When Britain got dot.com fever at the very end of the 20th century the City tore up the rule book. Lastminute.com soared to a stock-market valuation of 3750 million. Clickmango.com raised millions in days. Boo.com spent #100 million trying to sell designer sports gear on the Net. Old-style industrial giants with huge turnovers and workforces were edged out of the FTSE 100 by e-commerce newcomers losing a fortune. And then it all went horribly wrong, and even the most glamorous start-ups found they couldn't defy the laws of gravity. Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC's Internet Correspondent throughout the whole dot.com bubble (now it no longer has a dedicated Internet Correspondent at all), and was thus uniquely placed to cover the whole story at first-hand, from the first fledgling net pioneers and the launch of Freeserve through the fabulous fin-de-siecle spending of boo.com to the horribly messy crash that with hindsight seemed utterly inevitable. Originally published as current affairs, "Dot.bomb" - with the story brough up to date for this 2003 edition - now stands as both a business manual of how not to start a business, and a work of recent history.
