1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 263

Summary
The 1990s witnessed the arrival of the dot-com era, when the internet and World
Wide Web introduced new ways of doing business by selling products and services
remotely. Some companies prospered and created entirely new forms of business.
Others tried but would fail during the dot-com bust early in the next decade.
By the end of the 1990s, hundreds of applications were aging and in need of
geriatric renovations. The double impact of the euro rollout in 1999 and the Y2K
problem at the century's end showed that mass updates to legacy applications
would be troublesome, and there are many future mass updates just beyond the
horizon, when unique digit combinations will run out for telephone numbers and
social security numbers.
As software applications grow older, software maintenance begins to move
ahead of software development as the main form of software engineering work.
This is not surprising, considering a similar situation where there are more mech-
anics fixing automobiles than there are assembly-line workers building new auto-
mobiles.
This was the first decade of the internet and the World Wide Web. In this dec-
ade, this technology started to change the fundamental nature of human commu-
nications and social interaction. During this decade, some people began to interact
more with remote acquaintances than with their families and friends.
Social networks would blossom in the next decade but had already begun. A
new subindustry of massively interactive computer games had begun and would
continue to grow in the next decade.