Internet time and doomsday asteroids: this week in tech, 20 years ago

It’s difficult to remember a time when online media wasn’t arranged largely around memetic cultural events. On any given April 20th in recent years, for instance, you can find all sorts of weed-themed stories pegged around the unofficial holiday for marijuana. That’s not so in 1999: a search for “420” brings up precious few results.
Instead, the science and technology news of late April included one big company shake-up, some odd developments in space, and an extre