12 ms·

Amazon.com Homepage (1999)

KoftaBob 5y ago
“ Also, since this is very possibly the worst five-year period in history not to have equity ownership, you should know that compensation for all of our openings includes stock options.” Pretty amusing seeing this on their careers page, considering this was 1999.
ziggus 5y ago
I recall seeing a talk given by Jeff Bezos years ago at some university where he described the early versions of the Amazon web site. One of the more interesting bugs was one that allowed a customer to enter a negative quantity of items to order, which meant that Amazon would credit your account and wait for you to send them the books. I think it's fixed now.
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  There were web stores in the early 90s where the price of an item was contained within a hidden form field and not verified when you added it to your cart, allowing you to buy things for arbitrary prices, or sometimes zero.
  - InefficientRed 5y ago
    Browser based games were another wild west. The basic move was to post something mildly controversial in your "profile page" -- which often used the MySpace style of "whatever HTML you want" -- along with a cookie logger. Then be obnoxius in chat/forums. Pretty soon, an admin would visit your profile to check out the offending content and ban your account. In the process, they would give you their admin cookie. I was a dev/admin for a few of these browser-based games and would also poke at other people's games, so I was saw both sides of the arms race. That wild west still exists in browser based games, which were labors of love with large enough user bases to keep the steam going but not commercially viable enough to justify any sort of actual investment. There are still a half dozen or so browser based games running on huge piles of PHP written by middle schoolers and high schoolers in the mid to late 2000s. Many still have XSS and SQL injections lurking in forgotten little corner features.
    - joeframbach 5y ago
      The ones I vaguely remember are AlienAA and Outwar. I can't believe these are still running. I haven't even thought about them in almost 20 years.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    Similar with early PayPal integration. I played a mmorpg for a while and figured out that when buying credits and they sent the request to PayPal it was a post. Using Firefox tamper data I would modify the request to submit $1 and on return set it to $20. Had a similar hack occur on a clients website at work. They sold flowers I think, and gift cards. But the max value was like $30 and we got gift cards for $100/$1000 but they only paid $1. I wasn’t invoked in that bug report but I suspect it was a similar issue. The good old days.
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    My university's webstore has this exact flaw even today
  - TowerTall 5y ago
    I gave my sister a very nice upgrade on her first internet connection 25 years ago when the order form with the ISP had that the same feature. You could change the speed on any plans they offered. Ordered the cheapest plan but changed the form hidden speed field to maximum. It worked perfectly for many years without us ever being contacted by the ISP regarding this.
- nlawalker 5y ago
  > wait for you to send them the books I think the story was that in the really early days, orders were fulfilled by hand by humans looking at a screen or a printed page. No one was expecting to see a negative value, so in the fast-paced fulfillment workflow, the negative sign was missed or interpreted as a separator. Your account would get credited and you'd receive a book!
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    False version. The negative quantity part was partially true, but it didn't result in you getting a book. Source: guy that wrote the code.
    - hasmolo 5y ago
      this is great, i hope you don't have to work anymore!
    - xtracto 5y ago
      Thanks for JACK, Ardour and all your work in open source through the years :) > I was the 2nd programmer at Amazon, Shit... I seriously hope you got some equity haha. Right place, right time.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
        I got enough to be able to not work for 10 years, and stayed home to raise my daughter. That was worth far more to me than the US$5B or so my stock would have been worth today, or the even larger valuation had I not left after 14 months. It's been a good life, and I'm infinitely prouder of Ardour than anything I ever did at Amazon.
- bluedino 5y ago
  A couple years ago I had a user report a bug where they couldn't remove items from their cart. I couldn't reproduce it. Hopped on a WebEx, and they were trying to add -1 of the item to their cart. I understood how they thought it could work, but can't recall a site where it actually worked that way.
johncessna 5y ago
Amazon gave everyone in my school 100 dollars to spend on the store. Most people thought it was a scam, but I gave it a shot. I still have that 19" CRT TV I got for ~50 bucks out of pocket.
- amelius 5y ago
  Was that part of some kind of growth hack?
- yumraj 5y ago
  I'm more curious/surprised about the fact that you still have a 19" CRT TV ..
  - laumars 5y ago
    Why is that a surprise? I still have my old childhood 15” CRT and in fact still regularly use it to play old games consoles. The picture looks as good as the day I bought it so why would I throw it away?
    - KptMarchewa 5y ago
      Because it didn't look good at the day, even if it was state of the art.
      - OGWhales 5y ago
        For old game consoles, CRTs can actually look better than a modern day LCD. Edit: https://imgur.com/a/JGr57WE https://imgur.com/a/JGr57WE
      - fourteenfour 5y ago
        Games then were designed to be displayed on CRTs.
      - laumars 5y ago
        That’s oxymoronic. It clearly looked good when it was state of the art, it is only when compared to more modern technologies that CRTs look bad. But even by modern standards, CRTs are widely considered better looking for games. Not just retro consoles where the sprites were designed to take advantage of the blurring effect (thus using the limitations of the display to create new colours and emulate alpha blending) but also many modern gamers are starting to see the appeal of CRTs too because it means they can run their games at lower resolutions without them looking pixelated and turn all the rendering effects up to max.
