Posted on 06/07/2021 4:20:50 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Back in the mid 1990s, the Internet was still a very new thing and not everybody even used a web browser. There were still many using Archie, Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, etc., and that was only the geeks. Most people had no clue about the online world and if they did, they were using mainstream services like Prodigy (owned by Sears!), CompuServe, and America Online to get that interactive "online" experience (at several dollars an hour on a phone line).
The first browser was called Mosaic and it eventually morphed into Netscape Navigator, both of which are mostly forgotten today. But it did make some guy whose first name is Marc and whose last name is hard to spell a billionaire.
This would have been 1993 or 1994.
Around that time, people were starting to learn about URLs and magazine advertisements started having these curious looking words at the bottom that always began "http://www..."
It was called "The Worldwide Web" by some. But what exactly was the Worldwide Web back in the mid 1990s? Well, it was partly academic type sites with obscure articles on the works of Epicurus (the Greek Philosopher) and also rumination on the deeper meanings of Nirvana and Pearl Jam songs written by pimply faced 17-year-olds. But really, the World Wide Web at the time was this immense wasteland of personal websites in which (mostly) young people posted every minute detail of their insignificant lives which was a precursor to the kind of inane vanity later to be seen on social media sites like MySpace and Facebook.
So that was how things existed on the Internet back in the mid 1990s.
Sidenote: Free Republic would be launched in late 1996 and the HTML has hardly changed!
So around that 1996 timeframe, I was reading my copy of PC Computing (or maybe it was WIRED) and I learned of a website that was selling books! Basically the idea was you browsed the website for a book and if you saw something you liked, you would click on it and purchase it right then and there. You would enter your credit card information right there on the website (an utterly reckless idea at the time) and the book would be delivered right to your house a few days later!
It was only about 25 years ago.
Back then, it was almost sacrilegious to use the "World Wide Web" for commerce. But Amazon did it pretty much first. They quickly expanded their selection to hundreds of thousands of books and not only that, they started posting reviews of said books by people who bought them.
I was addicted from almost Day one. I still remember the very first book I purchased on Amazon. It was "Pillars Of The Earth" by Ken Follett. It arrived just 3 days later in a cardboard box and there were free bookmarks included as well as a letter urging me to review the whole experience on the fledging website that was Amazon.
In quick order, Amazon expanded into music and video as well and it became my go-to site to order music as well and eventually DVDs.
Now Amazon is the "everything store" and if I want to order a box of Bronze #9 x 2.25 wood screws, why I can have them in my mailbox by Thursday. Ditto for that weird looking piece that will fix my dishwasher (if I guessed the right part).
Yeah, I know most people here hate Amazon today. And I did cancel my Amazon Prime when AWS helped to shut down the Parler site earlier this year. But that was one hell of a company back in the day. Customer service was impeccable. I remember ordering a set of Bach Cantatas and one of the discs was duplicated (meaning I was missing one of the CDs). Amazon immediately sent me an entire new set (never even asking for the old set back) and giving me a $10 gift card for future purchases along with a letter of apology.
Anyway, I did like Amazon back in the day.
Amazon “sold” from the Books In Print catalog.
Same as any brick and mortar could do for you if you’d only walked up to the counter and special ordered a book.
They didn’t actually stock all of those titles, they just listed them and would backorder quite a few of them if you placed an order.
True. But I didn’t have to drive to a store.
I could have bought Amazon for $18.00 a share..My reply..They sell books..What else could they sell???? Yeah,I know....
I’m also old enough to remember the first emails I ever got and sent (grad school, and two elderly professors picked it up very quickly), and when the Internet meant telnet or ftp.
How exciting it was to be able to read a newspaper from Akron online via telnet.
I bought books from Amazon starting in 1998. You could search for anything and get it. The selection and convenience was decisive.
Mosaic was the first GUI based browser. There were text based browsers before that. The most sophisticated was a browser called Lynx, and I believe it is still being maintained to this day. I ran Lynx on a VAX workstation back in the day.
Oh well.
I still find it amazing that Sears did not pursue the strategy used by Amazon. Sears had everything in stock or in a warehouse and the ability to deliver. After all, people had been ordering from their catalogs for over 100 years. Sears could have crushed Amazon in the early years.
I love Amazon. It has been my lifeline to deal with aftermath of surgery...also to get ready for it.
I dont care what bezos does or believes...his company has really helped me.
And when there was a problem with a delivery..they accomodated me by either a courtesy gift card or total refund of product and let me keep it.
I needed some stuff same day delivery...amazon was the only way to get it.
The nineties was a funny time for online commerce. I remember listing a guitar on a used gear website called Daddy’s Junky Music (this was before eBay). The buyer responded with an email asking for pictures, which I took with a disposable film camera and had developed at one of those kiosks and then snail mailed to him.
I remember using half.com
I do recall the BBS.
It was just kinda neat.
I remember when MTV played music videos.
Blockbuster could have swatted Netflix like a fly. But their execs laughed when Netflix offered to sell to Blockbuster (for a tiny sum).
The first search engine that I used was “world wide web worm.”
Ahh the days of America Online.
Using the phone line to get online and my daughter would pick up the phone and I’d get disconnected.
A guy I knew graduated from Ohio State, computer science. He went to work for Compuserve which was North of Columbus and just starting out. Around late 80’s early 90’s.
I can’t remrber the exact story but he was offerred stock but took money instead. Later CS bought out by AOL when AOL was something.
Many of the employees there he knew retired as multi millionaires in their 30’s and 40’s in the tech bubble of the late 90s’.
I remember Amazon stock at $2-3 share when it dropped after the IPO.
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