Two of the highest profile women in tech have had a tough year. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, saw her company sold to Verizon. Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the experimental blood testing company Theranos, was banned from her own labs by regulators for two years.

Though men founders and CEOs fail all the time, it may have different implications when women mess up, says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

“There are so many other male leaders that … failure doesn’t really create expectations about other men’s leadership capacities or capabilities,” she says.

When former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was indicted for securities fraud or Angelo Mozilo, the former chairman of Countrywide Financial, was associated with bringing on the housing crisis nobody suggested it was because they were men.

Because there are so few women CEOs, especially in tech, Cooper says when a Marissa Mayer or Elizabeth Holmes fails it can feed stereotypes. “It not only can damage her career just individually for herself,” says Cooper, “but it can actually serve to reconfirm broader cultural beliefs that are out there that women aren’t quite the right fit for senior leadership or certain kinds of senior leadership positions.”

Cooper says there are studies that show that when women and men go to funders with the same idea, women are less likely to get backing.

And with the timing of failures by Mayer and Holmes so close, some people do lump them together despite their very different career trajectories. If you read the comments below articles online, both women are the targets of stinging sexism.

A recent post on NPR’s site said of Mayer’s failure — “simply evidence that women cannot lead.” A post on news comment site Reddit — called both women part of the “the feminist industrial complex” that promotes unqualified women.

Despite other successful CEOs in tech, as young, attractive, rising stars Mayer and Holmes became media darlings. Holmes was fashioned as a great female visionary of the tech world. Last year, Time magazine put her on the list of its 100 most influential people. Holmes’ penchant for wearing black turtlenecks evoked comparisons to Steve Jobs, who also wore them.

Mayer became a symbol of a woman CEO who could juggle her job and giving birth to twins. She appeared on television shows talking about the experience.

Many women executives in the tech world still prefer to see Mayer as a role model.

“I think certainly Marissa going in as a CEO who was having a child has shown that you can do both of those things at once. And just having a woman be in that role is normalizing for the rest of us,” says Natala Menezes, who has been an executive at Amazon, Microsoft and Google and is currently a general manager at the marketing and analytics firm Localytics.

Minnie Ingersoll, the chief operating officer and co-founder of Shift, a startup that helps people sell used cars online, likes to see women shoot for the stars. “One message for young women is that it’s OK to take a big risk and to fail,” she says. “I think there’s something actually for me personally that I find almost inspiring in someone who is willing to take that risk.”

But she doesn’t think Mayer and Holmes have much in common. “Marissa and Elizabeth are both blond women. But other than that, I see what is going on in their careers very differently,” Ingersoll says.

Though being young and blond may have something to do with the media’s fascination with these women, there are others succeeding as leaders in tech. Ursula Burns runs Xerox. Meg Whitman now runs HP enterprise — and as the former CEO of eBay she helped turn the company into a giant of online commerce. Ginni Rometty is CEO of IBM.

Menezes and Ingersoll hope that their successes will make it easier for women to succeed and dream so big that they can afford to fail as often as men do.

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For six years, the auto industry has been on a sales streak. July was no different. It was the best July since 2005, with sales up .4 percent over last July. Much of the growth was in trucks and SUVs. The three top-selling vehicles were trucks (Ford F Series, Chevy Silverado, Ram).

While sales generally were strong, some of the big names were down. General Motors fell 2 percent; Ford, 3 percent; Toyota, 1 percent. Those numbers are compared to the same month last year.

The industry is on track this year to sell 17.8 million vehicles.

The question for those watching the economy is: Has the car industry peaked? “It’s clear the industry is plateauing,” says Akshay Anand with Kelley Blue Book, “as we’re now seeing signs of SUVs slowing down for several brands, while sedans continue to struggle.” Anand isn’t alone in his analysis. Last week on Ford’s earnings call, the company said it likely slow production in anticipation of a weakened automotive economy in the fall and winter.

For much of the last half decade, the auto industry has been the bright spot in a tepid economy. And Anand says that’s not likely to change for a while. He says “sales are near all-time highs, and should continue to remain strong regardless of the flattened [economic] growth for the rest of 2016.”

