Tech Business History
TBH explores how tech businesses got started, how they succeeded or failed and what it was like to work in them. Presenter Charles Miller is a former BBC producer who specialised in documentaries about technology and business. In TBH he continues his research, meeting key people whose stories tell us how technology found its way into our lives. In this first series, he talks to those behind the dot com boom and bust in the UK in the late 1990s.
Tech Business History
Rory Cellan-Jones: The rise and fall of dot com Britain
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Rory Cellan-Jones, Charles Miller (presenter)
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Season 1
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Episode 2
As a BBC journalist, Rory-Cellan Jones witnessed the brief dot com boom in the UK, followed by the bust. Among the big stories, he covered the birth of Freeserve, Lastminute, Firebox and Clickmango - many of them headed by relatively privileged young people who'd come from Oxbridge or business school. But it was a time, he says, which has shaped Britain's attitude to entrepreneurship ever since - popularising the idea that anyone can start a business and make themselves online millionaires if their idea is good enough.