…1876: Judging by his own lab diary, Alexander Graham Bell made his first successful telephone conversation that day – well, actually his sentence was “Mr. Watson come here I want you!” only one call, as Watson apparently did not answer but obediently followed the request. In doing so, Bell laid the foundation for modern telecommunications, data transmission via modem and, in a broader sense, also for the Internet.
Source: Nasdaq The course of the US Nasdaq stock index documents the rise and fall of the “New Economy”. Since then, analysts have repeatedly feared that a dot-com bubble will rise again – especially in view of excessive investments in Web 2.0 companies.
…2000: The old economy has had its day, the future belongs to the so-called new economy – that's what everyone is sure of in the peak phase of the IT boom. Companies that want to make money solely via the Internet are conquering stock markets worldwide and, with modest sales and without concrete business plans, are reaching billions in values that traditional companies can only dream of. Often just a few nice websites are enough to find investors who will invest millions in 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 with it. But although everyone expects 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 a little, then plummetingly. Young companies are collapsing into bankruptcy without ever having made a profit. Within two years, companies on the German Neuer Markt lost around 200 billion euros in value, and two trillion dollars were lost on the Nasdaq. At the end of 2003, the Neuer Markt was finally abolished – and in the future investors would prefer to rely on traditional values again.
…2000: At the Games Developers Conference, a proud Bill Gates presents the Microsoft Xbox game console to the world public. He states that the Xbox has twice the performance of all previous platforms. This is supposed to 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.