rprise. But some insiders explained it differently. The earliest buildings on the network were beginning to return a profit. Had Teli- gent expanded more slowly, or had it gone out for an additional round of financing before the window closed, then the company might have been able to hold on until break-even. But slow expansion was not the order of the day. Eve- ryone acted as if more investor money would always be available whenever needed [26]. When it dried up, the game was over, for Teligent and many others. Dotcoms Create a Demand Bubble Stock prices did not rise during the boom years because company fundamentals were improving. Internet-related stocks were rising in large part because they were rising. The stocks had momentum. Investors bought in because they saw rising prices, and assumed that the price would continue to rise. The Internet Boom and the Limits to Growth This was, of course, a classic "bubble" situation, one that has hap- pened many times. One of the oldest such cases was "tulipmania," when the price of tulip bulbs in Holland briefly rose to astronomical prices. This was documented in Charles Mackay's 1841 classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. One bulb was bartered for goods worth, today, about $35,000 [27]! Of course, many skeptics viewed the Internet bubble as analogous to the tulip craze of 1635. Only the tulip first grew in western Europe in 1559, and it was decades before the price took off. The 1990s bubble hap- pened only a few years after the Internet was privatized: "Internet time" moved SO much faster. The Internet stock bubble was quite broad. Internet service providers themselves, of course, were beneficiaries. These were all, almost by definition, rather young companies-although established companies like Sprint had ISP subsidiaries, the excitement was hottest for initial public offerings of "new econ- omy" companies built around the Internet. "New economy" was an interesting euphemism. Promoters saw it as a bright future of an Internet-driven econom