Just 17 screenshots that will give you a nostalgic feeling

Be careful, in no time you will feel very old or only understand the train station.

Yahoo! – founded by two students – started in 1994 as an annotated bookmark collection for the young WWW. The later search engine started under the name “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.

Hotmail went online on July 4, 1996 and was the first email provider for an entire generation. In the original spelling HoTMaiL, the name referred to the web language HTML.

In 1997, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for $400 million. The Windows company changed the rather unfortunate name to Outlook in 2013.

The first Photoshop version 1 from 1990 cost $895. For years, the image editing program was considered one of the most illegal programs. In 2013, Adobe switched to a cloud solution or a subscription model.

Amazon started in 1995 as an online bookstore. Jeff Bezos originally wanted to name his company Relentless. Friends would have advised him against this.

Rotten.com, the chamber of horrors of the early WWW, was probably the dirtiest website on the Internet between 1997 and 2012 and certainly one of the most scandalous. The sensation on rotten.com “attracted mainly adolescent young people who had just discovered the Internet via a modem with a speed of 33 kilobits per second,” is how the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” described the fascination that Rotten exerted.

At the turn of the century, LimeWire was one of the most popular download programs alongside Napster, Kazaa and eDonkey. What many users probably didn’t know: All of these file-sharing programs were notorious virus-slingers.

Apple made a comeback in the late 1990s with the colorful iMac. From 2001 onwards, the iPod became a bestseller. Just four years earlier, Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy and had to be rescued by Microsoft with a financial injection. At the time, Microsoft needed Apple to prove to US authorities that Windows was not an operating system monopoly.

In 2001, iTunes was released, which was largely based on an MP3 program that Apple had purchased from the then software development company Casady & Greene. The Music Store, which was integrated in 2003, would become a cash cow for Apple for years – until Spotify took off years later and buried the MP3 download business. iTunes for Mac has not been developed since 2019.

In 1999, Switzerland’s most legendary chat went online. Just two years later, the Bluewin chat was the most popular chat in Switzerland. In 2004, 350 operators were needed to monitor the chats. This was urgently needed because the popular chat attracted uninvited guests. Children were repeatedly abused by pedophiles. The rapid decline began with the advent of Facebook.

Netflix (from ‘net’ for internet and ‘flicks’ for films) started in 1997 as an online video library. Video streaming was only offered from 2007 onwards. The rest is history.

In 2004, Google announced a free email service that would rival rivals such as Hotmail, GMX and Co. looked old-fashioned with an initial mailbox size of one gigabyte of memory. Back then, users were used to two to twenty megabytes of free storage space for their emails. Gmail subsequently grew to become the world market leader.

On February 4, 2004, four young students founded the company Facebook. Their names: Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and of course Mark Zuckerberg. The social network was originally only accessible to students in the US and was called Thefacebook.

LinkedIn was founded in the US in 2002 and has also been available in German since 2009. In recent years, LinkedIn has overtaken the business network Xing, which was once the leading business network in German-speaking countries. LinkedIn has been part of Microsoft since 2016.

Anyone who doesn’t know this logo is either lying or has never lived! 😉

What started in 2005 with a banal animal video grew into a billion-dollar business. Google bought the video portal in 2006 for 1.25 billion francs. It may be one of the best deals in history. In 2022, YouTube would generate revenues of more than R26 billion from advertising. It’s no wonder that today users watch more than a billion hours of videos on YouTube every day.

Spotify was founded in Stockholm in 2006 – as an alternative to file-sharing platforms such as The Pirate Bay and Apple’s iTunes. The streaming service grew slowly in the early years, but the proliferation of smartphones and flat rates for mobile data created the perfect conditions for Spotify. Nowadays, Spotify, with more than 550 million users, is virtually synonymous with music streaming and the Swedes are successfully keeping major technology companies such as Apple and Amazon at bay.

bonus