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.
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.
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.
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.
Every once in awhile I’ll see a long line of Amazon delivery vehicles go by. Makes me wonder what that is all about.
I’m old enough to remember when Amazon was just a river in South America…
I remember email on bitnet taking 5 minutes to travel from the midwest to upstate new york. Every node it passed through gave you a report of its progress. This was 1987.
I also remember dating someone in the mid 1990’s and telling her I altavista’ed her. She said the same to me. Back then if you said you checked someone out on the internet you were considered a stalker but it was ok as we were both geeks.
I had a 12 baud modem with a turbo boost up to 14bauds.
Remember Netscape trying to sue Microsoft over the browser included in the OS and I think they won. Where is netscape? The window into the world wasn’t important, the world was important.