995, and within hours a tel aviv advertising agency had put up a page where you could light a memorial candle in a...
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2001-01-31
Mercata (1998 - 2001)
mercata launched in may 1999 with a slogan that read like a pitch deck: "the more people who buy, the lower the price." vulcan ventures, paul allen's...
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2001-01-31
PC-VAN (1986 - 2001)
pc-van was nec's pc communication service, opened on 26 april 1986, and with nifty-serve it was one of the two networks that were the japanese internet before...
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2001-01-31
ZineZone (1999 - 2001)
for most of december 1998 the site was called the [password]. by february 1999 the same server was answering as zinezone, a free webzine network with twelve...
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2001-01-29
Go.com (1999 - 2001)
go.com was disney's portal play. it launched in january 1999 by stitching together infoseek's search engine with disney's stable of media brands. two years...
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2001-01-19
Tribal Voice PowWow (1994 - 2001)
powwow was a chat program built by tribal voice in woodland park, colorado in december 1994. john mcafee founded the company after stepping away from mcafee...
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2001-01-15
MobShop / Accompany (1998 - 2001)
accompany, inc launched in october 1998 in san mateo, founded by jim rose, salim teja and jonathan ehrlich as a consumer group-buying platform. shoppers pooled...
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2001-01-12
World Online (1994 - 2001)
world online sold internet access across fifteen countries and was worth twelve billion euros for about one afternoon. the float on 17 march 2000 was the...
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2001-01-04
ipchains (1998 - 2001)
kernel 2.1.102, 14 may 1998, is where it enters the tree, and by the 2.2 series it was the only way to configure a linux firewall. rusty russell wrote it as a...
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2001-01-01
Amazon Auctions (1999 - 2001)
amazon auctions launched on 30 march 1999 as bezos's direct attack on ebay, with eight million pre-existing amazon customers automatically registered as...
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2001-01-01
Claris HomePage (1996 - 2001)
claris homepage was the wysiwyg html editor apple's claris subsidiary shipped to compete with frontpage and pagemill. mac and windows, html 3.2, last release...
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2001-01-01
BIX (BYTE Information Exchange) (1985 - 2001)
byte magazine's online service. launched 1985 with $6 evening rates and cosy conferencing software. peaked at 17,000 subscribers, shut down 2001 after the open...
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2001-01-01
Virtual Places (1994 - 2001)
virtual places was a presence-based chat overlay built by an israeli company called ubique, founded in 1994 in rehovot by ehud shapiro and avner shafrir. the...
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2001-01-01
ShareYourWorld.com (1997 - 2001)
shareyourworld.com launched in 1997 as the first video-sharing website on the open web, founded by chase norlin. it let anyone upload short clips in whatever...
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2001-01-01
Dogpile (1996 - 2001)
a search engine that was not really a search engine. dogpile never crawled the web itself, it took your query and handed it to altavista and every other engine...
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2001-01-01
iSmell (1999 - 2001)
ismell never shipped, so there was nothing to have used. digiscents raised around twenty million dollars to build a usb fin that would puff coded smells at you...
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2001-01-01
RemarQ (1995 - 2001)
usenet in a web browser, back when that was a real convenience and not a museum piece. remarq let you read and post to the newsgroups without configuring a...
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2001-01-01
WebCrawler (1994 - 2001)
the first search engine that read the full text of every page it found, not just the titles. a graduate student at the university of washington built it in his...
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2001-01-01
bianca.com (1994 - 2001)
three people with day jobs at hotwired built a website in their off hours and gave it a fictional owner called bianca. the site was a house. you navigated it...
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2001-01-01
The Useless Pages (1994 - 2001)
a directory of web pages that had no reason to exist, kept alive by three different people across seven years. it began in 1994 when paul phillips found a...
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2001-01-01
GameStorm (1997 - 2001)
kesmai had been running graphical multiplayer games since 1987, when air warrior went up on genie and let strangers fly against each other in real time....
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2001-01-01
Abuzz (1996 - 2001)
a cambridge company built software that read what you were good at and routed incoming questions to you instead of posting them into a room, which is a better...
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2001-01-01
Technosoft (1980 - 2001)
technosoft began in 1980 as a microcomputer shop in sasebo, a naval port at the far western end of japan, about as far from the tokyo software industry as you...
