The Internet was starting to pick up during the late 90s. When Radio and TV first became mainstream it took them anywhere from 13 years for radio to upwards of 40 to get 50 million regular users. For the internet though it was a completely different story. It only took it 4 years to establish itself as a source of information. Due to its growing popularity it caught the eye of people like Jeff Bezos and Pierre Omidyar who saw this as an opportunity to start an online business.
Computers were getting more and more powerful using a simple formula, more is better. In the 90s there were computers the size of entire rooms, but now we have a computer many times more powerful in the palm of our hand. The way computers become more powerful is by adding transistors to the computer chip, which in turn allows it handle more processes therefore making it faster. In order to add more transistors onto the chip they need to be made smaller to create more space for more to be added. This is the formula that has made the computer chip as powerful as it is today.
Jeff Bezos started a business called Amazon in his garage, a place where many wonderful ideas are born , his whole objective was a to make a site where buying books was easy. His business grew faster than expected to the point where he had to recreate his entire business model. Pierre Omidyar took time out of his labour day weekend to start a project where he would make a site where people would buy and sell different items. When his name Ebay first started all that was being sold were old collectables and it would stay that way for a while, then as the internet started to grow so did both of these site, so much so that these sites would turn out to be the next craze on wall street and in the stock market.
Investors started to see website blow up, and started to invest every penny, nickel, and dime that they could get there hands on. Soon sites like Amazon and Ebay were getting to be big enough to challenge the top dogs of the stock market. Within a week on Ebay entering the stock market, its value had reached $2 billion, bear in mind that this was a company that had just entered the stock market. Now investors started to invest in anything that had a dot com on it, thus starting the dot com bubble. Investors were trying to get in on the craze as soon as try could, but as all good things have, it came to an end. On April 14,2000 Nasdaq fell 350 points in one day causing many sites online to be 'killed', which in turn resulted in millions of dollars of loss.