The auto industry is and has been cyclical. But since the bailout of GM and Chrysler, the automakers have been looking to improve profitability during the downturns. Jessica Caldwell analyst with edmunds.com says with sales volume cooling, the car companies can “focus on profits instead of volume. And if you’re selling SUVs and trucks then that’s not a bad strategy.” Trucks and SUVs tend to have much higher profit margins.

Also since the downturn, the car companies have been able to reduce costs. And the recent sales growth is real, not inflated by incentives. “Interest rates are higher than last year and consumers bought at a higher rate,” says Caldwell. While car company helped the economy recover most analysts don’t see an automotive slowdown being the spark that ignites the next recession.

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Copycat versions of biotech drugs work just as well as the originals and cost a lot less, according to an analysis of studies of the medicines.

The analysis by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that so-called biosimilars — medications that are meant to mimic, and compete with, complex and expensive biotech drugs — perform as well as the brand-name versions.

The researchers looked at data from 19 studies of biosimilar drugs that treat rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis, and found that they were comparable to the originals and would cost less. The findings will appear in the Aug. 2 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

“Hopefully, this will encourage the brisk adoption of these products,” said Caleb Alexander, the study’s lead researcher, in a release. “There is no question that greater competition in this market will benefit patients, prescribers and society in the long run.”

Biologics include proteins and antibodies that are typically made by living organisms. They’re more difficult to produce than medications made from mixtures of chemicals. It’s also next to impossible to make an exact copy of a biological product, which is why the drugs are often referred to as biosimilars.

There was a provision in the Affordable Care Act meant to encourage development and approval of biosimilars, but progress has been slow. The Food and Drug Administration has approved only two such drugs since the law passed in 2010.

Zarxio, the first biosimilar drug approved in the U.S., is expected to save about $6 billion a year because it costs less than Amgen’s Neupogen, the brand-name product. The medications help boost the immune systems of chemotherapy patients by increasing production of white blood cells.

In April, the FDA approved a second drug that is similar to Johnson & Johnson’s Remicade to treat colitis and Crohn’s disease. That drug, called Inflectra, is one member of the class of biosimilars that the researchers at Johns Hopkins examined. There are several other biosimilar drugs in this class available in Canada, Asia and Europe.

The Johns Hopkins study is important because drugmakers have raised questions about biosimilars since they aren’t identical to the drug they’re supposed to mimic. Many are fighting approval of the drugs, and some argue that they should not be substituted for a brand-name drug without a patient’s consent.

But IMS Health Informatics says there are 50 biosimilars under development. All told, they could save U.S. and European health systems as much at $110 billion over the next five years, the company estimates.

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At their party’s convention this week, Democrats highlighted positive economic news from the Obama era, including the dramatic plunge in unemployment and persistent growth in output.

But then on Friday, after the gathering had ended, the Commerce Department said the economy grew at only 1.2 percent during April, May and June. Most economists had believed that the gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services, had been growing at about 2.6 percent this spring.

So when the disappointing number was revealed, many Republicans pounced, suggesting that voters would not want to continue having a Democrat in the White House.

For example, Republican Ari Fleischer, a former spokesman for President George W. Bush, tweeted: “Want to know why Hillary could lose to Trump? It’s because the economy grew just 1.2%.”

And Ralph Benko, senior economic advisor to American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, said in a statement that “the new economic numbers cannot possibly represent good news for Team Clinton.”

But a deeper look at the data reveals a potentially more encouraging interpretation for Democrats.

The GDP data showed the weakness was in inventory accumulation. Businesses turned cautious this spring and whittled down inventories rather than make big commitments to the future.

But at the same time, consumers were springing to life, increasing their spending by an annualized rate of 4.2 percent – a healthy pace.

Economists say shoppers are in good shape for several reasons: cheap gasoline is leaving more cash in wallets; interest rates are low; unemployment is just 4.9 percent and wages are up 2.6 percent from a year ago.

So shopping is up too. The National Retail Federation recently predicted back-to-school spending would hit $75.8 billion — up more than 11 percent from last year’s $68 billion. “We are optimistic that overall economic growth and consumer spending will continue to improve,” NRF President Matthew Shay said in a statement.

