The internet in 2000
The NASDAQ peaked on 10 March and lost most of its value over the following two years. The failures that became famous — Pets.com and its sock puppet, Boo.com and its £80 million — were symptoms rather than causes: the underlying problem was that a great many companies had raised money against a user-growth story with no route to revenue. The infrastructure built during the bubble, particularly the fibre laid across oceans and continents, was not wasted; it sat dark for years and then carried everything that came next.
The numbers
- Websites
- 17,087,182 hostnames responding to HTTP
- Typical connection
- 56 kbps — 56 kbps still dominant. Broadband existed and was expensive.
- A gigabyte of storage cost
- $10, in 2000 dollars
How long things took to download
| What | At 56 kbps |
|---|---|
| A 3 MB song | 7 minutes |
| A 5 MB photo | 12 minutes |
| A 700 MB CD image | 1.2 days |
| A 4 GB film | 6.9 days |
| A 50 GB game | 87 days |
What arrived in 2000
- AOL and Time Warner announcing a merger in January, at the exact top
And what ended
- Boo.com, Pets.com, and several hundred others within eighteen months
The thing people misremember
The crash did not kill the internet economy. Amazon lost about 90 per cent of its share price and is still here. What it killed was the belief that a business plan was optional.
Against the years around it
| Year | Hostnames | Typical speed | $/GB of storage | A 4 GB film took |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 3,177,453 | 56 kbps | $30 | 6.9 days |
| 2000 | 17,087,182 | 56 kbps | $10 | 6.9 days |
| 2001 | 29,254,370 | 128 kbps | $5 | 3.0 days |
Between 2000 and 2020 the typical connection went from 56 kbps to 100 Mbps, a factor of 1,786, and a gigabyte of storage fell from $10 to $0.020 — a factor of 500. The 4 GB film that took 6.9 days takes 6 minutes.
Common questions
- What was the internet like in 2000?
- The dot-com bubble bursts in March and takes most of it with it. A typical home connection was 56 kbps, there were about 17,087,182 hostnames responding on the web, and a gigabyte of storage cost $10.
- How long did it take to download a film in 2000?
- A 4 GB film at 56 kbps would have taken about 6.9 days, assuming the connection held its rated speed the whole way, which it would not have.
- How many websites were there in 2000?
- About 17,087,182 hostnames responded to HTTP. That counts hostnames rather than distinct sites, which is why the figure occasionally falls between years without the web shrinking.
- What do people get wrong about 2000?
- The crash did not kill the internet economy. Amazon lost about 90 per cent of its share price and is still here. What it killed was the belief that a business plan was optional.
Related pages
- The internet in 1999 Napster arrives and the music industry discovers what a fast connection is for.
- The internet in 2001 Wikipedia launches in January, and nobody expects it to work.
- Every year side by side Speed, storage cost and site count in one table
- Convert data units Bits, bytes, and why a megabit is not a megabyte
Sources
- Web Server Survey — Netcraft
- ICT Facts and Figures / World Telecommunication Indicators — International Telecommunication Union
- Historical cost of computer memory and storage — Compiled from contemporaneous retail advertising and manufacturer price lists