A walk down memory lane in the tech world.
Last weekend I was looking for some financial documents when I came upon a stash of old credit card receipts and stock trade confirmations from 1999-2001. In the process of sending some of these old documents through the shredder I took a walk down memory lane.
There were credit card charges for GoTo.com, which I started using perhaps 6 months after the original pay-per-click search engine launched.
The very credit cards that those charges were on are a blast from the past, too. Remember NextCard?
Some of my branded credit cards were the FreeRide.com Credit Card and Cybergold Credit Card.
Speaking of Cybergold, it unfortunately can be found on some of my Datek (now TD Ameritrade) account statements. It’s in there with other losers such as Vignette and MyPoints.
Not all of my stock purchases were bad, however. I made a nice sum on Audible.com and rode up GoTo a bit. On the domain name side, I had forgotten that I once owned shares in Register.com.
Then there were my bank statements from CompuBank, one of the first online-only banks. It went defunct in 2001 and was acquired by NetBank.
There were some good things in that period, even when the dot com bubble burst. I found an old record of a 9 month CD that was paying 6.5%. The Savings Bond I bought back then is still paying a healthy 8% or so.
Maybe I should have saved some of these documents for nostalgia. They would have been interesting another ten years in the future.
But it’s too late. They’ve been turned into shredder confetti.
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