January: Microsoft made the first major acquisition of the year when it bought Hotmail for an estimated $15-$30 million. Days later Yahoo bought into the largest supplier of free personal Web pages, Geocities. Netscape made two major gambles to reverse the trend of dismal quarterly results as it moved to give away its browser software and allow developers to license the source code for free. Matt Drudge's report about President Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky scooped the mainstream media, appearing online 72 hours before it was published elsewhere. We tried begging, bribing, everything. This is not subtle. We have gotten on our knees collectively on this. - Apple board member Larry Ellison on the board's attempts to persuade interim CEO Steve Jobs to stay on. He did.
February: The search engine Lycos bought webspace provider Tripod for $58 million in stock. This came as Wall Street buzzed with reports that Netscape was considering selling some or all of the company to America Online. The World Wide Web Consortium endorsed the XML 1.0 specification.
There used to be this old saying that the lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Well, today, the lie can be twice around the world before the truth gets out of bed to find its boots. - Hillary Clinton criticising how websites handled the White House sex scandal.
March: Hewlett-Packard announced plans to develop its own version of Java runtime to sidestep Sun's licensing fees and other requirements. Microsoft, Sun and others lobbied the US Congress to lift the annual limit of 65,000 temporary foreign worker visas, due to an "urgent need" for skilled labour. Netscape started giving away its Communicator source code. We don't want Internet wars, but we need to reach an agreement on how we are going to use this tool. The US proposal on domain names seems to seek exclusive US jurisdiction over the Internet. - Euro Commissioner Martin Bangemann on US plans to privatise the Internet's domain name administration.
April: Police on both sides of the Atlantic investigated how thousands of CD-Roms containing Novell software, due to be destroyed in Ireland, turned up for sale in Germany and the US. Microsoft shut down the Irish section of its online service MSN. The same company faced the prospect of an anti-trust investigation by the US Department of Justice, based on allegations that in May 1995 it tried to persuade arch rival Netscape to agree to divide up the browser market.
It was like a visit by Don Corleone. I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day. - Marc Andreessen of Netscape on the alleged meeting with Microsoft in May 1995.
May: Bertie Ahern became the first Taoiseach to do a live Internet chat when he answered questions on the Belfast agreement. Sun Microsystems asked the US District Court in San Jose to require Microsoft to include a version of Java fully compatible with the standard implementation in Windows 98. Netscape's share prices dipped after fears about the loss of the company's browser sales and declining market share.
I have learned one thing: the vast majority of smart people do not work for my company. - Jim Barksdale of Netscape on public access to Netscape's Navigator code.
June: Felix Somm, former head of CompuServe in Germany, was convicted by a Bavarian court of spreading pornography over the Internet. Europe's best-known antivirus software provider, Dr Solomon's, was bought by its biggest rival, Network Associates, producer of the McAfee anti-virus programs, for $640-million.
The Net is turning commercial business on its head. One day the Net will be the place where the entire world comes to shop. - CNET CEO Halsey Minor at the PC Expo show in New York.
July: The start of the month saw the quiet introduction of Telecom Eireann's extension of the call unit for peak-rate calls to ISPs from three minutes to five minutes. Netscape released the first public beta version of its Communicator 4. Federal regulators in the United States warned companies who did business on the Internet to improve protection of consumers' privacy or face new regulation.
I'm more enthusiastic about and committed to Microsoft than I've ever been. - Bill Gates on rumours of early retirement after appointing Steve Ballmer as company president.
August: The US Department of Energy documented a security flaw in three popular email clients, Outlook Express, Out- look 98, and Messenger Mail, which allowed outsiders to send email attachments capable of formatting hard-drives and worse. The European Commission proposed that no new taxes should be levied on electronic trade and existing taxes should be adapted to enable e-commerce to be treated simply as the provision of a service. A Federal Aviation Administration official told the US Congress that top FAA officials intend to fly coast-to-coast on January 1st, 2000 to show that the air traffic control system hasn't been made unsafe by Y2K problems. Apple announced that it had received orders for more than 150,000 iMacs in two weeks. DoubleClick, the largest Internet advertising company, announced plans to establish its global headquarters in Dublin.
We see it in the broad statistical context of a natural disaster, like the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake or the 1954 north-eastern black-out. - Sally Pope Davis, a Goldman Sachs banking analyst, speaking at a Y2K conference in New York.
September: Bill Clinton and Bertie Ahern made a piece of digital history when they sealed a US-Ireland communique on electronic commerce using digital signatures. The online publication of the Starr report set new records of Web activity, but fears of massive service problems did not materialise.
Do not press the self-destruct button by ignoring this problem. The usual attitude - It'll be alright on the day - won't apply here. - The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, at a Y2K conference in UCD.
October: Linux supplier Red Hat won backing from Intel, Netscape and two venture capital firms, indicating that major technology companies clearly believe in the co-operatively developed operating system. RealNetworks said that AOL had agreed to distribute its software. Under the agreement AOL would provide RealPlayer to its 13 million customers. The US government and Network Solutions reached a deal to phase out the company's exclusive authority to register names in the most popular segment of the Internet. Ireland has an enlightened attitude to the Internet . . . You have the advantage of the English language and you have a good global image of being trustworthy, so people wouldn't mind giving credit card details to an Irish person." - Internet "guru", Esther Dyson, at the Internet World conference in Dublin.
November: Al Gore unveiled Blue Pacific, the world's fastest computer, able to make 3.9 trillion calculations a second. Microsoft defended itself against anti-trust charges by accusing Netscape of calling a key meeting in 1995 expressly to create evidence against it. According to a survey by the Irish Internet Association, Microsoft was romping home in the browser war, with 70 per cent of respondents using Internet Explorer. Oracle said it would pay $1 million to the first person who could demonstrate that Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 was not 100 times slower than its database. The bounty remains unclaimed. AOL agreed to buy Netscape Communications for $4.2 billion in stock. The new AOL is expected to team up with Sun Microsystems to create a powerful competitor to Microsoft.
They seemed to be saying to us they wanted us to knife the baby. - Avadis Tevanian, of Apple, telling the anti-trust trial that Microsoft tried to get Apple to drop its QuickTime software.
December: Charlie McCreevy's budget allowed for the creation of a £12m public/private partnership for a high-speed Internet link between Ireland and major business centres in the US and Europe. Esat Telecom unveiled its home phone and Internet service, Esat Clear. Irishman Martin Casey won a top prize at the Europ-wide Europrix MultimediaArt '98 event in Vienna with Born with a Broken Tongue. A European Parliament committee postponed a vote on legislation aimed at deterring piracy on the Internet. Several Y2K bugs were found in Windows 98 - one of the most heavily tested software products ever. South Carolina withdrew from the Microsoft anti-trust suit because the state believed that merger of AOL with Netscape showed the market was competitive.
This episode illustrates why I think throwing our lot back with Netscape is foolish. They are completely untrustworthy. No agreement with Netscape is worth the ink it's written with. Go sign a deal with Saddam Hussein. It has a better chance of being honoured. - Sun Vice President Jon Kannegaard in a 1997 email to Eric Schmidt, then the company's chief technical officer, after a delay in the joint licensing of JavaScript.
Page layout by Sarah Marriott. Monitor compiled by Conor Pope. Textonly email to computimes@irish-times.ie preferred (rather than attachments, faxes, letters, phone calls). Private correspondence should be marked "Not for publication".