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2001-01-01
Air Warrior (1987 - 2001)
kesmai put air warrior on genie in 1987 and it was one of the first graphical worlds where strangers shared a map in real time. you paid six dollars an hour...
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2001-01-01
Walnut Creek CDROM (1991 - 2001)
walnut creek sold free software for money, and the sentence only sounds strange if you never had a modem. bob bruce started pressing shareware and public...
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2001-01-01
Firetalk (1999 - 2001)
firetalk came out of the voice code in a failed multiplayer game and became, for about two years, the friendliest way to talk to strangers over a modem. it was...
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2001-01-01
Commercial Internet eXchange (1991 - 2001)
the nsfnet backbone carried most of american internet traffic and was paid for by the government, so it came with an acceptable use policy saying you could not...
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2001-01-01
Publius (2000 - 2001)
in july 2000 three researchers put a web publishing system online for a two month trial and named it after the pen name on the federalist papers. it encrypted...
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2001-01-01
InfoGear iPhone (1998 - 2001)
at ces in early 1998 a startup out of redwood city showed a telephone with a seven inch touchscreen and a keyboard that slid out from underneath it. it ran a...
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2001-01-01
Urban Desires (1994 - 2001)
new york, 1994. gabrielle shannon started an arts and culture magazine on the web with chan suh and kyle shannon, who would incorporate agency.com two months...
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2001-01-01
Dobedo (1998 - 2001)
the rooms were flat drawn backgrounds and everyone talked in speech bubbles, which in 1998 was enough to pull a hundred thousand swedes into a chat that looked...
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2001-01-01
Creative Micro Designs (1987 - 2001)
commodore went bankrupt in april 1994 and a small company in east longmeadow, massachusetts kept building new hardware for its machines for another seven...
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2001-01-01
JuniorNet (1999 - 2001)
boston, 1996: alan rothenberg set out to build a version of the internet for children in which nothing arrived that had not been checked first. juniornet...
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2001-01-01
Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (1986 - 2001)
codewarrior took the paying developers and mac os x took the platform out from under it. apple's own development environment for the macintosh ran from...
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2001-01-01
Online Gaming Review (1995 - 2001)
december 1995, and a website about computer games went up at a point when the games press was still almost entirely paper. ogr grew fast enough to spawn its...
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2001-01-01
The Fabulous Sports Babe (1994 - 2001)
on 4 july 1994 espn radio put its first weekday program on the air, and the host was a woman, which had not happened in american national sports talk before....
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2001-01-01
Swoon (1996 - 2001)
condenet put swoon online in 1996, a dating magazine assembled out of four conde nast titles with free personal ads and forums attached. on 16 november 2000...
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2001-01-01
iCAST (2000 - 2001)
david wetherell's cmgi folded two of its companies into an entertainment portal, put it live on 29 february 2000, and announced it was leaving the business...
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2001-01-01
Mr. T Ate My Balls (1996 - 2001)
somebody smashed the glass out of an exit sign on a dorm floor at the university of illinois in the spring of 1996 and wrote four words on it. nehal patel put...
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2001
Speedyclick.com (1998 - 2001)
speedyclick opened in glendale around 1998 and paid people in a currency called speedybucks for sitting on its pages playing blackjack and bingo. you cashed...
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2000-12-31
Adobe PageMill (1995 - 2000)
adobe pagemill was the first wysiwyg html editor a normal person could use. it launched in late 1995 for mac, shipped 30,000 copies in the first month, and set...
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2000-12-31
Gopher protocol (1991 - 2000)
the menu-based content protocol from the university of minnesota. you saw a numbered list of items, you typed the number, you got the next list. or a text...
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2000-12-31
Microsoft Bookshelf (1987 - 2000)
bookshelf was the english-reference companion to encarta. one CD held the american heritage dictionary, a roget thesaurus, bartlett's familiar quotations, the...
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2000-12-31
Mygale (1995 - 2000)
one of the very first free web hosting services in france, started in 1995 by a student named Valentin Lacambre. it predated multimania and got eaten by...
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2000-12-31
PointCast Network (1992 - 2000)
pointcast was the first product that tried to push the internet at you instead of waiting for you to fetch it. for a year in 1996 it was the future of news....
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2000-12-31
Microsoft Liquid Motion (1998 - 2000)
liquid motion was a microsoft authoring tool for web animations that compiled to java applets. it shipped in 1998 on top of technology microsoft picked up by...
