The dotcom bubble was full of absurdities. A common business model was giving away software or services and finding unconventional ways to make money off it, a model we today call “freemium” and that may or may not involve spyware. Geocities with its free web hosting was a good example. But Cyberrebate.com took it to an extra special level of absurdity. It gave away actual physical merchandise and had a scheme to make it profitable. Cyberrebate made its debut May 16, 1998, and closed its doors exactly 3 years later, on May 16, 2001.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
