ages and control data in a GIF and displayed ani-
mated color pictures. The animated GIF was quickly
imported for use on the Web. In 1995, Bill Joy intro-
duced Java while working at Sun Microsystems. Java
applets placed a programmable animated picture in
a portion of a browser window. Programmable Java
provided even more animated effects than GIFs.
Microsoft introduced ActiveX controls in 1996,
which allowed a Windows program to execute in a
portion of a browser window.
In 1995, Netscape decided to add programmabil-
ity to hypertext markup language (HTML) with a
language called LiveScript. With LiveScript, one
could change images and text properties, providing
some animation in a browser page. In 1996, Net-
scape changed the name of LiveScript to JavaScript
and added support in its browser for Java as well.
Microsoft introduced its version of JavaScript, called
Jscript, to IE in 1996. JavaScript continued to im-
prove throughout the 1990’s. In 1992, the multipur-
pose Internet mail extensions (MIME) were intro-
duced, and these added support for more pictures,
sound, and video on the Web.
Portals and E-Businesses In the early days of Web
development, many people recognized the impor-
tance of developing Web portals. These were Web
sites that allowed a user to access a wide variety of in-
formation from one site. The White House opened
its portal in 1993, as did many other government
agencies. In 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Stanford
University graduate students Jerry Yang and David
Filo. Yahoo! became an instant success and was one
of the most-visited Web sites of the 1990’s. The
Microsoft Network (MSN) debuted as an ISP in
- Like Yahoo!, it provided a variety of informa-
tion services. Microsoft’s bundling of MSN with IE
helped to make it one of the most popular Web por-
tals in the early twenty-first century. While America
Online (AOL) was popular as an online provider, it
was slow to provide general Internet service and
never gained a large share of the browser market. In
1998, AOL acquired Netscape, but the merger did
not really help either company. AOL eliminated de-
velopment of Netscape in 2003. The Google search
engine was developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page
as a research project at Stanford University in 1996.
Google was incorporated in 1998 and from that time
on has added functionality to its home Web site, be-
coming a complete portal.
In addition to the development of portals, a num-
ber of important e-businesses developed in the
1990’s. One of the best-known e-businesses estab-
lished in this decade was Amazon.com, founded in
1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookstore and which
later sold a wide variety of products. eBay, an online
auction Web site, was founded in 1995 by Pierre
Omidyar and became a premier e-business. Many of
the e-businesses of the 1990’s were based on provid-
ing a service. A good example of this was Hotmail,
started as a free online e-mail service by Jack Smith
and Sabeer Bhatia in 1995 and acquired by Micro-
soft in 1997. Hotmail was one of the most popular
free e-mail services of the 1990’s, with over 100 mil-
lion users in 2001. In 2000, the dot-com crash re-
sulted in many dot-coms going out of business. The
Web industry immediately began rebuilding with a
greater emphasis on good business practices and
fully recovered from the 2000 meltdown.
Impact The World Wide Web transformed the way
individuals, businesses, and organizations shared in-
formation, which was more accessible and easier to
use. A number of important e-businesses developed
during the 1990’s, and almost all businesses and or-
ganizations adapted to use the Web by 2000.
Further Reading
Berners-Lee, Tim, Mark Fischetti, and Michael
Dertouzos.Weaving the Web. New York: Harper-
Collins, 2000. An interesting history of the World
Wide Web by its inventor.
Hofstetter, Fred.Internet Literacy. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 2005. Provides a comprehensive introduc-
tion to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Mika, Peter.Social Networks and the Semantic Web. New
York: Springer. 2007. A good introduction to the
new interactive Web sites that began to appear at
the end of the 1990’s.
George M. Whitson IIISee also Apple Computer; CGI; Computers;
DVDs; E-mail; Hackers; Internet; Instant messaging;
Internet; Microsoft; MP3 format; PDAs; Silicon Val-
ley; Spam; Y 2K problem.The Nineties in America World Wide Web 943