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2000-12-31
Game.com (1997 - 2000)
game.com was tiger electronics' attempt to ship a full cartridge handheld with a touchscreen and a stylus, plus a 14.4k modem in the box. it launched in...
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2000-12-31
Marvel CyberComics (1996 - 2000)
marvel started putting comics into shockwave in the summer of 1996 and handed them to america online as part of a promotional deal, so for the first year you...
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2000-12-31
FidoNet (the dial-up era) (1984 - 2000)
a worldwide mail network built out of bulletin boards and long-distance phone calls, started by tom jennings in 1984. every night each machine dialed the next...
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2000-12-30
SixDegrees.com (1997 - 2001)
sixdegrees.com was the first social network in the modern sense. andrew weinreich launched it in 1997 with the explicit goal of building a web product around...
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2000-12-19
Stan Lee Media (1998 - 2000)
on 15 december 2000 the company suspended operations and laid off nearly all of its roughly 140 staff, and four days later it was done. it had been worth more...
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2000-12-19
HotOffice (1996 - 2000)
on 19 december 2000 a lawyer in palm beach county opened the case that ended hotoffice, four years after it was unveiled at comdex as the world's first virtual...
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2000-12-15
3dfx Interactive (1994 - 2002)
3dfx invented the consumer 3d accelerator as a category and then handed the category to nvidia inside five years. voodoo cards and the glide api were the...
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2000-12-08
Riffage.com (1999 - 2000)
riffage.com was a 1999 attempt to sell music straight from bands to fans over the web, built by ken wirt, the diamond multimedia executive behind the rio mp3...
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2000-12-07
Cobalt Networks (1996 - 2000)
mountain view, 1996: a few engineers out of apple's hardware group built a small blue linux server for people who did not want to spend a weekend installing...
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2000-12-06
Chemdex (1997 - 2000)
david perry founded chemdex in september 1997 to move the catalog of laboratory chemicals and equipment onto the web and take a fee on every purchase order...
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2000-12-05
Petopia.com (1999 - 2000)
the second pets.com. petopia raised one hundred fourteen million dollars from petco and tcv and the usual venture row, launched in august 1999, hit two hundred...
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2000-12-04
germany.net (1994 - 2000)
michaela merz and stephan hess started it in frankfurt in 1994 with an offer nobody else in germany made: no access fee, only the phone call. the catch was a...
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2000-12-01
1stUp.com (1998 - 2000)
in 1998 a san francisco company worked out that if you wrapped the browser in an advertising frame you could give dial-up internet away and bill the...
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2000-11-30
MetaCreations (1997 - 2000)
kai krause built interfaces that looked like nothing else in software, dark curved panels with unlabeled dials you turned to find out what they did, and for...
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2000-11-29
Visitalk.com (1998 - 2000)
phoenix, arizona, september 1998. a company that wanted to be the phone book for internet calls, handing out permanent twelve-digit numbers and routing calls...
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2000-11-27
TechWeek (1998 - 2000)
sunnyvale, california, where metro states media printed a free biweekly for a hundred thousand silicon valley desks. the last issue went out on 27 november...
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2000-11-22
Streamline.com (1993 - 2000)
streamline.com was founded in 1993 by tim demello in westwood, massachusetts as a subscription grocery delivery service for boston suburbs. the model was a $30...
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2000-11-15
Diamond Multimedia (1982 - 2000)
diamond multimedia was the brand on a generation of mid-90s pc hardware. monster 3d voodoo graphics boards. stealth and viper svga cards. monster sound. and...
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2000-11-15
Garden.com (1995 - 2000)
garden.com was an austin-based online gardening retailer started by cliff sharples and his wife lisa with their wharton classmate jamie o'neill in 1995. it...
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2000-11-15
Virgin Webplayer (2000 - 2000)
ten thousand of them went out free to people who agreed to be monitored. the webplayer was a 200mhz pc in a flat white shell that could dial exactly one isp,...
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2000-11-14
JavaScript Style Sheets (1996 - 2000)
in august 1996 netscape sent the w3c a stylesheet language made of javascript, where you styled a heading by assigning to document.tags.h1.fontsize instead of...
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2000-11-10
PageNet (1981 - 2000)
pagenet was the largest paging company in the world, more than ten million pagers in service and about a billion dollars a year in revenue, and it spent most...
