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.)
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
