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.
Happened to me when I mistyped “www.shareware.com”
And having a 56K modem was the schizzle.
Same here. It was time to renew my account on February. So I cancelled it. Too bad because i enjoyed watching shows and movies on Prime.
Thank you. Yes, the computer history is recent. My friend who worked at Apple in 1984 said they wore suits everyday. When the office took a weekend trip to Disneyland, he said the Apple workers walked around the park in suits. Thankfully, Levi’s invented Dockers (1986) to help computer workers get out of suits. Further, I remember in early 1990’s how getting fired was the only way to get a vacation in the computer industry. Further, I remember in 1986 saving for a Dell computer with 50hz of power. Further, I remember walking into the Elephant Bar in Burlingame on Friday nights in 1995 and there would be about thirty young ladies wearing black dresses lined up from the front door to the front desk. Yes, they were waiting for a wealthy, single computer guy to walk in and need a date. Further, I remember talking to the guy who led the crew who made MAC OS 7 and I was just impressed as he was with Aliases, Clicking a window twice to open it and other cool features. Further, I remember a talk by Mr. Tim B. Lee where he said that he regrets making the long phrase “World Wide Web” but could not think of a shorter phrase. Further I remember the first thing I saw on the internet: pictures from Mars in 1994. The nice thing about Amazon is how it keeps a record of all my purchases going back many years. For sure, Free Republic is part of the early history of computing.
Things really took off in 2018, when net income leaped from $3,033MM to $10,073MM on the strength of (as you noted) third-party service revenue growth of about $11bn, followed by subscription service revenue growth of $4.4bn. That helped North American operating income explode from $2.8bn to $7.3bn.
It must be acknowledged, however, how important AWS is to Amazon's bottom line. While the operating profit for North America and AWS were almost equal in 2018, by 2020 AWS's operating income was 56% higher than that from North America.
I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon's book selling business was a loss-leader nowadays.
I mention that to local vets around here and they don’t believe me... So simple around here :P
Call Wasting
still waiting for the book i ordered back then.
I’m old enough to remember when the Dead Sea was only sick......
They are posting the entire works of Bach on YouTube, including all the cantatas.
Stunningly high quality with both the audio and video.
Me too....................
I’m old enough to remember when MTV played nothing but music videos.
Sam, I’m replying privately. I think you and I have conversed before.
I liked your essay and your noting that Prodigy was one of the early participants in “online services.” I was Director of Planning at Prodigy from 1984-1993. Before that, I was an 11 year executive at Sears with my last assignment in the Planning office and a member of the team that evaluated the joint venture with CBS and IBM.
It was a shame that Sears didn’t do more to embrace and adopt Prodigy’s efforts at online services. After all, Sears was a “distribution success story” and it should have recognized the next revolution in distribution (goods, services, information, and communication). Instead Sears treated Prodigy like a wasteful technology effort. One of Prodigy’s primary goals was to provide its monthly service at flat rate of $10/month, so we designed a national network with the goal of giving members local access at an unlimited rate (no long distance charges). So that meant putting ~30 nodes in the Chicago suburbs and as few as a couple of nodes in Atlanta where the local telephone access allowed that kind of networking. During the start-up phase, we were trying to find a path to breakeven that we could follow to a successful new business for the 3 investors.
IBM was a great asset to the partnership but also a major bureaucracy that we had to deal with. First, we had to be headquartered in White Plains (I moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Weston, CT from where I commuted daily to White Plains).
As Prodigy spread its network nationwide, the capital costs were enormous and the run-rate was crazy. I ran the annual strategic planning process and maintained the “model” projecting near and longer term finances. We were generating around $12/month in subscriber fees and services and $10/month in commercial services like advertising, banking, etc. It was difficult trying to keep IBM from overwhelming the process and dictating the direction (we had about 20 Sears people on staff, mostly in subscriber marketing and my small team in planning and finance; CBS was mostly responsible for content development; the IBM team was about 130 people at the peak if I remember right).
