Boo.com

The e-commerce website Boo.com is the mother of all dot com disasters. Backed by Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and the Benetton family, the online fashion store is developed with no project plan, no cost controls, and an enormous marketing budget. It culminates into a late-arriving, critically panned e-commerce website. Boo.com burns through $160 million before its liquidation in May 2000.
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The AS/400

IBM introduces its AS/400 midrange system in 1988. Whereas most other minicomputer vendors are seeing their market eroded by PCs and client/server systems, IBM has reasonable success with its AS/400 series. By 1998, IBM is selling an AS/400 computer system to a customer every 12 minutes in a working day. In 2000, the AS/400 is renamed the iSeries server.
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Linux

Linux is created by Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds decides to rewrite Unix from scratch and give away his work for free. The ability to see the source code, to improve it, and share it with others inspires many programmers to dedicate sleepless nights to work on it. Linux is eventually improved to the point where it becomes more popular than many commercial Unix packages.
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H316 Kitchen Computer

Honeywell releases its H316 Kitchen Computer in 1969. At $10,600, this computer is marketed to the wealthy and savvy housewife. The computer requires about two weeks worth of programming to operate and can be programmed to keep track of various things like golf scores, investments, dinner menus, and membership lists of charity organizations.
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Stanford University

Stanford University creates the Stanford Industrial Park in Palo Alto, California in 1950. The goal is to create a center of high technology close to the university in order to raise money. This is the genesis of Silicon Valley, the world famous technology area that radiates outward from Stanford University and lies between the Santa Cruz Mountains on the west and the Coast Range to the southeast.
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CompuServe

CompuServe is founded in 1969 as a computer time-sharing service. In 1979, CompuServe becomes the first to offer electronic mail capabilities to personal computer users. One year later it becomes the first to offer real-time chat online. By 1982, the company is providing wide-area networking capabilities to corporate clients. Today, Compuserve operates as an internet service provider, owned by America Online.
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Booting

Booting is the process that loads the operating system from the disk into the computer's memory. The term booting or bootstrapping is inspired by the legend of the Baron Munchhausen. Munchhausen was an 18th century German Nobleman who told tall tales about himself, including the ability to pull himself out of the sea by his bootstraps.
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