The Dawn of the Dot-Com Era and the P4 DDR Era (PCGH-Retro, August 9)

…1995: In the coming years, countless companies will be founded that seek their salvation on the Internet. Only a few have a real business plan, but investors can be found quickly – and many a young company goes public without ever having made a profit. The beginning of this era marks the company Netscape Communications, which was founded just a year ago by Marc Andreessen, the developer of the first graphics-capable browser MOSAIC. The market-leading browser manufacturer dares to go public on August 9, 1995, the value of the share rises from 28 to 58 US dollars on the first day – the dot-com era begins.

…2001: On August 9, 2001, SiS introduced the SiS645, a new chipset for Intel’s Pentium 4. The special thing about it: It is the first chipset to support DDR memory. At that time, Intel’s own solutions only worked with the expensive RAMBUS memory, which was not really established on the market. SiS is surprisingly ahead of Via, whose announcement of the P4X266 was actually expected earlier. With that, the Intel market is slowly beginning to switch to DDR.