This is the date of the Netscape IPO. The offering resulted in two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive and made it "...so that Grandma could use it and her grandchildren could use it." Second, it enabled more people to communicate in more ways than ever before. If you’ve read the book, you know that Friedman lists ten flatteners—the one we are most concerned with today is Netscape. It probably has the most direct effect on the classroom. It created "...a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language." Consider this: Students in my classroom were born in the 1996. They don’t know what life is like without the Internet.