1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 220

Chapter 8. 1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World
Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms
During the 1990s, the rapid expansion of the internet and the World Wide Web
changed human communications and social life forever. New companies began to
emerge and carve out new kinds of markets by selling products remotely over the
web.
The exuberance and excitement of vast new global markets based on the inter-
net led to an enormous explosion of companies and products marketed over the
web by companies termed dot-coms . They were known as dot-coms because their
website addresses ended in a period followed by the term “com,” which was the
official web term for commerce.
Early in the next decade, the dot-coms bubble would burst, and many of these
new companies disappeared into bankruptcy, but the 1990s witnessed a huge glob-
al expansion of communications and remote commerce.
This decade also saw the arrival of online banking and new ways of purchasing
articles remotely. It was also a fruitful decade for computer games, which grew in
number and complexity and began to offer realistic backgrounds and high-resolu-
tion graphics.
In 1999, the new euro currency arrived and began circulation. This caused
changes to thousands of banking and financial applications as they were updated
to reflect the new currency. The euro became official on January 1, 1999, although
notes and coins did not begin circulation until 2002.
In the last half of this decade, the “Y2K” problem would emerge and divert
substantial software resources toward converting two-digit dates such as “99” into
four-digit dates such as “1999.” The reason was that when the year 2000 appeared,
the “00” format would damage sort sequences for time-sensitive information such
as taxes and corporate earnings.
Toward the end of the decade, some applications were approaching 20 years
of use, so “maintenance” began to replace new development as the dominant soft-
ware work. Legacy applications needing geriatric care were large components of
the euro and Y2K problems.