It seemed like a great idea at the time. The dot-com explosion of the late 1990s was just beginning to percolate, and individual investors were snapping up IPOs as fast as Wall Street could churn them out. . A quick – and, in some ways topical – trip down memory lane.

So in the spring of 1997, when white-shoe investment bank Morgan Stanley Group walked down the aisle with “stocks-and-socks” retail broker Dean Witter, Discover & Co., the market embraced the marriage as an ideal match. The securities that Morgan underwrote could now be distributed more easily to the stock-hungry masses under one roof, creating one of the most formidable cash machines on Wall Street. The era of the financial supermarket had begun.

For the first three years, the combination worked. The IPO business was on a tear, as Americans looked to satisfy their insatiable appetite for hot tech stocks and rapidly rising mutual funds. Over that time, the company’s own stock price more than quintupled. Of course, when the equity bubble burst, this institutional-retail marriage soon showed signs of strain — especially in the executive suite. The power-sharing gentlemen’s agreement between Dean Witter’s Phil Purcell and Morgan Stanley’s John Mack — Purcell would start as chairman and CEO, and Mack as president, with the two later expected to swap roles — disintegrated. Purcell flip-flopped on his promise, held onto his No. 1 spot and showed Mack the door in 2001.

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