edf13 5y ago
We read a lot more text on a homepage back then… we had a lot more patience
- itisit 5y ago
  Quite the contrary, we didn't like waiting for image-heavy sites to load.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  That led me to ask “when did tl;dr get coined?” and it seems likely after 1999. https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how-do-you-use-it/amp/ https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how... claims early 2000s
  - mhink 5y ago
    Really?! I'm actually kinda surprised, I would have guessed it's a much more recent abbreviation than that. I think I only started seeing it around 2010 or so.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      "tl;dr" was around when I hung out on LiveJournal, so definitely pre-2010. This would have been around '01-'06.
  - shitloadofbooks 5y ago
    Anecdotally I remember first encountering it on the Something Awful forums. I always assumed it originated there (like lots of stuff did in the early 2000s).
- throwaway48292 5y ago
  There was more of a time penalty for clicking to different pages, now it doesn't matter if you "waste" page loads
- bluedino 5y ago
  Remember all the text that used to be in 1980's magazine ads?
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
this was back when the whole website was written in perl
- PherricOxide 5y ago
  20 years later, only 60% of the website is written in Perl!
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  The website was NEVER written in Perl. Source: guy that wrote the code.
  - VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
    I heard it was written in perl
    - donflamenco 5y ago
      The guy you are replying to was employee 2 or 3 depending on how you count at Amazon. There was a ton of various scripts written in perl that kept everything running for sure. The website code was C/C++ as mentioned elsewhere.
    - jrauser 5y ago
      In 1999, front end templates were written in an internally developed macro language named catsubst and served by a C (maybe C++?) application named Obidos. Later (starting in 2003-ish), front end code was written in Perl (Mason) and served by another application named Gurupa. The transition to Gurupa was very long and arduous. I've no idea how the site works now.
      - joeframbach 5y ago
        The transition from Gurupa to Java (Spring, Horizonte) was long and arduous. If you see a page with /b/ in the url, that's Gurupa.
      - 5y ago
gigatexal 5y ago
somehow this version seems better, more inviting, more intuitive than the current one... is something broken in me?
Joeboy 5y ago
The weird thing about the current homepage (at least the version I see in the UK) is it shows me lots of pictures of products, but without any description. So I just see lots of eg. grey cuboids with buttons and lights. Do they expect me to click on them all to work out what they are?
jmkd 5y ago
I genuinely love that today I can see every single order I've made since 1998, with links to the same product pages. This feels really unusual. I'm sure countless internal systems and storage changed since then but all the orders are accurate with working links and start to provide amazing historical insight into what I used to consider important enough to buy. I can't tell you anything I bought in a physical store in 1998, 1999, etc.
- ryantgtg 5y ago
  You can’t even see that on Ebay. The purchase history is only two years (which really annoys me).
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    Ebay is a dumpster fire of a website. I can't think of a more user hostile experience, aside from those websites that actively advertise to be user hostile, e.g. https://userinyerface.com/game.html https://userinyerface.com/game.html
    - luckman212 5y ago
      Yesterday, after painstakingly creating an auction listing, fighting with eBay's terrible UI, fiddly buttons and Byzantine listing form, getting the pictures in the correct format (no HEIC, and nothing over 12MB!!) and agreeing to their usurious fees, I was finally ready and hit the Submit button...only to be greeted by an endless spinner. After waiting about 4 minutes, I decided to refresh the page. Poof - the entire listing was gone. Title, descriptions, pictures, all of the fiddly bits. This led to the dinner discussion with my wife: Why hasn't eBay been disrupted yet? Is the online auction business so terrible that not a single entity dare challenge them? I remember thinking the same thing like 15 years ago, yet here we are in the exact same place.
      - ryantgtg 5y ago
        I buy on ebay all the time and personally I think it’s fine. The site is essentially like amazon (for my use) except you actually see a picture of the exact item. I buy a lot of used kids books. On Amazon you can’t see the used books beforehand! And every book I buy is a “buy it now”. I rarely sell on it. Have you tried to sell on Amazon? Last time I did was about 6 years ago (with my own products, so I had to create items), and it was a horrible experience. I couldn’t believe what a pile of crap it was (compare it with etsy, which is pretty smooth aside from bizarre shipping settings).
u2077 5y ago
I find their privacy policy interesting. Wonder if never@amazon.com still works. https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/policy/privacy.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com...
elwell 5y ago
View Source reveals glorious image maps and tables.
- codazoda 5y ago
  Oh, image maps. Those I had forgotten about.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
akulkarni 5y ago
This made me chuckle. Man, what a time capsule: Ready to challenge reality? Take a mind-bending ride through an alternate universe with The Matrix. And on DVD, this year's coolest thriller looks even gnarlier. Get ready to follow the white rabbit.

