I'm old enough to remember when Amazon.com only sold books

[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.

[bigbob]

General Manager of a Fortune 100 division decided customers would happily pay a $50 fee for bring able to order via “the information superhighway” because that was a fraction of the cost of writing a purchase order. I told him he’d be making it would be free within six months. I should have said “weeks”

[Tell It Right]

I was called to help family and friends out many times before Windows 95's plug-n-play to help people figure out COM and IRQ settings to use for their new modem cards, and how to put the settings into BIOS, just so they could get on the "new" internet thing.

The same "new" internet that I'd been using for years, especially if you count the BBS days of boards used by hobby and professional programmers to share coding ideas. And as a computer science student I'd use Hyperterminal to run the VI editor on the school's UNIX box to tweak the homework assignment I'd made run on my Borland C++ to make sure it'd work fine on UNIX. (This was before I learned how to dual-boot in DOS or Linux.)

And yes, I'd have family members pick up the phone line and bump me off my slow as Christmas Hyperterminal session. LOL

[ealgeone]

Sears had the perfect reputation and opportunity to seize the market. They blew it.

[lodi90]

There wasn’t anything unique about Amazon when they started out. There were at least 4-5 other big online only booksellers.

They didn’t really take off until they allowed third party sellers to sell directly to consumers. First media sellers and then other categories. Then amazon used their sales data to cut out the 3P sellers and made even more money selling their own products to amazon customers. The rest is history.

[HandyDandy]

Did the 286 have the math coprocessor.......or was that the 386?

[Fury]

Ahh, the good old days! LOL. Used NCSA Mosaic in 1994 to test our brand new Internet connection at a site we supported.

[DouglasKC]

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.

Yeah that had it all...the complete infrastructure in place. I suspect it was because of short sighted executives not understanding the need to change until it was way too late.

[Lurkinanloomin]

I’m old enough to remember when Amazon was a region of rainforest.

[EvilCapitalist]

I remember when the History Channel taught history.

[fidelis]

You may have been near an Amazon distribution center. I used to live near a UPS distribution center and at certain points in the day the streets would be filled with their brown vans headed out to start their deliveries.

[Veto!]

I’m technically clueless, but my son got me online and also on AMZ when it only sold books. I’ve used AMZ ever since for a few things, then during lockdown I orderded so much that they gave me Prime free. I love it. Nor at all sure I’d pay for it next year. We shall see.

[Myrddin]

I am old enough to remember FM radio before it was possible to multiplex a 2nd channel with R-L to create stereo. All tubes with an Armstrong discriminator. 1958. I was 2 years old. The Fisher tuner worked well.

[sasquatch]

When I worked for Intel, the 8080 was current.
Seems like yesterday. Ford was reluctant to use
micros. Now they can’t get enough!

[Grampa Dave]

.

[KC Burke]

I had that catalogue and kept it until about 2010. It was a marvel for its era.

[Chickensoup]

There was a better book site called Biblio something. Have to try to track it on way back

Does anyone remember Magellan search engine. Or Black Ice security?

[Chickensoup]

Or my favorite the black box catalog. Where hardware learned how to cooperate

[kalee]

I can remember that and making a mistake once when typing the web address and getting a different kind of Amazon, large sized nekkid women. I was so embarrassed!

[SamAdams76]

Those Amazon women can get quite large.

[Antoninus]

I was working for a small foreign publisher back in the day (maybe 1994) and was in charge of taking orders. One day the phone rang and I took a special order from a company I had never heard of before--Amazon.com. I went into the other office and asked my co-worker if she had ever heard of them. She said, "No. And make sure you get pre-payment from them with a credit card. All first-time orders need to be prepaid."

I got back on the phone and asked the woman for the credit card number, which she gave with no hesitation. I asked for the name on the card and she said: "Jeffrey Bezos."

True story.