So if Americans are buying now, then businesses will have to restock this fall, ahead of the holiday shopping season. That could mean more jobs or longer hours for a lot of people, including factory workers, truck drivers, distribution-center workers, store-shelf stockers and so on.

Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, put it this way in his written assessment: “The big drop in inventories is a bad news/good news story. The bad news is that it cut second quarter growth. The good news is that the change in inventories will likely be positive in the third quarter, which will add to growth.”

And here’s another silver lining for Democrats: slow spending by businesses in the first half of the year could help hold down interest rates for everyone in the second half.

“The weak GDP report makes an increase in the fed funds rate at the Federal Open Market Committee’s next meeting, in mid-September, very unlikely,” PNC economist Gus Fuacher said in a statement.

Keeping rates low will help consumers who need to borrow for cars, homes and other purchases.

In other words, the economy could shape up like this in the fall for average workers: an inventory buildup could generate more jobs and longer work weeks; low interest rates could spur more consumer spending; and falling gas prices could put many Americans in a more positive mood.

Or not. Perhaps the drop in inventories signals a real decline in the economy. Maybe by November, the weak growth turns into a real recession. Anything is possible.

But for now, most economists are still holding to a somewhat brighter interpretation of the GDP data. “While the top-line growth rate for the second quarter of 2016 was disappointing, it does not reflect the underlying growth rate of the U.S. economy, which is in the 2 percent to 2.5-percent range,” Behravesh said.

He continues to forecast 2.5 percent growth for the second half of the year.

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The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 1.2 percent during the second quarter of this year, well below expectations, and it came after an even weaker first quarter, the Commerce Department said.

The report exacerbates fears that factors such as the global slowdown and the decline in energy production might have hit the economy harder than first thought.

While all-important consumer spending rose by a healthy 4.2 percent, business investment fell by 9.7 percent and inventories fell. Government spending, which includes military expenditures, also dropped, by 0.9 percent.

The Commerce Department also released revised numbers showing that the economy expanded by 2.6 percent during 2015, the biggest increase in nearly a decade.

But the data indicates that growth began to slow at the end of the year and was lackluster during the first half of 2016. The economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.8 percent during the first three months of this year.

The good news is that, with the unemployment rate still relatively low, consumers continue to spend.

Still, businesses remain cautious about the future, suggesting that many are worried about the outlook abroad. Although exports actually rose during the second quarter, the stronger dollar could hurt U.S. manufacturers trying to sell products abroad.

As The Wall Street Journal reported, continued anemic growth is likely to be felt in several ways in the months to come:

“Lackluster growth could be a concern to Federal Reserve officials considering whether the economy is strong enough to absorb higher interest rates later this year. It could also influence voters weighing the economic track record during Barack Obama’s administration before electing a new president in November.”

The numbers released today represent the first estimate of growth for the quarter. The data is almost always revised as more information comes in.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is drawing up new rules that would curb abusive debt collection practices, which it says generated some 85,000 consumer complaints last year alone.

The rules would limit the number of times debt collectors can contact borrowers to collect debts, and require them to substantiate that they have the right person before doing so. They would also have to make it easier for borrowers to dispute debts.

“Both consumers and responsible businesses stand to benefit by improved standards for debt collection. Consumers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and businesses should be able to operate fairly and reasonably to collect the debts they’re legitimately owed,” said Richard Cordray, the bureau’s director, at a field event in California.

The bureau says it receives more complaints about the $13.7 billion debt collection industry than any other issue. Many consumers report being harassed repeatedly to pay debts they don’t owe, or have already paid, the bureau says.

“The basic principles of the proposals we’re considering are grounded in common sense. Companies should not collect debt that is not owed. They should have more reliable information about the debt before they try to collect,” Cordray said.

One problem is that many companies purchase debt from creditors for pennies on the dollar, with the intention of aggressively trying to collect it, but don’t necessarily have correct information about the borrower or even whether the debt has been paid, he said.

The proposals would limit the number of times a company could contact a borrower and prevent the company from using certain channels of communication, such as a work phone, if the borrower requested it.

Debt collection is already governed by the 1977 Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The bureau was given the authority to issue new regulations under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill of 2010.

