What Was the Dot-Com Bubble? 

I was born in 1974. I used modems and dialup when you had to put the phone receiver on the modem cradle to transmit. I was a room admin on AOL before messenger. I was on icq, one of the first messengers as well. My husband was involved in the bubble fiasco. He lost a staggering amount of money. He went through hell. He is a semi conductor engineer and musician. He is 8 years older than me and he really got hung out to dry by this mess. Many people he knew committed suicide and many families were ruined. I was on the net at the beginning, he was helping build it. It was fun to code and build sites and programs but this was a devastating time for the people involved. Thanks, Simon for the information.

5:15 crazy Kickstarter campaigns! That should be a video. A really tame one was when Matthew Coville was trying to raise 50k? was it? for his Strongholds add on for D&D and raised a million instead.

"its October 2019, the economy is great, what happens when it isn't great anymore?" coronavirus: I'm about to end this man's whole career

Watching this march 17th during the corona crash, guess hindsight really is... 2020

Watching this on March 27, 2020 and we're heading toward an eceonomical crisis due to the coronavirus. This entire video now possesses a whole other level of irony and I'm living for it.

I would also like to know about the Japanese economic bubble and The Lost Decade.

Born in 67, I had a portable computer to work on to put figures into a material control computer. It was the size of a large old fashioned suitcase. No modem, green screen two inches by three. Resolution was so low that you could count the pixels at three feet. Believe it or not, it was the coolest thing in the company. Bloody murder to kart on the bus every day 🤣 5” discs that would frequently be used as coffee mats and ruined. The screaming modem was a thing of joy at first. Believe it or not I still have the same AOL email. Rereading this I have the sneaking suspicion that I may be getting old...

October 2019: What's gonna happen when the economy isnt amazing May 2020

Can you guys please videos on topics like: The US financial crisis of 2008 The Teapot Dome Scandal Enron Scandal Blockbuster's Fall from Grace Also I'm enjoy listening to Simon going on uncensored tangents in these videos

12:18 "When" is the question; "Now" is the answer.

Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, those were the days

I was born in 89 and I remember the dial up tone. Damn it makes me feel old now 😂

Hi, Simon and team! Thanks for keeping me company while I day drink!

Simon I love the dynamic you and Danny have. Between his writing and your story telling, one could come to believe the 2 of you are married, or perhaps childhood friends. I love all your channels but this one is quickly becoming my fav. Love the informality of it all. I know you gotta pay the bills, but part of me hopes you never get sponsors for this one that are overly serious so you can keep it loose and jovial. Love your work, please don't stop anytime soon!

Sometimes I want Simon to rewatch his old videos and react to them on camera lol 😭😂😂😂

"It will never go down!!!" Is it just me or does this feel like a repeat case of famous last words?

This is currently my favorite RU-vid channel. Love the personality you bring Simon!

I wonder if Danny only has one name like Prince.

I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late '90s boom/bust. It was a remarkable experience. A good friend worked for a booming company while I was plugging away in a civil service job. A couple of years later, he was drowning in debt and eventually had to take a job in Antarctica to pay his bills. I kept my iron rice bowl and eventually retired with a pension. Truly a story to tell my children.

Is neopets still going? Played that for almost 15 years.

4:17 Actually the Beatles had "too much money" and they were forced to pay 90% in taxes ... that's why they created Apple records ... and that hippy shop in baker street back in 1968. Look it up!

here we are in August 2020 and living in Simon's predicted future

Oh, I definitely had a geocities page! And I still have the ICQ "uh oh!" in my head. Mind you, I was born in 1979. I remember downloading my very first mp3 in 1998. It was Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls, and it took me 3 or 4 hours.

This has all happened before. It will all happen again. This is my new favorite Simon channel!

You gotta do Theranos. That's an hour episode easily I think you'd enjoy talking about that one.

I will wait for the "app bubble", after the dust have settled down, it would be a great opportunity to buy stocks on the few surviving companies

When I started law school in 2002 a girl in my class was a casualty from the dot-com crash. I honestly can't remember the name of the company she worked for, but I do remember her telling me that when the writing was on the wall that things were going to be shutting down she started squirreling away money so that she could go back to school. She was able to put enough away to completely pay her tuition, while dumbasses like myself took out loans that *maybe* my grand-kids might be able to pay back someday. The stories she would tell about how much money got thrown around in those days were amazing to listen to.

