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, acquiring its "core Internet assets" — search, email, finance, news, sports, Tumblr, Flickr — in essence writing the final chapter of one of the longest-running Internet companies.

Last year, Verizon bought another Internet pioneer, AOL (aka America Online) 

 — complete with its ad targeting technology and content sites 


This got us thinking: What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here's a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR

preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)



CompuServe launched for consumers as a dial-up online information service 

, and its popularity skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the original online portal, with news, chats, file sharing — a first such experience for several generations of users.
H&R Block (yep, that tax-prep company) bought CompuServe in 1980 and in 1997 

 to the growing rival AOL. After itself going through a merger and then a spin-off with Time Warner, AOL 

 CompuServe in 2009.
But! A relic version 


A younger competitor to CompuServe, Prodigy was a "home computer information service" 

 by a partnership of Sears and IBM, distinguishing itself with the addition of graphics and advertising support. The service lost money and users in the early '90s and went through a reboot in 1993, 

.
Prodigy Classic officially shut down in 1999, citing the "Y2K problem," and the

 on what went wrong. The company re-imagined itself as an Internet provider and 

 by SBC communications, now known as AT&T.



Launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation as a demo project, AltaVista — aka a 

 — was essentially an indexing predecessor of Google.
It changed hands a few times: Compaq Computer 

 (for $3.3 million), one-time Internet giant CMGI 

 (for $2.3 billion), ad company Overture Services 


This was like the original Facebook — or, um, MySpace? You could find a community and build your own neon-colored, spinning-animation, multi-fonted, 

 personal web page! After its mid-'90s launch, Yahoo bought GeoCities 

 during the dot-com boom in 1999, ran it as Yahoo! Geocities and eventually 

.
But if you're nostalgic, you could still 

Remember that web butler Jeeves who answered your web queries in a distant echo of today's Siri?


Launched in 1996, Jeeves didn't live up to Google's search engine ascent: 

 (whose businesses include OkCupid, Tinder, 

, CollegeHumor and Vimeo), it went through 

, abandoning the search engine and emerging as 

! Launched in 1996, it was bought a year later by another dot-com startup WhoWhere, which in turn was bought in 1998 by Lycos, 

 at the time as "the world's fourth most popular Web site, behind America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft." Lycos, after trading hands many times, currently belongs to Indian digital media company 


A brainchild of now-legendary Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics, the Netscape browser beat Microsoft to the market in 1994. After intense "browser wars," 

, Netscape's release of the source code spurred the creation of Mozilla.
AOL bought Netscape for the dot-com-bubble price of 

 costing $10 billion. As Firefox gained prominence, AOL made several attempts to revive Netscape's popularity, but eventually 


Launched in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, the "I seek you" chat service was an alternative to AIM and Yahoo Messenger (both of which are still around, and the latter is apparently beloved 

 in 2010 to Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies for $188 million.


A previous version of this post called CompuServe the original portal to the Web. In fact, while CompuServe launched for consumers as an online information service in 1979, it was not at that time a portal to the World Wide Web.

Science

Business and Economic News

Alina Selyukh

Author

Verizon's purchase of Yahoo will close the book on one of the oldest Internet companies. What happened to the other famous '90s brands, like GeoCities, Netscape and CompuServe? A nerdy remembrance.

The big internet brands of the '90s -- where are they now?

Go Deeper.

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