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2000-11-10
Daewoo Motors (1983 - 2000)
kim woo-choong started with a textile trading office in 1967 and built korea's second largest conglomerate out of it, and when the group went down in 1999 it...
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2000-11-09
Pets.com (1998 - 2000)
the online pet supply store that became the face of the dot-com bust. amazon owned a majority stake. a sock puppet with a microphone did super bowl ads. the...
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2000-11-07
MotherNature.com (1996 - 2001)
mothernature.com was a concord massachusetts online retailer of vitamins and supplements. it went live in 1996 and ipo'd in december 1999 at the tail end of...
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2000-11-06
Furniture.com (1998 - 2000)
furniture.com was a framingham massachusetts online furniture retailer backed by cmgi and a venture syndicate. it raised twenty-seven million dollars in june...
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2000-11-06
CATS (1977 - 2000)
on a friday in november 1977 the toronto stock exchange switched on a computer that matched orders and set prices without a human in the middle, starting with...
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2000-11-02
Urban Box Office (1999 - 2000)
ubo raised more than forty million dollars in 1999 to build a network of websites for what its own pitch deck called the urban mindset, took several floors in...
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2000-11-01
iCanBuy (1999 - 2000)
parents put money into an account, chose which stores their kid could spend it at, and set a limit for each one. that was icanbuy, opened in march 1999 out of...
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2000-10-31
Heat.net (1997 - 2000)
heat.net was segasoft's attempt to build the online layer for pc gaming before sega ever shipped a console online service. it launched in 1997 as a free...
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2000-10-31
Lotus cc:Mail (1985 - 2000)
cc:mail started in the mid '80s at a silicon valley startup called concentric systems, founded by robert plummer with hubert lipski and michael palmer. the...
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2000-10-30
Multics (1965 - 2000)
in april 1969 bell labs walked out of the multics project and took nothing with it except the idea. what the deserters wrote instead, on a discarded pdp-7 in...
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2000-10-25
RemoteAccess (1989 - 2000)
andrew milner started remoteaccess in australia in 1989 as a clone of quickbbs, and it turned into the most heavily extended shareware in the bbs world, with...
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2000-10-20
Eve.com (1998 - 2000)
eve.com sold luxury beauty products on the early american web. mariam naficy and varsha rao founded it in 1998, sold it to bill gross's idealab for $110...
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2000-10-20
MyLackey.com (1999 - 2000)
two former echange executives started mylackey in seattle in april 1999 to run errands for people who worked too many hours. contractors in branded shirts...
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2000-10-20
Zatso (1998 - 2000)
on friday 20 october 2000 zatso stopped making newscasts, two weeks after cutting its staff to thirty-eight. the service let you choose which local tv news...
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2000-10-13
Scour (1997 - 2000)
scour was a multimedia search engine and, through scour exchange, one of the earliest peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, built by five ucla computer science...
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2000-10-11
Boxman (1997 - 2000)
boxman was europe's answer to buying music online, founded in sweden in 1997 and run out of london, selling cds into eight countries at a moment when almost...
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2000-10-09
Freei (1998 - 2000)
freei was a free dial-up internet provider out of federal way, washington, that dialed you a local number and paid for it with a strip of advertising parked on...
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2000-10-05
Priceline WebHouse Club (1999 - 2000)
webhouse club was jay walker's bet that priceline's name-your-price model would work for anything, including groceries and gasoline. it launched in november...
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2000-10-03
Accolade (1984 - 2000)
two atari programmers who had already helped start activision founded accolade in 1984 and spent fifteen years publishing test drive and hardball, plus a blue...
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2000-10-02
Kibu.com (1999 - 2000)
a teen-girl web portal funded by jim clark and kleiner perkins to $22 million. it went online in may 2000 and laid off all 65 staff on 2 october, 46 days after...
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2000-10-01
Pop.com (1999 - 2000)
pop.com was a $50 million spielberg-katzenberg-grazer-howard short-video venture funded by paul allen, announced in october 1999, and dissolved twelve months...
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2000-10-01
Urbanfetch (1999 - 2000)
ross stevens launched urbanfetch in 1999 as the manhattan rival to kozmo.com with the same promise: any low-value impulse item delivered by bike messenger in...
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2000-10-01
Productopia (1998 - 2000)
twenty two million dollars bought editorial advice across 634 product categories and a san francisco office that was empty by the first week of october 2000....
