March 1995 – Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle – YAHOO! and raise $32 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. In the same month, WWW surpases ftp-data as the service with the greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count.
July 1995 – Amazon starts selling books online. Founder Jeff Bezos drives Amazon orders to the post office in his ’87 Chevy Blazer
August 1995 – More than any other stock, Netscape Communication’s IPO defined the arrival of the Internet as an economic force. With just $16 million in revenues at the time it went public, the seminal Web browser company was valued at more than $2 billion. More important than any specific numbers, Netscape’s IPO created the frenzy of day trading and venture capitalist investments that would become a hallmark of the dot-com era.
August 1995 – Microsoft introduces Windows 95 and gives away crappy new browser Internet Explorer 1.0
September 1995 – The first version of what would become eBay went online. It became a legend that eBay Chairman, Omidyar, while working at General Magic, wrote a software for a Web site that would help his girlfirend trade with other Pez collectors.
December 1995– AltaVista gets off the ground with 16 million indexed pages, making it the Web’s largest search engine (Today Google indexes mode than 8 billion).
1995 in other news:
- The Apache web server project is started
- The java programming site for websites
- The registration of domain names is no longer free. Beggining 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed
- Experimental CD-ROM disk can carry full-length film
- “Internet addiction” is identified
- Denmark announces plan to put much of the nation online within 5 years
- Major US dailies create national online newspaper network
- Lamar Alexander chooses internet to announce its presidential candidacy
- Audio of live events can be heard on the Internet
- Vatican develops a website