Vintage Computers

EA held the first "phase" of their public beta for Ultima Online during June 1997, sending out only a few thousand CDs. The Ultima Online Beta Test Kit consisted of a cardboard disk envelope that contained one (1) CD in a plain white paper sleeve. The CD is marked "Ultima Online Public Beta Test". A few weeks later, in July, the second phase was held, and new CDs were sent out to all beta testers, including those from the first phase. There is no distinguishable difference between the two different beta CDs, apart from the postmark date on the cardboard envelope and the timestamp of the files on the CD.

More than 25,000 people from around the world paid to participate in the 1997 beta test. The beta CD cost $2 U.S. On August 21, 1997, Electronic Arts announced that UO established the worldwide record for the largest number of people concurrently playing in the same virtual world over the Internet by hosting 2,850 gamers. At the time, the total game geography covered more than 189 million square feet of terrain. Showing the entire game surface area at once would have required 38,000 17-inch monitors, nearly enough to occupy a football field.

Hotmail service was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, and was one of the first webmail services on the Internet along with Four11's RocketMail (later Yahoo! Mail). It was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, symbolizing "freedom" from ISP-based email and the ability to access a user's inbox from anywhere in the world. The name "Hotmail" was chosen out of many possibilities ending in "-mail" as it included the letters HTML, the markup language used to create web pages (to emphasize this, the original type casing was "HoTMaiL"). The limit for free storage was 2 MB. Hotmail was initially backed by venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. By December 1997, it reported more than 8.5 million subscribers. Hotmail initially ran under Solaris for mail services and Apache on FreeBSD for web services, before being partly converted to Microsoft products, using Windows Services for UNIX in the migration path.

Hotmail was sold to Microsoft in December 1997 for a reported $400 million (~$705 million in 2023), and it joined the MSN group of services. The sale had been preceded by a major incident in 1997 where all email was lost for 25% of mailboxes. Hotmail quickly gained in popularity as it was localized for different markets around the globe, and became the world's largest webmail service with more than 30 million active members reported by February 1999.