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2000-10-01
Gazoontite (1998 - 2000)
thirty-one million dollars of venture capital went into a company that sold pillowcases and air filters to people who could not breathe. the web site stopped...
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2000-09-30
NETCOM On-Line Communication Services (1988 - 2000)
netcom was a bay area dial-up isp that ran shell accounts and the netcruiser dialer through the early-1990s commercial-internet boom. it was bought by icg...
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2000-09-30
SegaSoft (1995 - 2000)
a 50-50 joint venture between sega and csk, set up in 1995 to sell pc games to americans by a company whose whole identity was arcade hardware. the games were...
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2000-09-21
Aureal Vortex (1996 - 2000)
the pc sound chip line that pushed 3d positional audio in late-90s games. aureal semiconductor bought crystal river engineering in may 1996 for the...
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2000-09-18
Pseudo.com (1993 - 2000)
pseudo.com was the first serious attempt at internet television, founded in new york by josh harris in 1993, six years before broadband was something most...
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2000-09-14
QBasic (1991 - 2000)
qbasic arrived in june 1991 with ms-dos 5.0 as the replacement for gw-basic, a full-screen editor with an interpreter behind it and a help system that held the...
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2000-09-14
Windows CD Player (1993 - 2000)
the small gray applet under accessories that played whatever audio cd was in the drive. it had no idea what the disc was, so you typed the artist and the track...
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2000-09-14
MacsBug (1981 - 2000)
a machine-level debugger apple gave away for nothing, which thousands of people who could not read assembly installed anyway. the classic mac os had no memory...
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2000-09-14
Quick View (1995 - 2000)
right click a file in windows 95, pick quick view, and a window opened with the contents in it. no application, no wait, no license for whatever wrote the file...
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2000-09-14
Windows File Manager (1990 - 2000)
22 may 1990 put winfile.exe in windows 3.0, two panes over a row of drive letters, and it stayed shipping long past the point microsoft had a replacement for...
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2000-09-07
APBnews.com (1998 - 2000)
apbnews.com launched in august 1998 with venture money and a real newsroom, covering crime and criminal justice for the web at a point when nobody else was...
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2000-09-01
Miadora (1999 - 2000)
fifty-one million dollars in roughly eighteen months, against an average order over eight hundred. miadora sold fine jewelry online out of san mateo and bought...
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2000-09-01
Efdex (1999 - 2000)
tim carron-brown had the idea in the mid-nineties: put the whole food and drink trade onto one electronic exchange with prices updating by the minute, the way...
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2000-08-31
Quack.com (1998 - 2000)
pittsburgh in 1998 produced a company whose entire product was a phone number. you dialed it, you spoke, and quack.com read you stock quotes and movie listings...
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2000-08-31
Auction Universe (1997 - 2000)
the parent company of the los angeles times built an auction site in 1997 and pointed it at ebay. auction universe ran city-by-city auction pages for...
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2000-08-17
Quantex (1984 - 2000)
quantex sold pcs by mail order out of somerset, new jersey from 1984 and spent the nineties winning build-quality awards against companies with far bigger...
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2000-08-15
Living.com (1999 - 2000)
living.com was an austin-based home-furnishings dot-com that raised over a hundred million dollars and lasted thirteen months. amazon signed a five-year...
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2000-08-11
Value America (1996 - 2000)
value america wanted to be the store that sold everything, wiring you straight to the manufacturer so nothing ever sat in a warehouse. it went public in april...
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2000-08-03
RelayOne (1998 - 2000)
400 items a month is what a national postal service will tolerate before it stops. relayone was royal mail's attempt at the join between email and paper: you...
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2000-08-01
eGroups (1997 - 2000)
the mailing-list service that turned into yahoo groups. scott hassan started it in 1997 as findmail, an archive for email lists, and it grew into the place...
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2000-08-01
Word.com (1995 - 2000)
word was one of the first webzines that treated the browser as an art material. it launched in june 1995 out of new york, published something new almost every...
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2000-08-01
Fred the Webmate (1998 - 2000)
fred opened every conversation by telling you he had just been let go by a big new media company. he was a shockwave character pacing around a small clean...
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2000-07-31
Clickmango.com (1999 - 2000)
clickmango raised its funding in eight days in the autumn of 1999, on a plan to sell vitamins and health products to british households over the web. joanna...
