How the Internet Was Born (Part 2)

Hi everyone, welcome to Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. Last time we briefly talked about how the internet was born, and how it went from a military project to a tool within everyone's reach, thanks to one technical expert after another pushing it forward tirelessly. This time we'll continue with the connection between the internet and China, and of course, the internet bubble that burst at the turn of the millennium.

Last time we mentioned that Tim Berners-Lee of Britain invented the World Wide Web and the browser in 1989, and this invention completely changed the way people get and share information. Ordinary people no longer had to learn complicated programming. With just a small browser, they could access knowledge far richer than any community library.

Once technology innovation gets going, it develops a will and a direction of its own. This wave of innovation soon blew into China too, but connecting to the global network was not something that could be done overnight. First, it required considerable investment in basic hardware. Connecting needed root domain name servers, and it needed undersea fiber-optic cables laid. And most important of all, it needed a large number of communications talent. Besides, China was still in the early days of reform and opening up, so it urgently needed to train large numbers of relevant people and to receive guidance from foreign experts.

The United States was not willing to provide the necessary help at the start. In the end, it was Germany that sent a scientist named Werner Zorn to help China connect to the internet. In September 1987, he sent the first email from China to the world: "Across the Great Wall, we reach every corner of the world." In 1990, Professor Zorn also helped us register and open the CN top-level domain, and China got its own calling card on the internet.

But that still didn't mean China was officially online. It wasn't until 1994 that the US National Science Foundation approved China's request to connect to the internet, and a 64K international dedicated line went live. Internationally, China was recognized as the 77th country with full internet access. 1994 is therefore known as the internet's first year in China.

Meanwhile, internationally, personal computers were no longer astronomically expensive, and more and more American families were willing to buy a computer that could go online. From 1990 to 2000, the share of households owning a personal computer rose from 21.7 percent to 51 percent. This huge user base made the birth of internet companies possible.

However, many of the so-called products of internet companies back then were perhaps just a single web page. And the entrance to those pages was the browser. So a "commercial war" over browsers soon broke out.

Remember the browser that Tim Berners-Lee invented? It was actually quite primitive. In 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois developed the Mosaic browser, which was the ancestor of the modern graphical browser. One of the core developers, Marc Andreessen, later founded Netscape and launched the wildly popular Netscape Navigator browser.

This made Microsoft's Bill Gates realize how important the internet was, and he immediately organized a team to develop Internet Explorer (IE). Starting in 1995, Microsoft and Netscape launched the famous "browser war." Microsoft even bundled IE with Windows and gave it away for free, which ultimately caused Netscape's market share to plunge.

How did the war end? Netscape lost, but its spirit didn't disappear. Netscape open-sourced the browser's source code, which eventually evolved into the Firefox browser that everyone uses today.

In the era before tech giants existed, the internet was full of all kinds of small websites.

As the number of web pages exploded, people needed an effective way to find information. In 1994, two Stanford graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, founded Yahoo! At first, Yahoo! was really a manually edited website directory, like a giant online phone book.

But manually editing a directory soon couldn't keep up with the growth of web pages. In 1998, two more Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google. The PageRank algorithm they invented completely changed how search engines work, making search results more accurate and relevant.

Just imagine: without these search engines, looking for information across the vast internet would be like searching for a needle in a haystack!

Beyond browsing information on web pages, could the internet be used for business? In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage. It started out as just an online bookstore. In 1995, Pierre Omidyar founded eBay, a platform that let ordinary people buy and sell goods online.

The founding of these companies marked the arrival of the e-commerce era. Suddenly you could buy goods from all over the world without leaving home, and you could even open your own small online shop! This convenience completely changed the way people shop.

Back then, the constant stream of new companies and new products was no less exciting than the AI products we see today, and this quickly caught the interest of Wall Street money. After all, Yahoo!, founded in 1994, went public within just two years and soon became the world's first internet company worth more than 100 billion dollars. The founders and management of internet companies became new money overnight, and everyone was afraid of missing the next Yahoo! investment opportunity.

So from around 1997 to 2000, any company whose name included ".com" was hyped to the skies. Even if these companies' actual businesses were not profitable, and might not even be related to the internet at all, huge amounts of money still poured in and kept blowing the bubble bigger and bigger.

1. March 10, 2000: The NASDAQ Composite Index reached its peak of 5,048.62 points. This day is widely regarded as the peak of the internet bubble.

2. March 2000 to 2001: Starting in March, the market began falling rapidly, and signs of the bubble bursting appeared. Many internet companies went bankrupt or were acquired because they lacked sustainable business models.

3. 2001: The bubble fully collapsed. A large number of internet companies stopped trading, with an estimated nearly 1,000 companies shutting down and more than 3,800 being merged. The whole IT industry suffered heavy losses, and about 5 trillion dollars in market value evaporated.

How terrifying was this bubble? It wasn't until 2015 that the NASDAQ finally climbed back to the 5,048 peak it had reached in 2001, recovering all of its losses. But during that time, many companies that had gone bankrupt never lived to see that day.

Well, that's the end of this episode of Cold-Knowledge Blind Box. If you have any other cold facts you'd like to hear, you can also open the NIO app, go to the friends screen, find the community called NIO Radio Shenzhen City Branch, and share the cold facts you love with us!

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