1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 225

The end of this century witnessed the first use of the phrase “big data,” which
refers to the ability of analyzing large databases with millions or even billions of
records.
This decade saw a rapid increase in higher CMM levels of 3, 4, and 5. It also
witnessed the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) and the in-
creased usage of Joint Application Design (JAD) and the unified modeling lan-
guage (UML). Web applications exploded in numbers. Viruses and cyberattacks
likewise began to explode in frequency. Identity theft became a national problem.
The number of programming languages topped 1,750, with Java, Visual Basic,
PHP, JavaScript, and Ruby becoming the best known. Global outsourcing ex-
ploded during this decade, with India, China, Russia, the Philippines, and other
low-cost countries absorbing U.S. software projects. Commercial off-the-shelf
software (COTS) began to approximate 50% of corporate portfolios. Massive en-
terprise resource planning (ERP) applications were added to portfolios because
older stove-pipe applications could not easily share corporate data.
The last few years of the decade witnessed two interesting problems that caused
changes to millions of software applications on a global basis: the rollout of the
euro in 1999 and the Y2K problem at the century's end when the calendar changed
from 1999 to 2000 and two-digit abbreviations for years would no longer sort
properly.
Companies Formed During the 1990s
Table 8.1 shows many of the companies that formed from 1990 to 1999.