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2000-07-31
Pandesic (1997 - 2000)
intel and sap started pandesic in august 1997 to sell smaller companies a complete e-commerce operation in one package, the software bundled with the machines...
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2000-07-24
Spyglass Mosaic (1994 - 2000)
a company in illinois licensed the mosaic name from ncsa, rewrote the browser properly, and sold it to anybody who wanted one. microsoft was one of the buyers....
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2000-07-24
Spyglass, Inc. (1990 - 2000)
microsoft paid eight million dollars in january 1997 to make a contract go away. the contract was the 1995 license for spyglass mosaic, written as a royalty on...
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2000-07-03
Addicted to Noise (1994 - 2000)
michael goldberg left rolling stone and put a music magazine on the web in december 1994, before almost anyone had worked out what a music magazine on the web...
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2000-07-02
PlanetAll (1996 - 2000)
planetall was a 1996 web service for keeping your address book and your school directory in the same place. members got reminders when someone they knew was...
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2000-07-01
Altern.org (1992 - 2000)
valentin lacambre gave away web space in france for eight years with no advertising, no contract and no questions about who you were. in 1998 somebody put...
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2000-07-01
SavvySearch (1995 - 2000)
a graduate student at colorado state university named daniel dreilinger put savvysearch on the web in march 1995, built on one idea: rather than crawl the web...
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2000-06-30
Nintendo Satellaview (1995 - 2000)
the satellaview was a modem-shaped peripheral that clipped under the super famicom and pulled games down from a satellite radio broadcaster. it ran in japan...
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2000-06-30
Verant Interactive (1998 - 2000)
verant interactive was the studio that actually shipped everquest. it spun out of 989 studios in 1998 with john smedley, brad mcquaid, russell shanks and 55...
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2000-06-19
Reel.com (1996 - 2000)
a video store owner's recommendation cards, rebuilt as a website, with a shop bolted on because nobody pays for advice. it worked well enough that hollywood...
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2000-06-01
Pixelon (1998 - 2000)
pixelon was a 1998 startup that promised dvd-quality streaming over a 56k modem. the founder "michael fenne" was actually david kim stanley, a convicted felon...
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2000-06-01
Epidemic Marketing (1999 - 2000)
a denver company that installed a plug-in called epinabler into your mail program and paid you a commission when somebody clicked the ad it stapled to the...
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2000-06-01
John Labovitz's e-zine-list (1993 - 2000)
4,392 zines, each one checked and listed with its contact details, is where the e-zine-list stopped. john labovitz started it in the summer of 1993 to tell...
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2000-05-29
Aliens Online (1998 - 2000)
aliens online charged ten dollars a month to put you inside the hive. the marines got classes and motion trackers, the aliens got the whole map on radar and a...
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2000-05-24
Looking Glass Studios (1990 - 2000)
looking glass studios was started as blue sky productions in 1990 in salem new hampshire by paul neurath and ned lerner, merged with lerner research in 1992,...
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2000-05-22
Toysmart (1998 - 2000)
toysmart was a us-only online toy store that ran out of money during the 2000 dot-com crash and tried to sell its customer database to pay its creditors. the...
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2000-05-20
Life magazine (1936 - 2000)
the american photojournalism weekly of record. henry luce launched it on 23 november 1936 and by the 1950s it was reaching roughly a quarter of the united...
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2000-05-18
Boo.com (1999 - 2000)
the dot-com era's most expensive flameout. ernst malmsten and kajsa leander raised $135 million between 1998 and 2000 to build an online fashion retailer with...
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2000-05-17
Digital Entertainment Network (1998 - 2000)
DEN was supposed to be the MTV of the internet. niche-channel streaming video aimed at young men, funded by microsoft and intel and NBC, with a $75 million IPO...
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2000-05-05
Red Rocket (1998 - 2000)
four in the afternoon, eastern time, on 5 may 2000. that is when viacom switched off its online toy store and pointed redrocket.com at a notice page sitting on...
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2000-05-04
Good Times Virus Hoax (1994 - 2000)
good times was an email that warned you about an email. it showed up in november 1994, described a virus that could not exist, and asked you to forward the...
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2000-05-03
Datapoint Corporation (1968 - 2000)
phil ray and gus roche incorporated computer terminal corporation in san antonio in july 1968 to build a quieter replacement for the teletype. two of their...
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2000-05-01
Island of Kesmai (1985 - 2000)
two university of virginia classmates wrote a six-player dungeon game in the summer of 1980 and spent five years turning it into something an online service...
