Lastminute.com had the turnover of a fairly successful London pub and was expected to lose around £20 million sterling (€31.6 million) last year when it was listed on the London Stock Exchange. The new share issue was 47 times oversubscribed and its price climbed to £5.55 on the first day, valuing the company at £832 million and giving the two founders a stake worth £150 million each.
Solid profit-making enterprises were elbowed out of the way in the FTSE 100. The 18-month-old free internet provider Freeserve entered one place above Bank of Scotland. Baltimore Technologies, whose security software was widely admired but which had lost £31 million the previous year, was valued twice as high as Thames Water, which had made more than £400 million the previous year.
BBC correspondent Cellan-Jones says the much-hyped Lastminute public debut on March 14th, 2000 was the day Britain's dotcom bubble hit maximum growth - those who were listening closely enough could hear the hiss of escaping air.
By November, Martha Lane Fox - celebrated in the media as a combination of Michelle Pfeiffer and Sir John Harvey Jones - and Brent Hoberman saw the value of Lastminute shares fall by more than 80 per cent.
The Old Etonians in pin-striped suits who ruled the City and feared start-up geeks in casuals could smirk with relief.
But between September 1999 and May 2000 Britain was in the grip of internet mania, heralding the dawn of a new information age. A shareholding democracy was the dream of Margaret Thatcher when the mines and shipyards were crumbling in the 1970s and 1980s, but it became a reality during the dotcom boom - briefly. This is not the first time new technology has unleashed investment hysteria. Cellan-Jones reminds us of the pandemonium unleashed by the arrival of the railways and electrification in the 19th century.
Meanwhile, as the dotcoms were going from boom to bust, across the water the internet kept on growing. By March this year, 51 per cent of Britain's population had used the Net, with 35 per cent of households connected.
Dot.bomb is a classic story of rags to riches and back to rags again, well told by a journalist who was there as the drama unfolded.
After the initial euphoria, the tech sector continues to struggle with adversity and Cellan-Jones says we do not know yet what the impact of the dotcom bubble will be.
The internet will change our lives but it will take longer to impact than was predicted by the "digerati" in the mid-1990s.
In the words of the Chinese revolutionary who was asked about the lessons of the French Revolution, it is too early to tell.
jmulqueen@irish-times.ie
