What was going on with the Internet in 1998
In 1998, Google launched with just eight employees and now has approximately 182,381 employees and the company has a market cap of $1.885 Trillion.
Paypal, initially named Confinity, launched in 1998. Elon Musk would later merge his X.com with Confinity in 2000. Today, Elon Musk competes with Jeff Bezos from Amazon for the title, "The world's richest person."
Pets.com was also founded in 1998. Two years later, Pets.com became infamous as one of the biggest Dotcom busts. After raising $82.5 million in a February 2000 IPO, the company shut down in November 2000.
AOL launches AOL 4.0 and inundates American homes with CD-ROM mailers. AOL membership jumps from 8 million to 16 million members.
The number of websites with their own designated URL more than doubled from 1997 to 2,410,067*.
* www.internetlivestats.com