“ Also, since this is very possibly the worst five-year period in history not to have equity ownership, you should know that compensation for all of our openings includes stock options.” Pretty amusing seeing this on their careers page, considering this was 1999.

ziggus 5y ago

I recall seeing a talk given by Jeff Bezos years ago at some university where he described the early versions of the Amazon web site. One of the more interesting bugs was one that allowed a customer to enter a negative quantity of items to order, which meant that Amazon would credit your account and wait for you to send them the books. I think it's fixed now.

LeoPanthera 5y ago
There were web stores in the early 90s where the price of an item was contained within a hidden form field and not verified when you added it to your cart, allowing you to buy things for arbitrary prices, or sometimes zero.
- InefficientRed 5y ago
  Browser based games were another wild west. The basic move was to post something mildly controversial in your "profile page" -- which often used the MySpace style of "whatever HTML you want" -- along with a cookie logger. Then be obnoxius in chat/forums. Pretty soon, an admin would visit your profile to check out the offending content and ban your account. In the process, they would give you their admin cookie. I was a dev/admin for a few of these browser-based games and would also poke at other people's games, so I was saw both sides of the arms race. That wild west still exists in browser based games, which were labors of love with large enough user bases to keep the steam going but not commercially viable enough to justify any sort of actual investment. There are still a half dozen or so browser based games running on huge piles of PHP written by middle schoolers and high schoolers in the mid to late 2000s. Many still have XSS and SQL injections lurking in forgotten little corner features.
  - joeframbach 5y ago
    The ones I vaguely remember are AlienAA and Outwar. I can't believe these are still running. I haven't even thought about them in almost 20 years.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Similar with early PayPal integration. I played a mmorpg for a while and figured out that when buying credits and they sent the request to PayPal it was a post. Using Firefox tamper data I would modify the request to submit $1 and on return set it to $20. Had a similar hack occur on a clients website at work. They sold flowers I think, and gift cards. But the max value was like $30 and we got gift cards for $100/$1000 but they only paid $1. I wasn’t invoked in that bug report but I suspect it was a similar issue. The good old days.
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  My university's webstore has this exact flaw even today
- TowerTall 5y ago
  I gave my sister a very nice upgrade on her first internet connection 25 years ago when the order form with the ISP had that the same feature. You could change the speed on any plans they offered. Ordered the cheapest plan but changed the form hidden speed field to maximum. It worked perfectly for many years without us ever being contacted by the ISP regarding this.
nlawalker 5y ago
> wait for you to send them the books I think the story was that in the really early days, orders were fulfilled by hand by humans looking at a screen or a printed page. No one was expecting to see a negative value, so in the fast-paced fulfillment workflow, the negative sign was missed or interpreted as a separator. Your account would get credited and you'd receive a book!
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  False version. The negative quantity part was partially true, but it didn't result in you getting a book. Source: guy that wrote the code.
  - hasmolo 5y ago