I became very discouraged around early 1993 when I could see that our burn rate was leveling off at around $100MM per year (after the initial $1+ billion of start-up investment and networking) and decided that I didn’t think it would end well and I didn’t want to be around to watch it die. So I took a down-sizing ticket that Prodigy was encouraging. Fortunately for me, shortly after my departure, I had the first physical I had had in over 5 years... my doctor found me “profoundly anemic” and ordered tests to find the source of the anemia... turned out to be esophageal cancer which has about a 5% survival rate. But mine was found early enough and I got sent to Sloan Kettering in NYC and the best surgeon in the world for this cancer. So here I am almost 30 years later still surviving.
I have always felt that Sears senior management could be blamed for being so blind to the potential of online services — by 1997-8, the “world wide web” was coming online and the cost of networking was falling quickly but by then, Sears and CBS were giving up on the venture. I think IBM ended up with the network at pretty much no cost to them (gratis from Sears).
It took me about 2 years to recover from my esophageal cancer before I could get started again in a new career. I had a few more investment and business set-backs. And now I’m nearing retirement after working for my daughter’s conservative think tank (Independent Women’s Forum) for the last 10 years.
So it’s been a wild ride of a career. Very disappointing to watch the huge investment made in Prodigy end in tears.
Best regards,
ReleaseTheHounds
Like you, I relocated to the Southern Connecticut area for my job. I live just a few towns over from Weston, CT so know the area very well. You might be aware you had a famous neighbor by name of Keith Richards.
Anyway, you brought back more memories of the Prodigy Network. I still remember the TOS very well. It was something like $10/mo for the first 20 hours. After that, you would get billed at rate of $3.60/hr!
That initial 20 hours got used up fast, especially when you were using a 2400 bps modem, which was the speed I first connected to Prodigy at. In fact, this 20-hr limit was such a concern for users that we started using special software to download content so we could read it and response to it offline. Then we would go online and upload everything all at once - grab the new stuff and go back offline again.
I used to spend a lot of time on the Prodigy Bulletin Boards and actually the founders of Free Republic were to be found on the Whitewater BB. Jim Robinson used to post to that all the time until he had enough of the censorship there and started this site here.
Some of us used to spend hours transcribing full newspaper articles to that bulletin board and eventually Prodigy started pulling them down due to copyright concerns. But this was an age where most newspapers did not even have a website to link to so the only way to share an article was to manually type the articles in.
I was active on a lot of other non-political bulletin boards like those for classical music and talk radio. In fact, the Internet was still so small back then that many celebrities would post there and reply back to you as well. I remember having personal discussions with local DJs and talk show hosts. Then as the users got larger in number, the nasty people eventually drove them away. But for a short time in the early to mid 1990s, it was a very civil place and people generally behaved themselves.
Again, this was just 25 years ago but might as well be 100 years ago in terms of how much has changed with technology since.
Below is a screenshot of the login screen for Prodigy. I can still remember my logon ID - it was VJDB54A.
Yup. One of the earliest "connected" devices. Someone rigged up a coke machine so it would tell you if it was empty, and the temp if I recall correctly. Why? Because we can!
Back when gopher was a big thing, I used Jughead searches to find cartographic resources (maps) on the net. I probably still have a copy of some of those maps I downloaded way back then. One was a nationwide railroad map from the 1860s or so. What was most interesting about that map, IMO, was that it was almost a 1:1 correlation to modern fiber routes.
UH, no. You aren't. (replying privately, that is)
I was intrigued by most if not all of it, but your bout with Esophageal Cancer seriously touched me. My brother was diagnosed with that malady when he was still 37 years old.
Doctors estimated that he had 7-9 months to live. Seven weeks following he was dead, just 3 weeks following his 38th birthday. That was in the mid 1990s. I have worked in Health Care and encountered several other Patients and the improvements in the Care were remarkable though your 30 year survival does seem quite remarkable.
I would guess that there was some element of Faith and Prayer involved but you did not mention that.
Anyhow, I am happy for you. You are a fortunate person indeed as near as I can tell.
I’m old enough to remember when books were only sold in stores.
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