The internet became the defining infrastructure of the 21st-century economy. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and Hotmail all launched in 1995–96. The dot-com crash eliminated overvalued companies but not the internet itself — by 2020, five of the ten largest companies by market cap were internet businesses.
In 1991, the internet was already 22 years old. ARPANET had been operational since 1969, and the network linked universities and government laboratories across the country and beyond. If a teacher mentioned it at all, the description was accurate enough: a research tool, something scientists used to share data. Practical for everyday life? The question seemed almost absurd.
What the classroom didn't know — what almost no one knew — was that Tim Berners-Lee had just launched the first website at CERN in August 1991, weeks after most graduating classes had finished their ceremonies. Berners-Lee had invented the World Wide Web to help physicists share papers. CERN released the technology to the public domain in April 1993. No licensing fees. No gatekeepers. Anyone could build on the infrastructure Berners-Lee had invented. That single bureaucratic announcement set the conditions for everything that followed.
In the fall of 1994, the web had roughly 10,000 sites, most of them institutional. Then Netscape Navigator 1.0 shipped in December 1994, weeks after that year's graduating class had left campus. It was the first browser that made the web look like a designed medium rather than a document archive — images loaded inline with text, links were clickable without memorizing commands. The observation that the web was "for nerds" was statistically accurate in 1994 and statistically obsolete within eighteen months. Amazon launched in 1995. eBay launched in 1995. Yahoo launched in 1995. Hotmail launched in 1996. The window between the class of 1994 and the class of 1996 was not a generation; it was a single product release.
Skepticism persisted even as the evidence accumulated. Robert Metcalfe — the inventor of Ethernet and a founder of 3Com — predicted in a December 1995 column in InfoWorld that the internet would experience a "catastrophic collapse" sometime in 1996, traffic would exceed capacity, the infrastructure would fail. He offered to eat his words if wrong. He was wrong. He blended his printed column into a smoothie and drank it at the 1997 World Wide Web Conference. Doubts about the internet's durability were still present in school curricula through 1996, and they weren't obviously unreasonable: connections were unreliable, security was minimal, and most of the businesses launching had no clear path to profitability.
The dot-com crash seemed to vindicate the skeptics. The NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000 at 5,048. By October 2002 it had fallen to 1,114 — a 78 percent collapse over thirty months. Hundreds of companies had vaporized. Pets.com, Webvan, Kozmo.com — businesses with billions in market capitalization and no plausible path to profitability — simply ceased to exist. For anyone graduating into this wreckage, the lesson seemed clear: the internet had been a speculative bubble, and the bubble had burst.
The lesson was half right. The speculative excess was real, and the correction was brutal and necessary. But the correction eliminated overvalued companies, not the internet itself. Amazon lost 95 percent of its stock value between 1999 and 2001, falling from $107 to $5.51 per share. It did not close. Google had its IPO in 2004. The underlying infrastructure — broadband penetration, server capacity, software tools — had been built during the boom and didn't disappear with the companies that had built it. The medium survived its speculators.
By 2020, five of the ten largest companies by market capitalization were internet businesses. The failure of prediction was not a failure of information; it was a failure of imagination at every stage. In 1991 the web didn't exist. In 1994 it was for specialists. In 1996 it might be a fad. In 2000 the crash proved it was unsustainable. At each moment, the analysis was applied to the current snapshot instead of the trajectory between them.
The internet is essentially anonymous. Online activity cannot be traced or used against you.
Internet activity leaves extensive digital traces - IP addresses, browser fingerprints, cookies, ISP logs, and server logs. This was true from the internet's inception. The expectation of anonymity was always a misconception.
Computers are large, expensive machines for governments, universities, and major corporations. Personal computing is not practical.
The Apple II launched in 1977, the same year this cohort graduated. The Commodore PET and TRS-80 also launched that year. Personal computing was already arriving. Within a decade, computers were in millions of homes and schools.
Real estate is always a safe long-term investment because housing prices have historically never fallen nationwide.
The US housing market peaked in 2006 and began falling in 2007. The subsequent collapse wiped out trillions in household wealth, triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and produced the largest foreclosure wave in American history.
AIDS is a fatal disease with no effective treatment. An AIDS diagnosis is a death sentence.
HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) was introduced in 1996 and transformed AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable chronic condition. People on modern HIV treatment now have near-normal life expectancy.