The search engine that started it all. Back in 1995, it used to be run on Stanford University’s graduate school servers It all started as a hobby of the two EE students there.
It turned 10 today.
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
we've come such a long way since then... Yahoo! is definitely gonna go down as a major historic event in the industrial evolution of mankind.
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
thanks for the ice-cream coupun :)
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
I actually remember that face of Yahoo!. Back then my chat medium of choice was Prodigy. AOL was so fugly! 
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
Tofi, same here, i also started with AOL, then Prodigy then Compuserv before I finally got a dial-up account from the university :D
The first browser I ever used was Mosaic on X Window system at my uni. Then moved to Netscape :>
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
A Brief History Lesson
Yahoo started out as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo, as in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth." Yahoo itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki"—both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The "yet another" phrasing goes back at least to the Unix utility yacc, whose name is an acronym for "yet another compiler compiler".
Yahoo had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, selling 2.6 million shares at $13 each.
As Yahoo's popularity has increased, so has the range of features it offers, making it a kind of one-stop shop for all the popular activities of the Internet. These now include: Yahoo! Mail, a web-based e-mail service, an instant messaging client, a very popular mailing list service (Yahoo! Groups), online gaming and chat, various news and information portals, online shopping and auction facilities, and an online payment system (similar to PayPal) called Yahoo! Paydirect. Many of these are based at least in part on previously independent services, which Yahoo has acquired - such as the popular GeoCities free web-hosting service, Rocketmail, and various competing mailing list providers such as eGroups. Many of these take-overs were controversial and unpopular with users of the existing services, as Yahoo often changed the relevant terms of service. An example of this would be their claiming intellectual property over content on their servers, which the old companies had not.
Yahoo has now begun making partnerships with telecommunications and Internet providers - such as BT in the UK, Rogers in Canada and SBC in the US - to create content-rich broadband services to rival those offered by AOL. The company offers a branded credit card, Yahoo! Visa, through a partnership with First USA.
Beginning in late 2002, Yahoo quietly began to bolster its search services by acquiring competing technologies. In December 2002, it acquired Inktomi, and in July 2003, it acquired Overture Services, Inc., and through it, search sites AltaVista and AlltheWeb. On February 18, 2004, Yahoo dropped Google-powered results and returned to using its own technology to provide search results.
Re: Happy Birthday Yahoo!
Yeah, $3/hr for AOL. There was this snow storm in the North-East in Jan.96, and everything was closed for a week. My AOL bill came out to $500 that month. I was ready to commit suicide.
It was like christmas when they went unlimited end of '96 though.