style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s was the first flowering of a virtual online world and, as excitement grew, investors at the frontier of the fledgling internet showed themselves ever more susceptible to what Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan had dubbed “irrational exuberance” in 1996.