In the 1990s, commerce became e-commerce and the nation was gripped in dot-com fever. The nation's economy had started off the decade in a slump. By the mid-1990s, however, the energizing force of what became known as the dot-com revolution helped fuel the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation's history. Dot-coms are companies that do business over the World Wide Web. The Web is a system that connects computers in a giant network and allows people to easily buy and sell goods and services electronically (thus the term e-commerce). They are named dot-coms because their World Wide Web addresses typically end with ".com."

All over the country—but especially in the Internet boom areas of Silicon Valley, California; Seattle, Washington; and New York City's Silicon Alley—small dot-com companies launched themselves. The small companies had ambitious plans to use the...