Bureau officials say the 1977 act needs to be updated in numerous ways.

For instance, the act gave consumers the right to dispute a debt or ask for more information, but few consumers understand they may do so, Cordray said.

Under the proposed rules, companies would be obligated to confirm their information about debts if consumers requested it.

The proposed rules are being released to the public for comment and will be rewritten in greater detail, after industry and consumer groups weigh in.

“The law should protect and promote ethical debt collection, which safeguards the rights of consumers and provides clear and effective rules of the road for collectors,” said James Mastriani, president of Velocity Recoveries, a debt collection firm.

But, he added, “The law should not be misused to enable borrowers to turn legitimate loans into de facto gifts. In the long run, this will reduce the availability of credit for all consumers and make credit more expensive.”

Graciela Aponte-Davis, director of California policy at the Center for Responsible Lending, said the proposals “endorse the common-sense idea that people should not be harassed for debts they do not owe.”

But she expressed concern that some parts of the proposals don’t protect consumers from unwarranted collection attempts.

“Specifically the proposal does not go far enough to require that debt collectors adequately document that they are pursuing the right person for the right debt,” she said.

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The federal government released its first overall hospital quality rating on Wednesday, slapping average or below average scores on many of the nation’s best-known hospitals while awarding top scores to many unheralded ones.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rated 3,617 hospitals on a one- to five-star scale, angering the hospital industry, which has been pressing the Obama administration and Congress to block the ratings.

Hospitals argue that the government’s ratings will make teaching hospitals and other institutions that treat many tough cases look bad. They argue that their patients are often poorer and sicker when admitted, and so are more likely to suffer further complications or die, than at institutions where the patients aren’t as sick.

Medicare, which already publicizes on its website more than 100 hospital metrics, many of which deal with technical matters, acknowledges that the ratings don’t reflect cutting edge care, such as the latest techniques to battle cancer. Still, it has held firm in publishing the rankings, saying that consumers need a simple way to objectively gauge quality. Medicare does factor in the health of patients when comparing hospitals, though not as much as some hospitals would like.

Medicare based the star ratings on 64 individual measures that are published on its Hospital Compare website, including death and infection rates and patient reviews.

Just 102 hospitals received the top rating of five stars, and few are those considered as the nation’s best by private ratings sources such as U.S. News & World Report, or viewed as the most elite within the medical profession.

Medicare awarded five stars to relatively obscure hospitals and a notable number of hospitals that specialized in just a few types of surgery, such as knee replacements. There were more five-star hospitals in Lincoln, Neb., and La Jolla, Calif., than in New York City or Boston. Memorial Hermann Hospital System in Houston and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., were two of the only nationally known hospitals to get five stars.

Medicare awarded the lowest rating of one star to 129 hospitals. Five hospitals in Washington, D.C., received just one star, including George Washington University Hospital and MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, both of which teach medical residents. Nine hospitals in Brooklyn, four hospitals in Las Vegas and three hospitals in Miami received only one star.

Some premiere medical centers received the second-highest rating of four stars, including Stanford Health Care in California, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Duke University Hospital in Durham, N.C., New York-Presbyterian Hospital and NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia. In total, 927 hospitals received four stars.

Medicare gave its below-average score of a two-star rating to 707 hospitals. They included the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, North Shore University Hospital (now known as Northwell Health) in Manhasset, N.Y., Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Tufts Medical Center in Boston and MedStar Washington Hospital Center in D.C. Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa. — which is a favorite example for national health policy experts of a quality hospital — also received two stars.

Nearly half the hospitals — 1,752 — received an average rating of three stars. Another 1,042 hospitals were not rated, either because they did not have enough cases for the government to evaluate accurately, or because, as with all Maryland hospitals, Medicare does not collect the necessary data.

The government said in a statement that it has been using the same type of rating system for other medical facilities, such as nursing homes and dialysis centers, and found them useful to consumers and patients. Those ratings have shown, Medicare said, “that publicly available data drives improvement, better reporting, and more open access to quality information for our Medicare beneficiaries.”