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2000-05-01
Amiga Format (1989 - 2000)
future publishing launched amiga format in august 1989 with a floppy taped to the cover, and for about three years it was the biggest amiga magazine anywhere...
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2000-04-30
Sega Saturn (1994 - 2000)
the saturn won japan and lost everywhere else. 9.26 million units total, more than half of them in japan. its dual-cpu design made every port a nightmare, and...
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2000-04-14
Interleaf (1981 - 2000)
in 1985 a document system cost about sixty thousand dollars and arrived as furniture, sun workstations and a laser printer bought from interleaf as one turnkey...
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2000-04-09
Falcon 4.0 (1998 - 2000)
microprose shipped falcon 4.0 on december 11 1998 after six years of development at the alameda spectrum holobyte studio. it was the most ambitious civilian...
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2000-04-01
989 Studios (1995 - 2000)
989 studios was sony's american first-party game studio brand on the original playstation. it shipped twisted metal 3 and 4. it also held the syphon filter...
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2000-04-01
Microsoft Vizact (1999 - 2000)
vizact was microsoft's bet on a non-developer interactivity tool inside the office 2000 family. it was announced may 26 1999 and shipped in september 1999 at...
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2000-04-01
The Panda Project (1992 - 2000)
boca raton, 1992. stanford crane took over don estridge's old offices and built a workstation around a 256-bit backplane and a connector that put 1,100...
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2000-04-01
Stac Electronics (1983 - 2000)
five caltech graduate students opened a consulting shop in pasadena in 1983 and turned it into a chip company designing compression silicon for tape drives....
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2000-03-30
InterSpace Cyber Society (1997 - 2000)
at five in the afternoon on 30 march 2000, ntt switched off the free 3d world it had been running since july 1997. the client was a native windows application,...
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2000-03-20
StockGeneration (1998 - 2000)
sg ltd sold shares in eleven companies that did not exist, from a website registered in dominica under a gambling license. one of the eleven was advertised as...
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2000-03-08
Tradex Technologies (1996 - 2000)
in december 1999 ariba agreed to buy tradex for about 1.9 billion dollars in stock. by the time the deal closed on 8 march 2000 those same 19 million shares...
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2000-03-03
Amezou (1997 - 2000)
in april 1999 the busiest bulletin board in japan belonged to one anonymous person who had started it as a page of links two years earlier. amezou made the...
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2000-03-01
JavaStation (1996 - 2000)
no hard drive, no removable media of any kind, and an operating system that could only run java. the javastation-1 arrived in november 1996 at 699 dollars...
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2000-03-01
Confinity (1998 - 2000)
at a restaurant in woodside, california in july 1999, a venture capitalist held a palmpilot up to another palmpilot across the table and beamed 4.5 million...
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2000-02-29
Lycos' TOP 5% (1995 - 2000)
nineteen categories and a badge you could not award yourself. lycos' top 5% came out of point communications in 1995 and spent five years telling the web which...
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2000-02-22
iCraveTV (1999 - 2000)
icravetv was a canadian web service that grabbed over-the-air broadcast tv signals from the toronto market and pushed them back out as live realvideo streams...
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2000-02-17
Microsoft Personal Web Server (1996 - 2000)
personal web server was the free web server microsoft put in the add-ons folder of the windows 98 cd and in the nt 4.0 option pack. it let a desktop answer...
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2000-02-11
Cavedog Entertainment (1995 - 2000)
cavedog entertainment was set up in 1995 inside humongous entertainment as the adult-games division for chris taylor's real-time strategy project. total...
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2000-02-05
ZAZ (1996 - 2000)
a software company in porto alegre put a large part of brazil online, and for three years zaz was the second biggest thing on the brazilian web. telefónica...
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2000-02-04
MindSpring (1994 - 2000)
the atlanta dial-up isp charles brewer founded in february 1994. ran on a customer-service obsession that was unusual for the era, with named technicians and...
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2000-01-21
Gettingit.com (1999 - 2000)
r.u. sirius got the editor-in-chief job by showing his interviewer a web site featuring an interview with charles manson's webmaster. the money behind...
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2000-01-10
Cygnus Solutions (1989 - 2000)
making free software affordable was the slogan and it was also the whole business plan. three people started the company on 13 november 1989 and booked 725,000...
