The story of bitcoin development
All began with Satoshi Nakamoto. Then Sirius-M ported the bitcoin source code from SourceForge to Github. October 2009 Satoshi made his first appearance in the Github repository. July 2010 Gavin Andresen jumped into that boat.
See the developers activity in this timeline based visualisation:
The (un)worthy history of ICOs
The total fundraising volume of all ICOs exceed $6,000,000,000 this year.
These are the largest ICO fundraising campaigns ever:
2014 Ethereum
2015 No big things happened in this year...
2016 The DAO
2017 EOS, Tezos, Filecoin, Bancor, Paragon, Kin, QASH, COMSA, TenX, Polkadot, Status and Tronix
Of course, this list has nothing to do with the market cap or the recent price. A lot ICOs had huge marketing campaigns. For a lot of people, ICOs were very promising after the gain of Ethereum, especially when the ICO's promoting went viral on 4chan or reddit.
No pain, no gain
A lot of newbies forecasted massive returns without any further knowledge about the technology beyond. Unfortunately many of these coins lost their value a few months later. This is probably one reason for the recent #ICObans in China and South Korea.
Check out this interactive graphic about the massive scaling of ICOs in 2017:
https://elementus.io/token-sales-history