What a lovely bubble it was Blame it on Netscape. the company’s wildly successful IPO in August 1995 set the table for four years of Internet insanity. Hundreds of high-tech offerings followed, fueling a topsy-turvy economy where tech companies were measured not by the money they made but by how quickly they spent it, ushering in an era of CEOs on skateboards and foosball tables in conference rooms.The success of Netscape Navigator awakened Microsoft from its post-Windows 95 slumber. The Redmond giant saw the browser as a threat to its desktop monopoly and poured millions into developing Internet Explorer (ironically, IE 1.0’s code came out of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications Mosaic project — the birthplace of Netscape).The browser wars changed software development. Posting public betas and patches became standard operating procedure. Tech-savvy companies gave information to employees and customers via Web pages and e-mail. Businesses appended .com or .net to their names and spent billions securing domain names and developing sites. These in turn became targets for hackers, who left their marks on thousands of Web pages, including sites belonging to the CIA, the Air Force, The New York Times, and the Spice Girls.But the browser wars took a heavy toll. Netscape, tapped out after three years of red ink, was acquired by AOL in late 1998. A few months later, the Melissa virus spread across the globe in hours. While the world frantically prepared for the Year 2000 bug, holes in Microsoft software and weaknesses in Internet infrastructure would soon prove a larger problem. Technology IndustrySoftware Development