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2000 — 2002 · THE DENOMINATOR
A winners list without its denominator is advertising — and South Bend's denominator is mostly an absence: the national collapse was vast. The Associated Press, closing out 2001 on the Webmergers count, put the toll at at least 537 internet companies shut down or in bankruptcy court that year, on top of 225 in 2000, with 98,522 dot-com layoffs announced through November 2001 on the Challenger, Gray & Christmas count. Against that, this section's searches of the trade press and the state's business record for a named South Bend dot-com flameout — a local Pets.com, a local Webvan, a venture-backed startup of the bubble years that raised, spent and vanished here — return none. There was, so far as the reachable record shows, almost nothing here of the kind that could collapse. The city's bubble-era casualties are of a different order: the dial-up generation itself, absorbed without a documented trace, and the boards, which modem by modem went dark as their callers moved to the web — Flag Net's surviving note, its modem lines terminated to hold costs down, is the era's local obituary, written by the one board that refused to die.
What the bust did leave in South Bend was its precondition. The crash broke the price of the long-haul fiber that ran under the city along the railroads, and the region's institutions — which had organized their task force in the late 1990s, before the fall — were positioned to build on the wreckage: the Metronet incorporated in 2004, its exchange point in a station a local software man had been filling with carriers since the 1990s. South Bend's dot-com story, told whole, is that the city had little of the bubble and built for the aftermath. The record holds no local unicorn herd and no local crater, and no folklore is admitted to supply either.
Sources:
- Associated Press, December 28, 2001 — at least 537 internet-company failures in 2001 and 225 in 2000 (Webmergers.com count); 98,522 dot-com layoffs announced through November 2001 (Challenger, Gray & Christmas). honoluluadvertiser.com (the.honoluluadvertiser.com)
- The 219 BBS registry, Flag Net entry — the termination of modem access and the board's continuation by telnet. bbslist.textfiles.com
- Searches: the negative search for a named South Bend dot-com failure in the trade and state business press.