Archive for September 2023

September 4, 1998

Larry Page and Sergey Brin file incorporation papers for Google in California. Filing on a Friday, the date of official incorporation would be marked as Monday, September 7th. Starting out as a privately held company, Google would hold their IPO about 6 years later on August 19, 2004.

September 3, 1995

The online auction site, eBay, is launched as “AuctionWeb” by Pierre Omidyar. The first item sold, a broken laser pointer, wasn’t actually intended to sell, but rather to test the new site, itself started as a hobby. Surprised that the item sold for $14.83, Omidyar contacted the buyer to make sure he knew the laser pointer was broken, to which was replied, “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.” From that first $14.83, Omidyar is now worth billions of dollars.

September 2, 1993

The world’s first primitive web search engine is started. Known as W3Catalog or the CUI WWW Catalog, it was started by Oscar Nierstrasz at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva. This search site lasted for about 3 years before more modernized search engines began appearing.

I could not find an actual picture of W3Catalog, only a picture of a site linking to it. Can anybody help find me a picture of W3Catalog?