Download, the True Story of the Internet was a series made for the Discovery Channel in 2009, and so it quite out of date, but for anyone wanting to know how they internet got started, and how it developed, it is quite essential watching, despite the goofy presentation by John Heilemann.
The third of this series looks at the explosive growth of online sales with companies such as Amazon and eBay, and how their IPOs helped fuel enormous financing from Wall Street which poured into many new projects which really didn’t have plans that these companies prove to have.
It led to a spiralling economy that eventually crashed when the bubble burst and millions of investors lost money in the crash that followed. Some companies survived, and form the behemoths that we know today.
Along the way Heilemann also examines how public-key encryption formed the basis for trusted services and ecommerce. In struck me (as it has others, of course) that the parallels with the present crypto economy are numerous, but we are not probably post-crash, and the ones who are still building will be there in the future.