"Customer acquisition at the cost of everything else" is literally how RU-vid defines who gets promoted and monetized and who doesn't.

Maybe you could do a video on the roaring 20'es and how it innevitably lead to the great depression.

*Spoiler Alert From Future Viewer: March. It's gonna bust big time in March.

Simon mentioned history repeating itself, which sparked an idea for an interesting story: the digital piracy war, which is a fight as old as recorded media. In the earliest days of cinema, prints were routinely illegally struck and screened at Nickelodeons. That's why many of Thomas Edison's films exist -- he printed the negatives onto paper to copyright them. By the 1960s and '70s, private collectors were targeted for owning films, and legendary actor Roddy McDowell even had his monstrous personal collection seized by the FBI. The 1978 American copyright act was the result of the movie industry's fear of the public being able to buy VCRs. Video stores were raided into the early '80s when the studios finally realized they could profit by releasing their movies (although they attempted to keep the general public from owning the tapes for ages by pricing most videos around $100). Meanwhile, the music industry went into a tailspin over the Walkman/cassette tape revolution nearly 20 years before Napster. And now we have RU-vid and Putlocker, with everything that that entails. It's a vicious cycle that the copyright holders are never gonna win, but it's been endlessly looping for well over a century.

12:41 2020: Oh you'll see....you'll aaaaall see....

Yahoo was founded in 1994 and is still around. It use to be more fun back in the late 90's when they had chat rooms and games. I loved trolling some chat rooms as a victory prize for whoopin' hundreds of people at Euchre and Hearts.

12:42 Damn Simon, if u keep correctly predicting the future The Simpsons may sue you...just sayin

Another massive win for the ad inception. Simon says something about panic investments. White screen with "buy a tiger" pops up. Amazon ad pops up about having 15 seconds to tell all about the good stuff you can buy there. Such legends!

OMG! You were born in 1987? I graduated High School in 1986! I can't get my brain to function on which sites are still around from the early days. The first company I worked for that had Internet access was BellSouth back in 1997. Before that most people (in general) didn't have access to the internet and were using BBS's (Bulletin Board System). In order to access a BBS, first you had to find the number (likely in a magazine or newspaper until AOL did their campaign of mailing out flyers and floppy disks), then dial up that number with a dial-up modem, being sure you had your modem set to the right speed and parity. Before BBS's, people used to connect to each other's computers directly using dial-up modems. I remember my first modem was a 300 baud modem for my Ti-99/4a, and I would connect to one of two friends. One friend had a Comodore64, the other a ColecoVision Adam.

Anyone remember limewire.???

happened to bitcoin. speaking of, can you do a vid on bitcoin?

Started my first company with a few friends in 1998, just an idea, no customers no product, got $150k seed investment. Never made money, didn't even finish the product and sold to another dot com. Went to work for another bigger startup backed by a bigger tech company and they went out of business in 01 because they couldn't make a profit. So pretty damn spot on. lol

Not part of the Dot Com thing but as I was a child during the early days of the internet, my mom got a PC game called The Neverhood that we kids were allowed to play. I remember a character named Willie Trombone. And I remember that the creators of this PC game would go on to create a fighting game called Skull Monkies, I think. I vaguely remember the clay animation and I think Willie Trombone was featured in this game as well. I remember hearing "You've got mail!" from Yahoo. And of course, the nostalgic, ear-splitting noise of dial-up. I would actually have to deal with that noise up until 2008. We kept up with internet either by going to the library or getting 30 day trial discs for AOL from Walmart, lol.

“Its October 2019, the economy is great! Who knows what will happen in the future!” 2020: “hold my beer”

Would love to see a vid about the beanie baby boom and the craziness around how much they were selling “retired” TY’s for on online auction sites :)

Everyone watching this during the pandemic realize Simon, Danny, and Sam are all prophetic wizards, from impending economic crashes to Tiger King.

