It would take hours just to send a simple email. But it turns out that from the moment the internet was started, there was one thing people made sure it could do: Sell weed. According to several researchers, the first thing that was ever bought and sold over the internet was marijuana. Here is a quote from the book:. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.
Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana. Trading partners could transfer orders, invoices, and other business transactions using a data format that met the ANSI ASC X12 , the predominant set of standards in North America for inter-industry electronic exchange.
EDI allowed the transfer of data seamlessly without any human intervention. It was apparent from the beginning that these early advancements would make B2B online shopping commercially lucrative. In , France launched Minitel , an online service that used a Videotex terminal machine accessed through telephone lines. The Minitel was free to telephone subscribers and connected millions of users to a computing network. By , over 7 million homes had Minitel terminals. The Minitel system was popular before falling out of favor after the success of the internet three years later.
That same year, Berners-Lee created the first web server and wrote the first web browser. Shortly thereafter, he went on to debut the web on August 6, as a publicly-available service on the Internet. In , the National Science Foundation lifted its restrictions on commercial use of the NET, causing online shopping to grow exponentially.
In September , the NSF began charging a fee for registering domain names. The number of domain names quickly grew to two million by From the beginning, there were many concerns over the safety of online shopping. However, the development of a security protocol, Secure Socket Layers SSL —an encryption certificate created by Netscape in , provided a safe means to transmit data over the internet. Web browsers were able to identify whether a site had an authenticated SSL and, based on that, determine whether or not a site could be trusted.
Now, SSL encryption protocol is a vital part of web security, and version 3. In the mids, there were major advancements in the commercial use of the Internet. One of the first ecommerce sites was Amazon, which started in as an online bookstore but grew to become the largest online retailer in the world.
Traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores were limited to about , titles. Amazon, being an online only store without physical limitations, was able to offer exponentially more products to the shopper. The retail giant was one of the first online retailers to add user reviews and a rating scale for their products. Product reviews are now considered one of the most effective tactics for driving sales and building customer trust.
The late s also saw new ecommerce platform options for merchants. In , Amazon launched Amazon Prime, a membership offering free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States on all eligible purchases for a flat annual fee. So depending how you slice it, the first internet transaction could have involved pizza, weed, a CD or computer parts. Of course, now the online shopper can get any of these - though the rock music would probably come in a different format.
Marissa Fessenden is a freelance science writer and artist who appreciates small things and wide open spaces.
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