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The ONElist File

I am told that viruses, like Ebola, can flair up for awhile, infecting a large population for a period of time, and then go dormant, infecting no one for years on end. There was a strange disease, perhaps a virus, going around in the late 1990s. It caused people to do weird and unnatural things, like start Internet companies. I believe this is a mutation of the virus that afflicted so many in the 1970s, the disco bug. As with disco, one day we will look back on this era in cringing wonderment. Somebody ought to work on a vaccine. At least our clothes were better this time.

Despite my best efforts, I somehow caught the malaise in August 1997 and was compelled to start ONElist. This is my attempt to document that time, from inception until acquisition by Yahoo in September 2000. It actually was an incredible adventure, and hopefully this compendium will provide a glimpse of it, through emails, press releases, and insider commentary. This is not a "dot bomb" story; far from it. ONElist was more successful than anyone could have guessed.

I have just started working on The ONElist File. Really. Most of the internal and other company documents that I have are here and linked by the Index and Table of Contents. However, I've only just started writing the story that links all of this together. Beware the ugly formatting, broken links, misspelled words, smelly aardvarks, etc. You have been warned.

Apologies to John Walker for the blatant rip-off of The Autodesk File. His work is much better than this.

Click here to begin

Click here for the Table of Contents

Click here for the Index


Changed/Updated: August 23, 2001


Mark Fletcher / markf (at) wingedpig.com