First it was tulips, then it was shares in the South Sea Company. Now the dot.coms have been added to that dubious hall of fame - the roll call of speculative bubbles that have punctuated the history of financial markets.
Yesterday yet another high profile dot.com business - Letsbuyit - announced it had run into difficulties.
The mania for technology stocks in 2000 had all the ingredients for a roller-coaster ride from boom to bust - glamorous sounding products that investors knew little about, avarice, an economy firing on all cylinders, some dashing young entrepreneurs, a small army of cheerleaders in brokerage houses and in the media peddling the line that the rules of business had been rewritten.
Yet what it did not have was the ability to rewrite the rules of economics. When the historians come to write the story of the dot.com bubble their epitaph will be the same as that penned after the madness ended in 17th century Holland, London in 1720 or Wall Street in 1929: it wasn't different this time.
In vain did the Cassandras prophesy that it would all end in tears, that there were simply too many companies chasing too little revenue, and that for the stock market valuations of the dot.coms to be justified every person on earth would have to be surfing the net 24 hours a day with a mobile phone clamped to each ear.
The iron laws of markets have now reasserted themselves. The ratcheting up of interest rates by the Federal Reserve has not not helped, leading to weaker consumer demand and higher business costs. But there were also structural factors at play. Over the medium term, share prices are linked to profits with a fairly stable relationship between share prices and earnings, the price-earnings ratio. If the price-earnings ratio is much higher than normal, one of two things can happen - either the company will eventually justify its share price by making higher profits or its share price will come down to earth with a bump.
Most dot.coms were involved in sectors where profits - assuming there were any - were destined to be squeezed by cut-throat competition. Reality has now set in. Shares in dot.com start-ups that were changing hands for hundreds of dollars each at the height of the speculative fever are now virtually worthless. Did anybody know or care what Engage Inc was actually involved in, let alone have any idea of its likely earnings potential when it was trading at $95 a share earlier this year. They probably took a closer look as the shares fell to just over $1 this month.
However, there was little analysis of this sort as the year dawned with the US economy booming, fears of a millennium bug meltdown for the markets dispelled and the merger between America Online, the world's biggest internet services provider, and Time Warner, one of biggest traditional media companies, symbolising the unstoppable force of the "new paradigm".
The combination appeared to mark the coming of age of online upstarts as AOL had all the glitz and all the potential, but Time Warner was making all the money. With the benefit of hindsight, the merger presaged the crest of the stock market wave rather than the start of an avalanche of deals.
Having risen a record-breaking 88% in 1999, the Nasdaq composite index of technology companies rallied even higher in the first three months of 2000. On March 10, the index reached a record high of 5048. In the dying weeks of the year, it is trading at less than half this level. With the bubble burst and investor confidence in tatters, the index has recorded its worst ever annual performance in its 29-year history. The previous low of a 35% decline was recorded during the oil crisis of 1974.
This year's bear market began in April, when the Nasdaq suffered four of its worst ever points losses in quick succession. Within 51 trading days, $2,400bn (£1,700bn) had been wiped from the technology-driven stock market.
The amount of paper money made and lost in the US hi-tech sector has been astonishing. Microsoft has halved in value since the beginning of the year with about $240bn cut from its market capitalisation. Bill Gates, the company's founder, is still the world's richest man in spite of losing about $40bn as a result of his company's misfortunes.
Others to have lost several billion dollars over the past year include Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com who saw the value of his stake in the company fall by $1bn one day this summer, and Jerry Yang, the chief of Yahoo whose stake in the web search group is worth about $7bn less than it once was.
Cassandra-in-chief for the bubble proved to be a shy economics professor from Yale, Robert Shiller, whose book Irrational Exuberance was published just as the market peaked in March. Shiller is unable to identify a precise explanation for why the bubble burst when it did, however. "It seems to me that something happened to let the sceptical advice sink in," is all he will say. After years out of the spotlight, Shiller is rather uncomfortable with some aspects of his role as a naysayer. "It felt funny," he said of the tours publicising the book, where many readers were concerned about their own plummeting fortunes. "It seems as though all doctors, whether economic or medical, are meant to be reassuring."
The Nasdaq has declined by about 50% since Shiller's book was launched. Yet, still he is bearish about the future direction of share prices. "I don't think we're at the bottom of the overall market," he said, adding that on a trailing 12-month basis, the S&P 500 index is still trading at a price-earnings multiple of 25 times, about twice the historic average.
The rate of company closures is still accelerating, according to a report published by Webmergers, an online consultancy. In the first 11 months of the year, 130 internet companies folded with about 8,000 job losses.
In spite of signs that the stock market mania has come to an end, most analysts believe the internet will make a lasting impact on business and the economy.
Andy Grove, chairman of Intel, confidently predicted last year: "There won't be any internet companies [within a few years]. All companies will be internet companies, or they will be dead."
This is almost certainly true. The Wall Street crash of 1929 did not mean the end of radio or prevent the spread of the motor car. But a word of warning. In real terms, the S&P composite index did not regain its level of September 1929 until December 1958.