what was the first original big dot com bust?

Answer 1

According to the BBC dot-com timeline, pets.com was the first to go down in November of 2000.

Answer 2

In the mid and late 1990's individual investors were speculating on the new Internet technology companies. The companies issued public stock and the demand for the stock sent to companies' Market value(number of shares outstanding times share price) skyhigh. A small Internet based company may have had 5 million dollars worth of assets and 20 million dollars of debt but, because of the frenzy for these companies, their Market value may have been 100 million dollars. In about 2000 and, with the World Trade center disasters, people began to slow down on their speculating and they started cashing out on all the money they had made in the dot com boom. The dot com's started going out of business as their debt to income ratio's rose. They just weren't making any money. So, basically, the market went down drastically in a very short ammount of time. The Economy and Stock Markets are VERY complicated beasts and this is by no means a comprehensive explaination.

Answer 3

I would say Magellan, one of the original big search engines. They ran out of money after a lot of heavy spending, from what I understand.

Your question is a bit hard to answer, since a lot of really marginal companies were saved from going bust by being bought up by other companies like AOL or Microsoft.