Akamai's stock closed its first day above $145, more than five times its offering price, on the strength of an idea from MIT. Popular websites often slowed to a crawl or crashed under heavy traffic. Akamai, named for the Hawaiian word for smart, copied content to thousands of servers around the world and served each visitor from the nearest one. People had a name for the problem: the World Wide Wait.

An Algorithm From MIT

MIT professor Tom Leighton and graduate student Danny Lewin bet that clever algorithms could fix internet congestion without rebuilding the internet. Their system decided, in real time, which server should answer each request. One origin server no longer had to strain under all the demand. The load spread across a global network placed inside many internet providers, close to the people asking for content.

September 11, and Beyond

Akamai priced at $26 a share in October 1999 and soared on its first day, one of the great debuts of the era. The crash cut its value sharply. On September 11, 2001, Danny Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11. The company survived and grew into a core part of the internet's infrastructure and security. It still trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AKAM.

Cover: Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series "Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei)", Katsushika Hokusai. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a great Pacific wave (Akamai, Hawaiian for smart; traffic surging at the edge).