The Internet's Early Days as seen in TV Commercials (2000)

All of these commercials are from 2000. The first is for the online brokerage firm Ameritrade when online trading was still fairly new. Online trading represented a sea change in the industry as individual investors wrested control of their portfolios away from brokers. Take a look at the PDA the woman is using to make her trades. That’s a Personal Digital Assistant not Public Display of Affection, by the way. The hand-sized computers (Palm’s PalmPilot being one of the most popular) were once state-of-the-art devices before being swept away by the smartphone revolution. The second commercial for Lucent Technologies trumpets the then-new idea of gaining access to the Internet from mobile devices (again, look for the PDA). The third commercial is for America Online, the ISP and web portal that dominated the Internet in the U.S. in the late 1990s. The fourth and last commercial is for NBCi.com, a site that attempted to cash in on the use of general web portals prior to the popularity of sophisticated search engines such as Google. NBC folded the subsidiary in 2001 after a massive collapse of NBCi’s stock price.