@Home bet that the coaxial cable already running into American living rooms could carry the internet many times faster than a phone modem. The Redwood City company was founded in March 1995 with backing from the cable operator TCI and the venture firm Kleiner Perkins. It built a national network and sold service through local cable companies. When it went public in July 1997, nearly everyone online still dialed in, and @Home was asking them to switch.

Cable Companies Go Online

@Home's partners owned the wires. @Home supplied the rest: the national backbone, the servers, the email and the home page that greeted every customer. The cable operators sold the service and split the money. The pitch was speed and a connection that never hung up. The risk was that @Home depended on cable companies that held big stakes in it and could one day decide to run the business themselves.

The Excite Merger and the Fall

@Home priced its IPO at $10.50 a share in July 1997 on Nasdaq, under the ticker ATHM. In 1999 it bought Excite, the web portal, for about $6.7 billion and renamed itself Excite@Home. The merger never worked. The ad business sank with the dot-com crash, and AT&T, which had bought TCI, controlled the board. Excite@Home filed for bankruptcy in September 2001, and its network went dark within months.

Cover: Wooded Landscape with Cottage and Horseman, Meindert Hobbema. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a cottage in the woods (home).