With the recent acquisition of Yahoo! by Verizon for $4.8 billion, NPR got a little nostalgic for the internet-of-yore and rounded up some throwback names – with a bunch of clickthrough links to forgotten-about (or at least historical) elements of the web – from the 1990s. Among others these include ICQ (“I Seek You” – I was always fond of that!), CompuServe, AskJeeves, Geocities, and yes, of course, Netscape.
Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion, acquiring its “core Internet assets” — search, email, finance, news, sports, Tumblr, Flickr — in essence writing the final chapter of one of the longest-running Internet companies.
Last year, Verizon bought another Internet pioneer, AOL (aka America Online) for $4.4 billion — complete with its ad targeting technology and content sites Huffington Post and TechCrunch.
This got us thinking: What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here’s a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)