The History of the Web

Charles Stack is direct, often plainspoken. He’s worked on several different Internet related projects. The details of user interaction matter to him. Empathy for one’s customers, he once said, can be an incredible asset for an entrepreneur.

In the early 1990’s, when Stack looked at the possibility of a network, he saw a bookstore. “My dream was to have a bookstore that had every book ever published. To feed my own habit,” he said not much later. In 1992, he built a bookstore called Book Stacks Unlimited into a Bulletin Board System. And he paid attention to the details, creating a destination for purchasing books that was friendly and welcoming.

Charles Stack wanted to empathize with his customers. When the BBS service launched, he sat at his terminal and watched his first customer try it out. It felt like it was taking a while, and the person couldn’t find what they needed. Stack had to understand what was wrong so he could fix it. He interjected, and asked what he could do to help, even telling them that they were first to use the service. The customer began writing back:

A…s… … a… … b…l…i…n…d… … p…e…r…s…o…n…

That’s when Stack realized that networks, and later the Internet and the web, wouldn’t simply give shoppers somewhere new to find something they needed. It would give entirely new shoppers a way to find something they never thought they’d have access to. It was an idea that fueled what would eventually become ecommerce.

Networks and shopping, before the web

Michael Aldrich is often credited as the first person to test commerce between networked devices. In 1972, he made use of a novel telecom system Britain known as videotrex. Simplifying the technology somewhat, videotrex hooked a television to a phone line. Aldrich used that system to design an interface for people to browse their local supermarket, an idea he reportedly came to from his own disdain for weekly supermarket trips.

The first person to use Aldrich’s videotrex system wasn’t quite who you’d expect. In May of 1984, the BBC broadcast live as Jane Snowball, a 72 year old grandmother, placed the first network connected order to her local Tesco. Snowball had difficulty getting to the store, and it was a great relief to be able to order things through her television. A decade earlier, Aldrich came to the same conclusion as Stack. Online shopping had the potential to reach people at the periphery of a typical shopping experience.

In France, the telecom company Mintel had a much broader goal. Mintel was a full service network, something like an early Compuserve or AOL. As one exectuive put it, its “aim was to computerise French society and ensure France’s technological independence.” Mintel had forums, games, magazines, and chat feeds. But its most novel innovation was online shopping and payments built right in.

Like other experiments, Mintel’s widest customer base also came from the fringes, in a different way. Using the payment and subscription systems available, quite a few pornography magazine and sites popped up on the network, and became immensely popular.

Even at the beginning, networked shopping didn’t simply replicate physical shopping. It became something else. It created new customers for new services. In the United States, the first recorded transaction on ARPAnet, which would later become the Internet, was between two college students purchasing marijuiana. One of the first major ecommerce companies in the US sold specialized computer parts and used computers to tech savvy customers.

Stories like this abound in the 80’s and early 90’s. Ecommerce didn’t start in the mainstream, it created something entirely new alongside it. But the web would bring it fully to the surface.

Ecommerce on the Web

As the web gathered momentum in the early 1990’s, it came into a world already primed for online shopping. The word ecommerce, a shortening of electronic commerce, was already in widespread use.

1994 was a turning point.

It was that year that a Pizza Hut in Santa Cruz, California began selling its pizzas online. Dubbed PizzaNet, the website gave local area customers the option to order pizzas for delivery using a stylish new interface that let them pick out toppings and preferences. It was quite possibly the first thing ever sold on the web.

Much like the experiments before it, the service remained very much on the edges of adoption, a small subset of the Santa Cruz public who were both pizza lovers and early web adopters. Even so, payments were still collected on delivery, sidestepping the more complicated issue of collecting credit card names through the web.

Two other companies were already working on that issue. Before 1994 was over, both NetMarket and Internet Shopping Network rolled out specialized software that encrypted and transmitted sensitive information, like credit cards. The technology is interesting, and I plan on coming back to in a future post, but it still required users to be extremely tech savvy. There was software to be downloaded and hooked up to the browser, and the first version only worked on Unix machines. Not exactly a very big market.

By the end of the year, Charles Stack brought Book Stacks Unlimited to the web, launching on books.com (Stack had also purchased over a dozen other high profile domain names, such as movies.com and cleveland.com, which he would slowly sell off). Books.com was the next iteration of what Stack had already developed on other Internet and network connected systems, but it had greatly expanded. The site had hundreds of thousands of titles to browse through, many obscure and hide to find in other places. The interface was friendly, clean and searchable.

Book Stacks Unlimited was launched right at the moment of transition for ecommerce. Netscape had finally added proper encryption to their new browser Navigator in the form of SSL, which baked secure credit card transactions right in, without the need for special software. The web itself was gaining more and more popularity.

The first people that came to Book Stacks Unlimited were likely looking for something rare. Or they had specific needs that prevented them from comfortably browsing in-person stores. Like so many shopping experiences that had come before it, Book Stacks Unlimited had a wide market, but it certainly wasn’t mainstream to start.

In 1995, that changed. It started with Netscape’s new browser which added SSL, an encryption protocol baked right in. And there were the secure credit card payments everyone had been waiting for. No specialized software, just go to a webpage and click “Checkout.”

Not long after, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com with a much larger ambition to push ecommerce into everyday use by the public. For the first few years, Amazon would geuinely compete with Book Stacks Unlimited, before fully separating itself. In 1999, Amazon unveiled it’s “1-click” service, making transactions even easier than beofre. By the end of 1995, AuctionWeb also launched, soon to be renamed to eBay. Among many other things, eBay would later bring along PayPal, providing an even more consistent interface for online shopping.

By the time the 1990’s came to a close, a newly online public was ready for their ecommerce experience. Upstarts like Zappos Newegg were joined by their brick and mortar competitors, like Walmart and Best Buy. Shopping on the web became normal to most people, and dot-com would become a point of pride that would lead to a boom, and subsequent bust, in the tech world.