Then came the dotcom bust, which forced many chief executives to fall on their swords.

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The Andersen ruling may have repercussions for another high-profile case arising from the dotcom bust.

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After the dotcom bust, American firms turned cautious and investment spending was weak.

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Many of their fresh-faced founders can barely remember the downturn triggered by the dotcom bust in the early part of the decade.

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This week, figures released by the Census Bureau showed that the hitherto fast-growing cities around Silicon Valley, including San Francisco, have started to lose population in the wake of the dotcom bust.

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Perhaps as significant, it survived the dotcom bust.

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Google's ability to place small, targeted text advertisements next to internet-search results, and on other websites, meant that many of the business models thought to have been killed by the dotcom bust now rose from the grave.

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It became the dotcom bust after 2000.

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With the dotcom bust, its shares crashed.

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They never touched that low again, rising fairly steadily to reach a temporary peak of 10.5% of GDP in 1997, before dropping sharply during the dotcom bust to 7.6% in 2001 and climbing smartly again to 11.8% in 2006.

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The recession has exacerbated a long-term trend, says Mr Gill, who thinks many venture-capital investors have been put off the high-tech sector by a combination of uncertain returns and memories of the dotcom bust at the turn of the century.

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The 45-year-old Mr. Grimes, who had joined a year earlier, helped rebuild Morgan Stanley's tech team through the dotcom boom and bust.

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In the 1990s, we had a big bull run and then, starting in 2000 to 2002, we had a huge sell-off in stocks because of the dotcom bubble and bust.

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Instead, voters chose the boom and bust of the dotcom bubble, when trillions of dollars were made and lost between 1995 and 2001, with 19 percent (3, 420 votes) selecting the moment as the most significant in the Web's history.

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And if Gerstner's traditional approach made IBM look old-fashioned and monolithic during the dotcom boom, they were also the reliable name that businesses turned to during the bust that followed.

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