In a statement, Rick Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, called the new ratings confusing for patients and families. “Health care consumers making critical decisions about their care cannot be expected to rely on a rating system that raises far more questions than answers,” he said. “We are especially troubled that the current ratings scheme unfairly penalizes teaching hospitals and those serving higher numbers of the poor.”

A preliminary analysis Medicare released last week found hospitals that treated large numbers of low-income patients tended to do worse.

A sizable proportion of the nation’s major academic medical centers, which train doctors, scored poorly, according to a Kaiser Health News analysis. Out of 288 hospitals that teach significant numbers of residents, six in 10 received below-average scores, the analysis found. Teaching hospitals comprised one-third of the facilities receiving one-star. A number were in high-poverty areas, including two in Newark, N.J., and three in Detroit.

“Hospitals cannot be rated like movies,” Dr. Darrell Kirch, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said in a statement. “We are extremely concerned about the potential consequences for patients that could result from portraying an overly simplistic picture of hospital quality with a star-rating system that combines many complex factors and ignores the socio-demographic factors that have a real impact on health.”

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent news service supported by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

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Trevor Burbank is single, 27 years old, and has been house hunting in Nashville for the last year.

“My rent’s going up in August, so I have to figure out what I’m doing,” he says.

The last time Burbank looked for a place was five years ago. He decided to use his down payment to start a business instead.

“There was a house that I really liked that was going for $60,000, and I saw the house being sold in the past few months for just shy of $300,000,” Burbank says.

There’s a big debate in real estate over where home ownership rates are headed, and whether Millennials — people who came of age around 2000 — will get into the housing market the way generations before them did.

The percentage of people younger than age 35 who are homeowners went from 42 percent a decade ago to just a little more than a third now.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says young people are squeezed from both sides. Rents are increasing even faster than home prices.

And, he says, city politicians aren’t making it easy for developers to build condominiums that would be good starter homes.

“We are creating this divide because of the ongoing housing shortage,” Yun says.

There are other factors everyone agrees are making it harder for today’s younger home buyers. They’re delaying marriage, mortgages are harder to get, and people are staying in school longer, taking larger loans.

Which has the biggest effect, though? Is home ownership on a permanent decline because of high costs, changing demographics or new attitudes about home ownership?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” says Jonathan Spader, senior researcher at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing.

He takes the view that ownership may stay the same, just delayed for the younger generation.

“We really haven’t seen a shift in interest in home ownership among younger households,” Spader says.

In surveys, a huge majority — 90 percent — of those younger than age 30 expect to eventually own, he says, but their earnings took a hit in the recession eight years ago and it’s taking them longer to save up a down payment.

Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, takes a different view: she thinks the younger generation is simply less interested in home ownership.

“This is a permanent shift,” Goodman says.

She cites a 2014 study by Fannie Mae of “prime” home buyers. It found that among young, college educated, upper-income, white families, home ownership fell 6 percent from 2000.

“And that sort of best captures the subtle change in attitudes towards home ownership, because this is a group for whom there’s no reason not to be homeowners,” Goodman says.

Of course more than 80 percent of them eventually buy, but, she says, “they’re doing it later, and a lower percentage of them are eventually doing it.”

And then there are the views of Ted Gayer, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

“I actually think home ownership rates are likely to increase,” he says.

Gayer says many young adults lived with their parents to weather the post-recession years, but as they age, more will start new households and that trend will increase.

“This Millennial generation is actually a rather large generation,” he says.

At 82 million people, he says, it outranks the Baby Boomers in size. And Gayer expects that means a bigger housing boom is around the corner.

As for Burbank, his startup isn’t generating much salary yet. Qualifying for a mortgage took some finagling.

He’s looking for a fixer-upper, but sellers are driving hard bargains on those, too.

“In some cases, there’s not even photos online,” Burbank says. “So you don’t get a tour, you don’t get photos.”

He’s losing out to investors buying sight unseen.

That’s a bridge too far for Burbank, so for now, he remains on the sidelines.

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Verizon is buying Yahoo for $4.8 billion, acquiring its “core Internet assets” — search, email, finance, news, sports, Tumblr, Flickr — in essence writing the final chapter of one of the longest-running Internet companies.

