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The web · A story from 2009
When Yahoo switched off GeoCities, millions of home pages disappeared. The story of a lost internet — and why it still matters.
Read the storyConnect the dots
Yahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.
In January 2007 an email about deadly storms in Europe spread a Trojan that built one of the largest peer-to-peer botnets of its time.
After 18 months of public drafting, the Free Software Foundation published version 3 of the GNU General Public License in June 2007.
Britain legislated for national ID cards backed by a central biometric register, then abolished the whole scheme within five years.
The Asus Eee PC started a boom in low-cost mini laptops that propped up PC sales, until tablets and thinner laptops took their place.
Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air at Macworld in January 2008. Its compromises looked radical then and became normal for laptops.
In February 2001 an email promising a photo of the tennis player spread worldwide. It was built with a point-and-click virus generator.
Adobe handed control of PDF 1.7 to ISO, turning a proprietary format into ISO 32000-1 in 2008.
After a false biography made headlines in late 2005, Wikipedia restricted new article creation and introduced semi-protection.
In December 2006 Bill Gates said digital rights management caused too much pain for honest buyers, at a time when Microsoft was selling DRM technology.
Firefox launched in 2004 and within five years had grown into a browser used by hundreds of millions, reopening the browser market.
For a decade Microsoft treated Linux as its biggest threat, with leaked memos, cost studies and patent claims. Linux supporters answered every round, and in the end Microsoft joined them.
Bill Gates gave up the chief executive job in 2000 and stopped working full-time at Microsoft in 2008. The eight years between were a long, staged handover through antitrust cases and a changing industry.
Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, released its code as OpenOffice.org and gave the world a free alternative to Microsoft Office, then lost it to a fork after Oracle took over.
Dell built the world’s biggest PC business by selling straight to customers. In the mid-2000s, customer-service anger, a battery recall, criticism of its advertising and a resurgent HP forced it to rethink.
Psion made some of the best handheld computers of the 1990s, then helped create Symbian, the operating system that ran most of the world’s smartphones before the iPhone.
In February 2005 the address book and notes from Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile Sidekick appeared online. The breach showed how weak account recovery could expose data synced to the cloud.
In 2004 the maker of Palm OS promised to rebuild it on Linux for phones. Ownership changes, few devices and the iPhone overtook the plan, and Palm went its own way with webOS.
After leaving Apple, Steve Jobs built NeXT. Its black cube sold poorly, but its software ran the first web browser and became the basis of macOS and iOS.
In 2007 a newspaper report suggested mobile phone signals might be behind the mysterious loss of honeybee colonies. The researchers it cited disagreed, and later science pointed to other causes.