In 1996 the Internet was a place of static text and images, low bandwidth, and too many point-to-point connections. New users to the Internet were outpacing bandwidth growth by an order of magnitude. The time was right for caching and a handful of new companies rode the caching bandwagon to fame and fortune. Along the way, extreme caching was brought to the Internet, reducing congestion and latency to all-time lows. But times change. Today, the Internet is a world of high bandwidth connections, streaming audio and video with content rights management, and dynamic web pages. Caching is less useful and more problematic for today's Internet and, though still servicing almost all of the static content on the Internet, caching has lost its luster.
In this talk we examine the rise and fall of Internet caching, from the conditions that spawned a new market to the clever solutions that gave rise to extreme caching to problems that face caching today including streaming media, digital rights management, quality of service, and dynamic web page creation.