1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 244

The early history is complex and involves multiple mergers and acquisitions.
It started with an older company called Telephone Marketing Programs (TMP)
Worldwide that was formed in 1967 and started as a print-based “yellow pages”
firm. In 1993, TMP started a recruitment division. In 1995, it acquired the Monster
Board and the On-Line Career Center, the two companies that would later merge.
Monster.com itself is owned by Monster Worldwide, Inc.
Monster was a pioneer in web-based job searches and had one of the first job-
search websites in 1994, not long after the web began to function internationally.
Although Monster.com is very popular with job seekers and companies seeking
new employees, not everything was smooth as the company grew. In 2007, Mon-
ster.com was hacked, and personal information for thousands of job-seeking can-
didates was stolen from its databases. Although Monster said it would improve se-
curity, there was another hack in 2009 at the U.K. Monster data center, which may
have resulted in as many as 4.5 million records being stolen.
In 2006, the Attorney General's office of the State of New York began an in-
vestigation on assertions of back-dating stock options. Monster started its own in-
ternal investigation and reported some irregularities, which resulted in restating
earnings from 1997 through 2005. There were some personnel terminations as
well.
The parent TMP Worldwide company went public in 1996 and is traded on
NASDAQ. In spite of hacks and legal issues, Monster.com remains a pioneer in
online employment searches and job postings, and it is also a company that cre-
ated many innovations in personnel systems.
Netscape Communications
Netscape was a pioneer among web browsers and was also one of the combatants
in the famous “browser wars” by competing against Microsoft. The company was
founded in Mountain View, California, on April 4, 1994, by Jim Clark and the
famous Silicon Valley entrepreneur Marc Andreesen. Originally, the company was
Mosaic Communications Corporation, but as with many software startups, the
name of the company changed.
Many of the same people who developed the original Mosaic web browser also
worked on the development of the Netscape web browser, but the source code of
the two was different. Netscape also created the famous JavaScript programming
language and originated the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.