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2000-01-07
Visio Corporation (1989 - 2000)
seven january 2000, a stock swap worth roughly one and a half billion dollars, the biggest check redmond had ever written to that date. what it bought was a...
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2000-01-07
Caldera, Inc. (1994 - 2000)
ray noorda lost the netware market to microsoft and then spent part of what was left of his fortune buying dr-dos off novell for four hundred thousand dollars....
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2000-01-05
General Instrument (1923 - 2000)
motorola closed the largest acquisition in its history on 5 january 2000 and the name on the cable box changed. general instrument had been going since 1923,...
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2000-01-01
Microsoft ActiMates (1997 - 2000)
actimates was a line of interactive plush dolls released by microsoft kids starting september 1997. the first character was barney. arthur and his sister d.w....
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2000-01-01
MPMan F10 (1998 - 2000)
the mpman f10 was the first mass-market portable mp3 player. saehan information systems shipped it in march 1998 in south korea, six months before the diamond...
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2000-01-01
LANtastic (1987 - 2000)
artisoft shipped lantastic out of tucson arizona in 1987 as the first peer-to-peer pc network anyone could run without a dedicated server. by 1990 it had over...
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2000-01-01
UUCP (1979 - 2000)
uucp was how unix machines talked to each other before the internet reached most of them. unix-to-unix copy, written at bell labs in 1979, moved mail and...
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2000-01-01
MBone (1992 - 2000)
mbone was the internet's first real attempt at broadcasting to many people at once. built in 1992 as an experimental overlay of tunnels stitched across the...
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2000-01-01
GauchoNet (1996 - 2000)
gonzalo arzuaga was a business student in buenos aires who spent the summer of 1996 in a university computer lab typing argentine websites into a list by hand....
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2000-01-01
Human Entertainment (1983 - 2000)
human spent its first years building famicom games that shipped with nintendo's name on the box and bandai's name on the box, then put its own name on fire pro...
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2000-01-01
AOLpress (1994 - 2000)
it started as navipress in february 1994, from a small company in goleta, california, and it did the thing the web was originally designed to do: you browsed a...
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2000-01-01
Windows Neptune (1999 - 2000)
neptune was supposed to be the version where home windows finally stopped being built on dos. one build, 5111, went out to developers in december 1999 and no...
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2000-01-01
EIES (1976 - 2000)
murray turoff built the electronic information exchange system at the new jersey institute of technology with national science foundation funding, and it went...
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2000-01-01
Gooey (1999 - 2000)
gooey was a small windows download that watched which page your browser was on and put you in a room with everybody else who was on it. forty six thousand...
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2000-01-01
Qmodem (1984 - 2000)
john friel iii wrote it in turbo pascal in 1984 and sold it as shareware, and it took the dos terminal slot away from pc-talk by being faster. for a decade it...
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2000-01-01
X-Stream Network (1998 - 2000)
two canadian brothers worked out that a british isp did not need to charge a subscription, because the phone company was already billing the customer by the...
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2000-01-01
Global Village Communication (1989 - 2000)
global village started in mountain view in june 1989 and spent a decade making modems for one computer company's customers. the teleport sat on the desk and...
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2000-01-01
Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer (1996 - 2000)
a mailing list with five jennifers on it produced one line of complaint in 1996, and jennifer farwell went and built the website. the society for preventing...
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2000-01-01
CareerMosaic (1994 - 2000)
an advertising agency that had spent decades buying help wanted space in american newspapers looked at the web in 1994 and put the listings there instead....
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2000-01-01
ePods (1999 - 2000)
a twenty two year old chief executive in belltown, funded by the company that sold the george foreman grill. what they were building was a two pound windows ce...
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2000-01-01
L0pht Heavy Industries (1992 - 2000)
on 19 may 1998 seven men gave evidence to a senate committee under their handles and told it they could take the whole internet down in half an hour. that was...
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2000-01-01
SingleTrac (1994 - 2000)
twisted metal came out for the playstation in 1995 with warhawk beside it, both from a salt lake city studio founded the year before by engineers out of a...
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2000
Computer.com (1999 - 2000)
computer.com was the dot-com that exists in business-school slides as the company that spent half of its $7 million in venture capital on super bowl xxxiv ads,...
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2000
Olé (1996 - 2000)
spain had a search engine before it had google, and a catalan research foundation built it with public money and then sold it to the employee who had proposed...