This video made me realize Simon is a year younger than me. And yet he's so productive and successful by any reasonable metric. Damn. =|

WHEN is the big question. Hi, I'm from 2020

Thanks for doing topics like this. I was an early 90's baby and am expected to know about this. However, I grew up in 'merica; all of my school books just ended after the year 1969. Love this channel!

I know of 3 that have been around forever and will probably never die: Newgrounds, eBay, and 4chan.

While you're correct that companies do _eventually_ need to make a profit, I'd like you to remember that Amazon spent fourteen years operating at a loss before they became profitable. Now, they're one of the world's largest retailers.

SIMON, where's the zebra mask???

Watching this during the pandemic, and I got to say, at 12:00 it's kinda prophetic...

I like this new channel. Probs my fav Simon channel. It would be cool if you had a video talking about all your channels, how you started, advice on starting a new channel or running a RU-vid media empire etc Considering your experience with your 146 channels it would probably be pretty interesting.

altavista.com was the first search engine I used in 1995. I was art director in an internal company, with offices in 17 different countries, when the bubble burst. We had mouse mats where it said on "Webmasters, today we make money - tomorrow we burn in hell". The crash wasn't a surprise for everyone. We sold off our customer details to some shady company for a lot of money.

Yahoo is still around. I suggest Eron, Video Game Crash of the 80"s, the demise of Radio Shack, Circuit City, New Coke, drugs be sold as medicine (Cocaine, Heroin etc), Ford Edsel, PanAm airlines, Betamax (I was born in '72. I can do this all day...😆)

How about doing a business blaze about the tulip bubble? Or South Sea bubble? Or...controversially, MLMs?

I can absolutely confirm its still happening--I've seen ads on FB that are, like, "sign up for a service we don't even offer, yet" and, it's like.......why??

My memory of the dot-com bubble and bust was that I did IT work for a university. In the late 90s and into 2000 so many I knew insisted I was foolish to stay there and not take the booming corporate opportunities. Then the bust happened and the same people very much changed their tune because my job was not threatened. Such was life in tech back then.

Crash... When? Now, its happening right now.

Was always on eBay, having to get my gran to write cheques to buy things! Or waiting 10 days when you sold something.

Hm... the link to the AOL video actually worked... I don’t know how I feel about this

Ah, the 90s. When video games still had cheat codes for which you didn't have to pay extra.

Amazon launched in 1994. I think its still somewhat popular.

I'd like to see a video about file sharing and torrenting starting with Napster etc. That could be interesting

Filmed Oct 2nd 2019 posted Nov 13th 2019. Didn't realized he filmed this much in advance.

I am early generation X. I remember that dotcom hype clearly, all my colleagues were laughing at me because I showed zero interest to buy shares. When the hype was over they were all very silent. I never trusted any hype. Not then. Not now.

12:10 Covid-19

I love being this early to Simon! Who els tried to click " join" just so danny wouldn't be alone?

i started watching Today I Found Out and then learned about Biographics and Geographics and so on. i was pretty hesitant about watching Business Blaze, because it seemed boring. it's funny how that this is actually the best channel. very entertaining. also the reasonable chance to get rickrolled by links in the description is legendary

I think it was between 1995 to 2005 where things changed from... "Nobody" has the internet, to "Everybody" has the internet.

We need a catchy name for when silicon valley goes boom.

How about one on the Dutch tulip mania.

In Another airport business lounge. Perfect place to watch big Simon on business blaze. Another great video guys. Never get tire of them!!!

"Dude, we're gettin' a Dell' guy. I want that video.

Not sure if anyone mentioned this, but do an episode on Enron.

First things I did back in the early days of the net were chatrooms and porn. To be fair I was like 14 or so...