    this is great, i hope you don't have to work anymore!
  - xtracto 5y ago
    Thanks for JACK, Ardour and all your work in open source through the years :) > I was the 2nd programmer at Amazon, Shit... I seriously hope you got some equity haha. Right place, right time.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I got enough to be able to not work for 10 years, and stayed home to raise my daughter. That was worth far more to me than the US$5B or so my stock would have been worth today, or the even larger valuation had I not left after 14 months. It's been a good life, and I'm infinitely prouder of Ardour than anything I ever did at Amazon.
bluedino 5y ago
A couple years ago I had a user report a bug where they couldn't remove items from their cart. I couldn't reproduce it. Hopped on a WebEx, and they were trying to add -1 of the item to their cart. I understood how they thought it could work, but can't recall a site where it actually worked that way.

johncessna 5y ago

Amazon gave everyone in my school 100 dollars to spend on the store. Most people thought it was a scam, but I gave it a shot. I still have that 19" CRT TV I got for ~50 bucks out of pocket.

amelius 5y ago
Was that part of some kind of growth hack?
yumraj 5y ago
I'm more curious/surprised about the fact that you still have a 19" CRT TV ..
- laumars 5y ago
  Why is that a surprise? I still have my old childhood 15” CRT and in fact still regularly use it to play old games consoles. The picture looks as good as the day I bought it so why would I throw it away?
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    Because it didn't look good at the day, even if it was state of the art.
    - OGWhales 5y ago
      For old game consoles, CRTs can actually look better than a modern day LCD. Edit: https://imgur.com/a/JGr57WE https://imgur.com/a/JGr57WE
    - fourteenfour 5y ago
      Games then were designed to be displayed on CRTs.
    - laumars 5y ago
      That’s oxymoronic. It clearly looked good when it was state of the art, it is only when compared to more modern technologies that CRTs look bad. But even by modern standards, CRTs are widely considered better looking for games. Not just retro consoles where the sprites were designed to take advantage of the blurring effect (thus using the limitations of the display to create new colours and emulate alpha blending) but also many modern gamers are starting to see the appeal of CRTs too because it means they can run their games at lower resolutions without them looking pixelated and turn all the rendering effects up to max.

edf13 5y ago

We read a lot more text on a homepage back then… we had a lot more patience

itisit 5y ago
Quite the contrary, we didn't like waiting for image-heavy sites to load.
sokoloff 5y ago
That led me to ask “when did tl;dr get coined?” and it seems likely after 1999. https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how-do-you-use-it/amp/ https://www.howtogeek.com/435266/what-does-tldr-mean-and-how... claims early 2000s
- mhink 5y ago
  Really?! I'm actually kinda surprised, I would have guessed it's a much more recent abbreviation than that. I think I only started seeing it around 2010 or so.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    "tl;dr" was around when I hung out on LiveJournal, so definitely pre-2010. This would have been around '01-'06.
- shitloadofbooks 5y ago
  Anecdotally I remember first encountering it on the Something Awful forums. I always assumed it originated there (like lots of stuff did in the early 2000s).
throwaway48292 5y ago
There was more of a time penalty for clicking to different pages, now it doesn't matter if you "waste" page loads
bluedino 5y ago
Remember all the text that used to be in 1980's magazine ads?

