Women's WIRE

Women's WIRE, later known as Women.com, was the first online space and the first internet company to target women. It was founded in California in 1992 as WIRE, an acronym for Women's Information Resource and Exchange, conceived by self taught programmer Nancy Rhine and co-founded with entrepreneur Ellen Pack; accessible first via telnet subscription, it later migrated to the World Wide Web, drawing around 300,000 visitors a day at its peak with email access, chatrooms, forums, news and advice, before it was acquired by iVillage in 2001 after suffering financial losses in the dot-com bubble.