… is a long time, as Cringely points out in his 10th anniversary column this week. A snapshot of how things were ten years ago:
The big names back in 1997 were Microsoft, Intel, AOL, Compaq, and Netscape, only two of which survive today as independent enterprises. The PC was everything. Apple back then was the Apple of Gil Amelio, not Steve Jobs, and was hardly even a contender. Google was a year from being founded. Yahoo was around, but then so was Excite and AltaVista. It was the beginning of the Internet bubble, a time of promise and Super Bowl commercials, when crazy business ideas were funded overnight and people sometimes got jobs because they had places to live in Silicon Valley, not because they had particular talent.