Web Portal - History

History

In the late 1990s the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web browsers in the late-1990s many companies tried to build or acquire a portal to have a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, IBM and others launched Prodigy, and Excite and @Home became a part of AT&T Corporation during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies, such as CBS.

The portal craze, with old media companies racing to outbid each other for Internet properties, died down with the dot-com bust in 2000 and 2001. Disney pulled the plug on Go.com, Excite went bankrupt, and its remains were sold to iWon.com. Some portal sites such as Yahoo! and those others first listed in this article remain active.

Read more about this topic:  Web Portal

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?
    David Hume (1711–1776)

    False history gets made all day, any day,
    the truth of the new is never on the news
    False history gets written every day
    ...
    the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
    sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
    asking the clay all questions but her own.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)