Dot-com bubble in the context of "WorldCom"

NTT, Inc. (formerly known as Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) is a Japanese telecommunications holding company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked 128th in Fortune Global 500, NTT is the sixth largest telecommunications company in the world in terms of revenue, as well as the 15th largest publicly traded company in Japan by market cap, and the 6th largest by revenue, as of November 2025. In 2025, the company was ranked 79th in the Forbes Global 2000. NTT was the world's largest company by market capitalization in the late 1980s, and remained among the world's top 10 largest companies by market capitalization until the burst of the Dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.

The company traces its origin to the national telegraph service established in 1868, which came under the purview of the Ministry of Communications in the 1880s as part of a postal, telegraph and telephone service. In 1952, the telegraph and telephone services were spun off as the government-owned Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation. Under Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, the company was privatised in 1985 along with the Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation and subsequently the Japanese National Railways two years later, adopting the previous name until July 2025. While NTT has been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since 1987, the Japanese government still owns roughly one-third of NTT's shares, regulated by the NTT Law (Law Concerning Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Etc.).

Silicon Alley is an area of high tech companies centered around southern Manhattan's Flatiron district in New York City. The term was coined in the 1990s during the dot-com boom, alluding to California's Silicon Valley tech center. The term has grown somewhat obsolete since 2003 as New York tech companies spread outside of Manhattan, and New York as a whole is now a top-tier global high technology hub. Silicon Alley, once a metonym for the sphere encompassing the metropolitan region's high technology industries, is no longer a relevant moniker as the city's tech environment has expanded dramatically both in location and in its scope. New York City's current tech sphere encompasses a universal array of applications involving artificial intelligence, the internet, new media, financial technology (fintech) and cryptocurrency, biotechnology, game design, and other fields within information technology that are supported by its entrepreneurship ecosystem and venture capital investments.

Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telephone line which could be connected using an RJ-11 connector. Dial-up connections use modems to decode audio signals into data to send to a router or computer, and to encode signals from the latter two devices to send to another modem at the ISP.

Dial-up Internet reached its peak popularity during the dot-com bubble. This was in large part because broadband Internet did not become widely used until well into the 2000s. Since then, most dial-up access has been replaced by broadband.

Cisco Systems, Inc. (using the trademark Cisco) is an American multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products. Cisco specializes in specific tech markets, such as the Internet of things (IoT), domain security, videoconferencing, and energy management with products including Webex, OpenDNS, Jabber, Duo Security, Silicon One, and Jasper.

Cisco Systems was founded in December 1984 by Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, two Stanford University computer scientists. They pioneered the concept of a local area network (LAN) being used to connect distant computers over a multiprotocol router system. The company went public in 1990 and, by the end of the dot-com bubble in 2000, had a market capitalization of $500 billion, surpassing Microsoft as the world's most valuable company.

An economic bubble (also called a speculative bubble or a financial bubble) is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth (e.g. dot-com bubble), and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment (e.g. Tulip mania). They have appeared in most asset classes, including equities (e.g. Roaring Twenties), commodities (e.g. Uranium bubble), real estate (e.g. 2000s US housing bubble), and even esoteric assets (e.g. Cryptocurrency bubble). Bubbles usually form as a result of either excess liquidity in markets, and/or changed investor psychology. Large multi-asset bubbles (e.g. 1980s Japanese asset bubble and the 2020–21 Everything bubble), are attributed to central banking liquidity (e.g. overuse of the Fed put).

In the early stages of a bubble, many investors do not recognise the bubble for what it is. People notice the prices are going up and often think it is justified. Therefore bubbles are often conclusively identified only in retrospect, after the bubble has already "popped" and prices have crashed.

In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an index that measures the performance of a stock market, or of a subset of a stock market. It helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calculate market performance.

Two of the primary criteria of an index are that it is investable and transparent: The methods of its construction are specified. Investors may be able to invest in a stock market index by buying an index fund, which is structured as either a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund, and "tracks" an index. The difference between an index fund's performance and the index, if any, is called tracking error.

The 1990s economic boom in the United States was a major economic expansion that lasted between 1993 and 2001, coinciding with the economic policies of the Clinton administration. It began following the early 1990s recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush and ended following the infamous dot-com crash in 2000. Until July 2019, it was the longest recorded economic expansion in the history of the United States.