Ask HN: What Is Your Most Vivid Memory from the Dotcom Boom?

Sitting in Netscape’s sysadmin offices at midnight Dec 31, 1999, watching them monitor for Y2K issues. My friend was on duty that night, and we’d offered to keep him company. Most of their servers had times that were skewed and/or in different time zones, so the actual transition was smeared over many hours. But by my watch, the real local midnight was celebrated by somebody popping their head over the top of their cubicle and shouting “Fishcam okay!” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcam

I know there were probably more dramatic places to spend that moment, but I’m glad I hung around for that.

The night it all ended. For a few years you couldn't get into any restaurant SF North Beach on the weekend without reserving days or even weeks in advance. Then one Saturday night my wife and I were walking around looking for a place to eat and realized every restaurant we looked at had tables available.

(I think it was in February 2001.)

I live in Austin. Route 2222 hugs the bluffs west of downtown; it has 2 lanes in each direction with no center (turn) lane. The curves are sharp & unpredictable, especially in wet weather.

I was headed home on a Friday afternoon at the height of the boom. Traffic suddenly slowed to a crawl as we navigated the worst of the curves - mostly to rubberneck at two 20-something tech bros who had just crushed the front of a brand-new red Ferrari into the rock wall. They were unhurt - but definitely missing the Masters-of-the-Universe look.

This was the era of Trilogy in Austin recruiting "only the best". I smiled all the way home.

Eric S Raymond reflecting on his new found wealth due to the VA Linux IPO: https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/12/10/0821224/esr-writes-...

Not sure what it was eventually worth when he could cash out.

Reading fuckedcompany.com every morning and watching the carnage happen in realtime.

Being 13 year old, knowing to make some HTML then reading stories about how people were making $50 per web page (!!!)

My MBA father told me to try it out, but I couldn't find any buyers and it was a huge pain without CSS and all that.

Sure there was crazy evaluations, greed, and ridiculous business ideas that would never succeed getting real coverage. But what I remember was the excitement that was around at the the time - that anything was possible. There were entire shows on prime time TV about technology and its effects on society. Sunday mornings had talk shows on the industry and where it was headed. There was this crazy show called The Site which was actually pretty good. Even the the DevNull cartoon thing was a bit off. There was real excitement around and people knew the world would never be the same.

Checking fuckedcompany.com multiple times per day, seeing rumors about a third round of layoffs at 60% of staff in two days, and then seeing 16% layoffs right on schedule.

I remember taking advantage of the promotions at places like UrbanFetch and Kozmo.com. Once I ordered a couple of music CDs and had them delivered to my door same-day for a total outlay of a few dollars. I remember seeing all the delivery guys with their Kozmo-branded messenger bags hanging around on the sidewalk outside their Manhattan offices, waiting for someone to order something I guess. I had a feeling this couldn't last.

I wanted to buy Redhat shares because, well it was the boom and it was a tech company and it was Linux man, Linux is cool. (I had no idea how to install it though!). I was scared/unsure of how to buy a US stock from the UK so I didn't end up doing it. If I recall correctly they went 6x shortly after the IPO. Damn!

Being able to order dogfood, delivered, for less than I could buy it for locally.

This E-Trade commercial that played during the Superbowl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnQMq5wtZcg

Listening to my father and his work friends at Microsoft in the late 90s talking about their upcoming retirements from their investments solely in Cisco and MSFT.

It sounded so glorious, yet... my dad is still working.

Wondering how companies with not very good ideas or products and losing huge amounts of money could be getting the valuations that they were.

Playing quake 3 arena in the office with 30 other engineers after the work day.

Sites like the HamsterDance. The web was so much more chaotic back then.

Rich friends in high school bragging about buying Cisco stock.

it's no different than today, tons of jobs, money flowing, watching most people get far richer than me.

America Online buys TimeWarner!