Starting to hit the limits of the net's current capacity to carry data 2007-04-10
A neutron bomb is designed to kill people but leave buildings standing, while the effect of the dotcom crash was to close down companies but leave the network intact.
At the turn of the last millennium financial markets around the world realised that the valuations they were offering for companies whose business plans included the word internet were completely ridiculous and that there was no way most of them were ever going to make money.
Share prices for those that had already floated collapsed; second round venture funding for start-ups disappeared, even for good ideas with a solid track record; and the angel investors took their money elsewhere.
Individual investors - the "day traders" who had sunk their savings into stocks that looked like they would grow forever - lost the most money, but pension funds, insurance companies and other big holders of shares also suffered. The companies, large and small, went under.
Who now remembers etoys.com or Online Publishing?
But the effect of the collapse was like a neutron bomb, a nuclear weapon that produces high doses of radiation but with a relatively small explosion, and the damage it did was limited.
The web servers went as companies like boo.com turned off their sites, but the cables in the ground, the routers that connected them together and the infrastructure of the internet itself remained in place.Billions of dollars were spent making the network fast enough to support the anticipated growth in e-commerce and online activity, and when the revolution was halted in its tracks by the collapse it wa
