In 2001 they buried the internet, and Wikipedia and the iPod were born at the funeral.
Amid the dot-com winter, Wikipedia launched in January 2001 and Apple shipped the first iPod that October. In February, NEAR Shoemaker became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.
2001 was supposed to be the year the internet stayed dead. Instead, in the quiet after the crash, two of the most important things of the decade appeared.
Wikipedia went live in January, on the wild idea that strangers would build the sum of human knowledge for free. Apple shipped the iPod in October: a thousand songs in your pocket. Almost nobody was watching either one.
That is the point. The best things get built in the down years, by people who did not get the memo that it was over. Bull markets are loud and a little stupid. The winters are when the serious people work.