The BBC has a nice interactive timeline on Fifteen years of the web. It includes such “firsts” as the first webcam to go online – watching a coffee pot at Cambridge University (picture of it being disconnected here). Apparently the coffee percolator went offline in 2001 and was sold to Speigel (who seem to have put it, or another one, back online.)
I suspect that dot.com crash was due to a lack of coffeecams. The timing of the disconnection is suspect.