Last year, Verizon bought another Internet pioneer, AOL (aka America Online) for $4.4 billion — complete with its ad targeting technology and content sites Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

This got us thinking: What happened to all those other big brands that dominated the early Internet experience? Here’s a nerdy remembrance of a few of them. (A TL;DR preview: Yahoo and AOL bought a bunch of them, though many survived far longer than you might think.)

CompuServe

The original Internet service provider launched for consumers as a dial-up online information service in 1979, and its popularity skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was the original portal to the web, with news, chats, file sharing — a first Internet experience for several generations of users.

H&R Block (yep, that tax-prep company) bought Compuserve in 1980 and in 1997 sold it to WorldCom, which in turn passed on the subscriber base to the growing rival AOL. After itself going through a merger and then a spin-off with Time Warner, AOL officially shut down CompuServe in 2009.

But! A relic version still exists here.

Prodigy

A younger competitor to CompuServe, Prodigy was a “home computer information service” launched nationally in 1990 by a partnership of Sears and IBM, distinguishing itself with the addition of graphics and advertising support. The service lost money and users in the early ’90s and went through a reboot in 1993, according to Wired.

Prodigy Classic officially shut down in 1999, citing the “Y2K problem,” and the Atlantic has a great long read on what went wrong. The company re-imagined itself as an Internet provider and got fully acquired by SBC communications, now known as AT&T.

AltaVista

Launched in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation as a demo project, AltaVista — aka a web “super spider” — was essentially an indexing predecessor of Google.

It changed hands a few times: Compaq Computer bought it in 1998 (for $3.3 million), one-time Internet giant CMGI bought it in 1999 (for $2.3 billion), ad company Overture Services bought it in 2003 (for $140 million) and it was acquired by Yahoo later the same year. Yahoo officially shut down AltaVista in 2013.

GeoCities

This was like the original Facebook — or, um, MySpace? You could find a community and build your own neon-colored, spinning-animation, multi-fonted, totally cool personal web page! After its mid-’90s launch, Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $3.5 billion during the dot-com boom in 1999, ran it as Yahoo! Geocities and eventually shut it down in 2009.

But if you’re nostalgic, you could still Geocities-ize websites, thanks to the Internet.

Ask Jeeves

Remember that web butler Jeeves who answered your web queries in a distant echo of today’s Siri?

Launched in 1996, Jeeves didn’t live up to Google’s search engine ascent: Bought in 2005 by IAC (whose businesses include OkCupid, Tinder, The Daily Beast, CollegeHumor and Vimeo), it went through several relaunches, abandoning the search engine and emerging as Ask.com.

Angelfire

The website host/builder is still around! Launched in 1996, it was bought a year later by another dot-com startup WhoWhere, which in turn was bought in 1998 by Lycos, described by CNN at the time as “the world’s fourth most popular Web site, behind America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft.” Lycos, after trading hands many times, currently belongs to Indian digital media company Ybrant Digital.

Netscape

A brainchild of now-legendary Mark Andreessen and Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics, the Netscape browser beat Microsoft to the market in 1994. After intense “browser wars,” detailed by Engadget, Netscape’s release of the source code spurred the creation of Mozilla.

AOL bought Netscape for the dot-com-bubbleprice of $4.2 billion in 1998, though it ended up costing $10 billion. As Firefox gained prominence, AOL made several attempts to revive Netscape’s popularity, but eventually stopped supporting it in 2008.

ICQ

Launched in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis, the “I seek you” chat service was an alternative to AIM and Yahoo Messenger (both of which are still around, and the latter is apparently beloved by oil traders).

AOL bought Mirabilis in 1998 for $287 million and sold ICQ in 2010 to Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies for $188 million.

Bonus ’90s Brands That Are Still Around

• eBay (owns Stubhub; previously also owned Skype, Craigslist and PayPal);
• Match.com (now owned by IAC, along with Tinder and OkCupid);
• Amazon.com (owns Audible, Zappos);
• MapQuest (launched as a web service in the 1990s, it was bought by America Online, which is now owned by Verizon);
• WebMD (formed as a result of a 1999 merger, backed by Microsoft and featuring the co-founder of Netscape).

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