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

this was back when the whole website was written in perl

PherricOxide 5y ago
20 years later, only 60% of the website is written in Perl!
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
The website was NEVER written in Perl. Source: guy that wrote the code.
- VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
  I heard it was written in perl
  - donflamenco 5y ago
    The guy you are replying to was employee 2 or 3 depending on how you count at Amazon. There was a ton of various scripts written in perl that kept everything running for sure. The website code was C/C++ as mentioned elsewhere.
  - jrauser 5y ago
    In 1999, front end templates were written in an internally developed macro language named catsubst and served by a C (maybe C++?) application named Obidos. Later (starting in 2003-ish), front end code was written in Perl (Mason) and served by another application named Gurupa. The transition to Gurupa was very long and arduous. I've no idea how the site works now.
    - joeframbach 5y ago
      The transition from Gurupa to Java (Spring, Horizonte) was long and arduous. If you see a page with /b/ in the url, that's Gurupa.
    - 5y ago

gigatexal 5y ago

somehow this version seems better, more inviting, more intuitive than the current one... is something broken in me?

Joeboy 5y ago

The weird thing about the current homepage (at least the version I see in the UK) is it shows me lots of pictures of products, but without any description. So I just see lots of eg. grey cuboids with buttons and lights. Do they expect me to click on them all to work out what they are?

jmkd 5y ago

I genuinely love that today I can see every single order I've made since 1998, with links to the same product pages. This feels really unusual. I'm sure countless internal systems and storage changed since then but all the orders are accurate with working links and start to provide amazing historical insight into what I used to consider important enough to buy. I can't tell you anything I bought in a physical store in 1998, 1999, etc.

ryantgtg 5y ago
You can’t even see that on Ebay. The purchase history is only two years (which really annoys me).
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  Ebay is a dumpster fire of a website. I can't think of a more user hostile experience, aside from those websites that actively advertise to be user hostile, e.g. https://userinyerface.com/game.html https://userinyerface.com/game.html
  - luckman212 5y ago
    Yesterday, after painstakingly creating an auction listing, fighting with eBay's terrible UI, fiddly buttons and Byzantine listing form, getting the pictures in the correct format (no HEIC, and nothing over 12MB!!) and agreeing to their usurious fees, I was finally ready and hit the Submit button...only to be greeted by an endless spinner. After waiting about 4 minutes, I decided to refresh the page. Poof - the entire listing was gone. Title, descriptions, pictures, all of the fiddly bits. This led to the dinner discussion with my wife: Why hasn't eBay been disrupted yet? Is the online auction business so terrible that not a single entity dare challenge them? I remember thinking the same thing like 15 years ago, yet here we are in the exact same place.
    - ryantgtg 5y ago
      I buy on ebay all the time and personally I think it’s fine. The site is essentially like amazon (for my use) except you actually see a picture of the exact item. I buy a lot of used kids books. On Amazon you can’t see the used books beforehand! And every book I buy is a “buy it now”. I rarely sell on it. Have you tried to sell on Amazon? Last time I did was about 6 years ago (with my own products, so I had to create items), and it was a horrible experience. I couldn’t believe what a pile of crap it was (compare it with etsy, which is pretty smooth aside from bizarre shipping settings).

u2077 5y ago

I find their privacy policy interesting. Wonder if never@amazon.com still works. https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/policy/privacy.html https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com...

elwell 5y ago

View Source reveals glorious image maps and tables.

codazoda 5y ago
Oh, image maps. Those I had forgotten about.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

akulkarni 5y ago

This made me chuckle. Man, what a time capsule: Ready to challenge reality? Take a mind-bending ride through an alternate universe with The Matrix. And on DVD, this year's coolest thriller looks even gnarlier. Get ready to follow the white rabbit.