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.
Uphill both ways
Yes the whole earth catalog. Smelling the pacholie
I have a love hate relationship with Amazon. I hate their politics, but I find if I need stuff I either have to chase between stores rarely finding what I wanted, spend time searching the online sites for regular stores only to find none in the area have the item I’m looking for in stock or conveniently order from Amazon.
In many ways Amazon has become what Sears Roebuck was 125 years ago when Sears sold everything in their catelogue from whole houses to heroin (prior to the 1909 Food and Drug Act). Brick and mortar stores at the time hated Sears because they sold everything, didn’t pay taxes in the states where they did business and provided lavishly illustrated catelogues for free. Old Sears catalogues even provided reading material and toilet paper for many outhouses.
Interesting that Sears, Wards and other catelogue retailers are long gone, while many of the local brick and mortar stores survived. Amazon will in time meet a similar fate.
>Did the 286 have the math coprocessor.......or was that the 386?
the 386DX had it, the 386SX did not, well it did but it was actually disabled at the factory, crippled as it were so made little sense to get an SX. Sorry to say I actually knew the answer to this one...
Sears wouldn't have even had to deliver. They would have made money hand over fist if you could have just picked up whatever you ordered at the nearest Sears store.
That rings a bell. My first was the 386sx (no math coprocessor). It couldn’t handle fractals. And I was miffed. Before the WWW came along with hot links, it was fun to look at fractals.
I don't think 286s had a built-in coprocessor. With the 386, you could get one with (a 386DX), or without (a 386SX). From what I understand, they were exactly the same chips. They were having QA problems and the coproccessors on a lot of them were failing, so they would disable it, and sell it as an SX.
Lots of Freepers remember the internet in its early days. For myself, I recall gopher sites, and the archie, jughead, and veronica search engines.
I remember cursing when someone would call and kick me off the internet
I rememember not too long ago dialing webex and it was websex...oops. interesting mistake.
Yeah I try to give brick and mortar stores a chance but half the time you get nothing in stock or some useless employee with a bad attitude. Amazon has given me time back.
That is different than Books in Print. Amazon didn't stock or sell those out of print titles, they just helped process the transaction.
And used bookstores used to network to locate out of print titles in the pre-WWW days
Bookfinder.com works best today
Yes...remember these days as well. Also all of the “signs” and “reports” it was going to go out of business and go belly up and the stock prices being in the single digits and not a safe bet to buy...wish I had bought at least a few shares of it back then...
I remember when getting a color TV was a big deal.
I got early retirement in the later 1990’s.
The first year I read books from the library, bought a few and ran into the left wing book stores staffed by hostile gays of both/? sexes.
They refused to carry any conservative books by Limbaugh, Sowell and ???? or any hunting/fishing books or magazines.
I fly fished and still hunted and had sons who hunted and fly fished. These left wing book stores refused to carry magazines and books dealing with violent fishing and hunting articles. If you subscribed to magazines, about 5% of the articles dealt with fishing and hunting on the West coast.
A SIL living in the midwest and as a conservative had to drive a couple of hours to get to a book store, and she ran into the same B$. All of the males in her family fished and hunted, and most book stores made you order those books and pay extra for delivery.
She and one of my conservative sibling sisters both discovered Amazon and got me using it in the late 1990’s.
We use it all the time for basically everything, we use in our life, Since the Covid B$
Thanks. I remember the bulletin boards. I also remember a short-lived browser called “Cello”. I remember being a beta-tester for different servers. I remember hearing about Archie and Veronica but never used them. Way early on there was something having to do with “coke machine”, but in those days the computers communicating with each other were mainly used in college computer labs.
Now they ban books.
Koopman’s interpretation of the cantatas is hands down the best one out there. Some amazing musicians and vocalists on those recordings.
In 1993, I found a cheap intel 286 computer running DOS to compile my c and c++ code. I would command line to compile, then come back in 20 minutes to check results.
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