03/10/2023 at 00:01 by Carsten Spille – The dot-com bubble bursts, Bill Gates announces the Xbox and AG Bell makes its first phone call – all of this happened on March 10th. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
…1876: Judging by his own lab diary, Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful phone call that day – well, actually his sentence was “Mr. Watson come here I want you!” just a phone call, as apparently Watson didn’t answer, but obediently complied with the request. In doing so, however, Bell laid the foundation for modern telecommunications, data transmission via modem and thus, in a broader sense, also for the Internet.
The course of the US stock index Nasdaq documents the rise and fall of the “New Economy”. Since then, analysts have repeatedly feared that a dot-com bubble would swell again – above all in view of excessive investments in Web 2.0 companies. Source: Nasdaq
…2000: The old economy has had its day, the future belongs to the so-called New Economy – everyone is sure of that in the high phase of the IT boom. Companies that want to earn their money solely via the Internet are conquering the stock exchanges worldwide and, with modest sales and no concrete business plans, are achieving billions that traditional companies can only dream of. Often, just a few neat websites are enough to find investors pouring millions into building new dot-com companies. This development reached its climax on March 10, 2000, when the technology-oriented US stock index Nasdaq reached its peak and followed the German Nemax at the same time. But although everyone is expecting further growth, the opposite is the case – the dot-com bubble that has been growing for years bursts: the following day, prices begin to fall, initially only slightly, then into the abyss. Young companies go bankrupt in droves without ever having made a profit. Within two years, the companies on the German Neuer Markt lose around 200 billion euros in value, and on the Nasdaq even two trillion dollars are destroyed. At the end of 2003, the Neuer Markt was finally abolished – and in future investors would prefer to go back to traditional values.
…2000: At the Games Developers Conference, a proud Bill Gates presented the Microsoft Xbox game console to the world public. He states that the Xbox has double the performance of all previous platforms. This should be made possible by a special Intel processor (Coppermine/Celeron hybrid, 133 MHz FSB, but only 128 KiByte L2 cache) with 733 MHz, an Nvidia NV2A graphics chip, which is essentially a cross between Geforce 3 and Geforce 4 Ti corresponds and clocks at 233 MHz. Nvidia also supplies the mainboard chip MCPX, which integrates the Soundstorm audio solution of later Nvidia chipsets. Bill Gates announces that he wants to sell the console worldwide.
