Over the last several decades, there were two distinctly dark periods for American technology companies – the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 and the 2008 financial crisis. In those periods, investors had such distaste for risk that technology companies shied away from initial public offerings of stock.

Now, for only the fourth time since data the early 90s, there have been no tech company I.P.O.s in a quarter.

In the first three months of 2016, not a single technology company went public, according to data compiled by Dealogic. Since 1993, when the firm started collecting data, tech intial offerings have been absent from only three quarters: the third quarter of 2002, the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter of 2009.

For I.P.O. watchers, the lack of deals in those three quarters made sense. They were periods of crisis, when stock markets were trading at record lows. (initial public offerings are often correlated to the broader equity markets, where higher valuations give the buyers and sellers of new issues incentives to participate).