Well, its not pre-1995 but Google did in fact start during and survive the bubble, it was started in 1998 AOL is actually still active as well, and it was started in 1985 CERN website was started in 1991 Bloomberg website was started in 1993 Wired Magazine website started in 1993 Amnesty International website was started in 1994 The Economist website was started in 1994 Megadeth, first band website, started in 1994 Pizza Hut website started in 1994 (wikipedia is a wonderful thing)

There was a story from the 1920s Wall Street crash where a huge trader was getting his shoes shined before starting the day, and the show shine boy gave him stock tips. He went in and supposedly immediately started to sell his shares, because if everyone, including this boy, was into the market, it was a bubble. I remember how many people were onto the dot com boom as well, including relatives, colleagues, etc. So many people talked stocks and stock tips, and no one cared about profits, just promise.

>what's gonna happen when the economy's not amazing anymore? Turns out we didn't have to wait long to find out, eh Simon?

let's do one on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies

I was born in 2000 and we had dial up until around September 2010. We live in an area that didn’t have it then and never thought to upgrade until we moved into a new house.

You should do a video on the early 20th Century version of the dot com bubble, where everybody was trying to get into the automobile business, even Sears.

Old websites still in use today: Bloomberg.com (1993): I think some people still use this as a news source? IMDB.com (1993): I see enough references to this site as something useful that people must certainly be using it. I sometimes look up the rating/10 of a movie or show on here before I see it. Wired.com (1993): I know people who use this site for tech news. The Economist (1993): I like them as a news source. Pizzahut.com (1994): I think this site is actually a much bigger deal now than it was in the early days, since you can now order pizza online more easily than over the phone. Telegraph.co.uk (1994): Another online news source. The general idea that the websites from the early internet still in use today are news sources looks mostly true.

Simone, you're 6 years younger than me... I feel old, lol

I watch all your channels, big fan. Love for you to tackle big tobacco, the MSA, and vaping industry. Happy to help with research 😁

I remember how exciting the internet was! I was amazed how quickly you could get an answer to a question! The only sad thing was that arguments in pubs were a thing of the past. Any query was instantly resolved.

omg I remember when RU-vid was commercial free without having to pay for it. Though the content was kinda stuck at 5 mins tops. (I think not positive on that last one) it was much!

Cheatcc.com was my go to after i stopped buying gaming mags.

I get an email from Twitter about once a week... "Come back pwease" Hell NO

Being a 80s baby I remember getting shitty dial up internet around 93-94. All I was concerned with was yahoo chat rooms and porn... took minutes to load a picture and forget about watching a video on that dinosaur of a pc I had.

Today I Found Out: we're both '87

Cryptocurrency is the next .com...

There was a popular RU-vidr, I can't remember which one right now though, that made a video parodying all the stupid niche social network apps that were around a few years ago. In their video, they went on about their new social network where *everything* was emoji. Your username had to be a strong of emoji, and you add friends and communicate with each other using only emoji. This app didn't actually exist, all they had made was a RU-vid video and a website where you could "reserve" your emoji username. The guys came out afterwards and said they had investors come to them thinking they were a startup and without any asking these investments would offer them millions of dollars... for a product that didn't even exist. Turns out unintentionally parodied more than just stupid social networking apps

I remember visiting startrek.com a lot in the mid nineties. Even sent Roxann Dawson a fan email for her character's inspiration helping me get through early teenage troubles.

I've not even got past the prequel quote and I hit up the like button tout suite, always a chicken dinner. Thank you Simon!

One reason a lot of these start-ups failed were their fancy, over engineered websites that took ages to load over the narrow bandwidths of the time. A lot of people still had the old fashioned modems with 1200 baud bandwidth that made peculiar sounds when sending and receiving signals.

This was less than half a year before covid ruined the world. 2019 was probably the best year of my life too.

you should do a drinking video where Karl Smallwood writes the script and you get progressively more drunk as the video goes on

I love the salty and snarky Simon, he is the best :)

I was born when the bubble started, it happened long before I was old enough to be aware of the internet.

So funny watching this in 2021 and seeing Simon before he went all...Simon

Do the 2008 mortgage / banking crisis and how different countries dealt with it (say US vs Iceland). Yes, done to death, but we want Simon's reactions! How American A&W is struggling while Canadian A&W is striving. The rise of German grocery stores (Aldi, Lidl) and their model. What is a naked short, and how "going short" in general works. The business of charity (PR, tax breaks, etc...)