If there is one ray of hope amid the gloom that has cloaked the digital economy, it could be summed up with one word: wireless.

What began as a pet project for technophiles has become a multibillion-dollar industry, with uses ranging from untethered computers in the home to major networking connections for telecommunications giants. More than 35 million wireless networks are in operation today, according to industry estimates, and the number is growing daily.

Starbucks offers overpriced Wi-Fi to go with its overpriced coffee, while Auckland, New Zealand has city-wide high-speed wireless network.

Microsoft pays $750 million to settle an anti-trust lawsuit filed by the Netscape division of AOL.

Hard disk storage drops below $1 per gigabyte, while the 1998 price was $43.

File sharing tool Kazaa, becomes the most downloaded software in history. Hoping to identify and sue some 900 alleged file-traders, the RIAA subpoenas Internet sharing providers. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs of Apple sees the market and launches iTunes music store which offers tunes for 99 cents.

Bay Area unemployment triples compared with three years ago, reaching 6.9 percent.

Mobile phones go crazy, logging a record year with 520 million units sold.

In other news:

• From Apple Computer: the browser Safari.
• Flash mobs, organized on the Net, start in New York, spread worldwide.
• Popularity of blogs increases sharply.
• Amazon.com scans texts of 120,000 books for Internet users.
• International piracy of films is rampant.
• Estmated 5 trillion unwanted messages set on the Internet.
• Internet becomes integral part of political campaigning.

The carnage from the dot-com meltdown was far worse than anyone had imagined. Summing it up best was this News.com report on the ensuing blame game, whose participants were described as “day traders who gambled on obscure companies, midlevel engineers who cashed in stock options and retired at 29, Wall Street analysts who preached ‘eyeballs,’ ‘stickiness,’ and ‘price-to-sales ratios,’ forecasting companies that predicted exponential growth, and business publications that canonized the rich and gave others hope of striking similar fortunes.”

Code Red, Nimda worms bring major damage to computer networks, More than 58,000 computer viruses exist. The amount of damages caused by Code Red only exceeds $2.4 billion.

Meanwhile, Napster is ordered to stop distributing copyrighted music. A file-sharing boom ensues. Meanwhile US Court of Appeals overturns lower court order to break up Microsoft.

More than 17.000 dotcom employees are laid off. Most of them become real estate agents.

In other news:

• Instant messaging grows in popularity.
• The iPod music player.
• More than half of all Americans now use the Internet.
• as Twin Tower fall DJIA goes to suffer the worst five-day slide since the Great Depression
• New Economy poster child, Enron, files for bancrupcy

What began as an obscure file-sharing program quickly grew into a global network used to trade digital music for free. Within the music industry, however, it became as notorious as it was popular with its followers and eventually was the target of multiple lawsuits charging copyright violation on an unprecedented scale. Although only a shadow of its former self, Napster’s influence continues to pervade much of the Internet today.

If in 1995 the amount of venture capital invested was $8 billion, now the amount rises to an incredible $105 billion. Seventeen dot-coms spend $2.2 million each for 30-second ads during the Super Bowl. By the year end, three of them are dead.

Dow Jones Industrial Average tops out at 11,722.98, while NASDAQ composite peaks at 5,048.62, never to be reached again since, as in the next 30 months it sings 74 percent.

AOL announces plans to buy Time Warner.

Average Sillicon Valley tech worker’s incomes tops out at $80.000 – but median home prices reaches $530.000. Salaries begin to drop, housing costs don’t

The June issues of Business 2.0, eCompany Now, The Industry Standard, Red Herring, Upside and Wired together tip the scales at almost 5 kilograms (10 pounds). Within three years, four out of six magazines are gone.

The end of the golden era begins, as Pets.com is the first publicly held dotcom to bite the dust.

In other news:

• the dot.com industry crashes.
• 5.1 billion emails are sent in the U.S.; 8.2 billion worldwide.
• seven new domain names approved, including .info, .pro, .biz.
• Love Bug virus infects 45 million computers worldwide.
• 3G (3rd generation) licenses sold for wireless internet.
• bluetooth lets computers converse via low power radio signals.
• Y2K bug tamed, but it was expensive.
• microprocessors outdo Moore’s Law with Intel’s 1.5GHz.
• British “newscaster” Ananova joins other virtual performers on TV, the Net.
• Stephen King’s novel Riding the Bullet is best seller via Net downloads only.

The doomsday scenarios were rampant: Computer systems everywhere would fail to recognize 2000 because the vast majority of programs recognized only the last two digits of a given year. But it all turned out to be much ado about relatively little–prompting skeptics to wonder whether the barrage of “millennium bug” warnings were convenient excuses for poor earnings or sales pitches for so-called corrective software that no one really needed.

In March, Netscape introduces RSS, a tool for customizing homepages, unwittingly kicking off the blogging revolution.

Virus after virus attack computers. Melissa – named for an exotic dancer – infects more than 1 million computers in one night causing $80 million worth of damages, becoming the first virus to create problems worldwide.

The madness is on the rise as Pixelon.com (say who???) throws a $10 million bash in Las Vegas to celebrate $23 million round of venture funding. Headline acts include Kiss and The Who. Meanwhile the Bay Area commuters spend 52.000 hours in traffic daily, four times as much as they did in 1995.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is named Times magazine’s Person of the Year.

The US Department of Commerce begins seggregating e-commerce statistics. In 1999’s fourth quarter, $5,3 billion was spent online.

In other news:

• 13.6 million miles of fiberoptic cable are deployed in North America only this year
• 10 million web servers throughout the world
• free downloading of music via the Internet increases sharply. Millions do it.
• more than 800 million web pages
• Jon Johansen, 15, of Norway, manages to break movie DVD copy protection

In one of the most significant antitrust actions of the century, attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia joined the Justice Department in federal lawsuits against the world’s most powerful software company. The case, which would go on for the next several years, was a pivotal juncture for the technology industry, the legal community, the stock market, and just about anyone who used a personal computer or the Internet.

March: Web becomes king of all media as web users spend more time surfing the Internet than watching TV. Everything with a reason as there are 300 million pages online and another 1.5 million added daily. As such the traffic on the Internet is doubling every 100 days.

September: The Starr Report, filled with lurid Monica Lewinsky details, is released online, making for what’s called the busiest day in Internet history so far.

Yahoo! wannabe Google, opens for business in a garage in Menlo Park, California.

November: Battered Netscape bows out of the browsers war, makes public its code for Mozilla, an open-source browser and agrees to sell to AOL for $4.2 billion

December: Stock analyst Henry Blodget sets a $400 price target for Amazon shares. A year later, it tops out at $600.

The final 21 unwired countries come online. The Web is now truly global.

In other news:

• music industry up in arms as fans download MP3 sound files for free
• internet economy gets its own weekly magazine: The Industry Standard
• Associated Press sells online archive service to newspapers. There are 3.250 newspapers and 1.280 TV stations which have online websites.
• 150 million Internet users estimated by the end of the year, half of them in US

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