Aol Merger with Time Warner

Martha Lane Fox was just a couple of months away from floating her tiny travel and tickets internet start-up lastminute.com at an outlandish price when the news came from across the Atlantic.

"I was busy stuffing tickets into envelopes," she recalls."Time Warner/AOL seemed a big deal - proof the world was irrevocably changed."

Not quite right, she now concedes.

In April that year, I travelled to AOL's headquarters in Virginia to interview Steve Case for Newsnight.

The sprawling campus seemed rather staid and corporate for the funkiest company on the internet, and Mr Case's answers to my questions were all pretty bland - but there was little doubt that I was in the presence of the man in charge of changing the world.

But from Virginia I flew on to Silicon Valley, and as I arrived all those day traders were looking at screens turning red.

On April 14th, the Nasdaq index of hi-tech shares fell by 10%, leaving it 35% down from its peak a few weeks earlier in March.

The bubble was bursting and over the next couple of years a lot of those young hopefuls who'd abandoned steady jobs or bet their house on the dotcom dream would have a rude awakening.

Pipes and poetry

The wheels did not fall off the AOL/Time Warner deal for quite a while.

But gradually the tensions in the marriage between old and new media began to tell.