January 1997 – marks the first webcast of a presidential inauguration
Dr.Koop’s wild ride: former surgeon general founds drkoop.com, launches, goes public, hits billion-dollar market cap, goes kaput.
business.com domain is bought for $150.000 and is to be sold two years later for $7.5 millon.
NASA’s Web site for Pathfinder’s Martian journey attracts a record of 46 million hits in one day. Some years later, in 2004, when the Mars rover lands, Nasa.gov gets 404 million hits.
The weblog is born, as usenent poster Jorn Barger use the word to describe his online journal.
In dramatic fashion, Apple Computer was saved from the brink of death by the return of its charismatic and controversial cofounder. Despite repeated early denials that he would return to the role of CEO, Steve Jobs went on to do just that and eventually returned the company to its former glory. Although the deal that brought him back took place in the final days of the previous year, Jobs would reshape Apple throughout 1997 and the next decade.
In other news:
- nearly 8 in 10 US public schools have Internet access
- Kodak launches first point-and-shoot digital camera
- optical fiber cable lines now stretch around the world
- streaming audio and video is available on the Web
- 2.600 US newspapers have internet sites
- 43 percent of US homes have a computer
- couch revolution: TiVo launches, quitely begins work on first personal video recorder
- Gary Kasparov loses chess match to IBM’s Deep Blue