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A lot of people don't know that before Amazon started, there was a company out of Portland, OR called Bookstacks selling books via a telnet interface. In the ea
by PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
A lot of people don't know that before Amazon started, there was a company out of Portland, OR called Bookstacks selling books via a telnet interface. In the early days, Bezos was quite worried about their potential to get "there" first (wherever "there" was going to be). It was a fairly cool interface, at least for 1994.
[ EDIT: worried to the point that we actually implemented a telnet version of the store in parallel with the http/html one for a few months before abandoning it ]
- mleo 3y agoThere were a few using telnet before the web gained wider traction. For example, CDNow started out that way in 1994.
- brk 3y agoI remember ordering a CD via CDNow and a very rudimentary SMS interface on my phone around 1996. It took about 10 minutes to go through the entire process, but I did it while at the movies with my wife, waiting for the previews to start and we both thought it was just SO advanced.
- keepamovin 3y agoThat is an epically cool story from the early days of the Internet / web. Thanks for sharing!
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoA brief reminder that SMS has nothing to do with the internet (TCP/IP) or the web (HTTP).
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoNetflix also was founded in 2007, not 1997.
- obruchez 3y agoThat's how I ordered my first CDs online: via a Telnet interface. It sounds crazy 30 years later.
- kloch 3y agoI bought a CD from CDNOW over Telnet in the early 90's! I also remember telnet BBS's became popular for a few years when I was in college 91-93.
- simantel 3y agoDo you have more info? I found this article[0] about "Book Stacks" which became Books.com, but it looks like they were based in Cleveland? [0] https://sbnonline.com/article/visionary-in-obscurity-charles-stack-operates-in-two-business-communities-151-cleveland-and-the-internet-151-and-isn-146-t-well-known-in-either-this-time-around-that-146-s-going-to-change-he-hopes/ https://sbnonline.com/article/visionary-in-obscurity-charles...
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoYes, books.com was based in Ohio. I bought from them via the mentioned telnet interface.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoMore info is: I was wrong, Ohio is right.
- newsclues 3y agoA large bookstore was using CLI for their internal inventory management system well into the 2000s.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoamzn was likely doing that too. the original tools that we wrote in 94-96 for store ops were all CLI.
- ahazred8ta 3y agoYes, they were the original books.com, and I used to buy from them via telnet before they had their www site up.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago> selling books via a telnet interface. Were people just that trusting back then, or had they figured out some kind of pre-SSL way of securing things?
- __s 3y agoIn terms of MITM attacks, yes, they were trusting Even back in 2010 lots of sites were http, like Facebook, & there was FireSheep which would snoop on public wifi for people logging into sites over HTTP
- SoftTalker 3y agoIn 1994? Most of the internet was unencrypted, and it wasn't very commercial yet. https had just been invented, and ssh was a year away. There was no wifi, everything was dial-up unless you were at a university or something, and snooping just wasn't all that big a risk.
- hultner 3y agoI can only talk from personal experience I did not trust most online payments around the turn of the millennium, but I did order quite a few things online. I usually payed either by collect on delivery or by invoice like regular good old fashioned mail-order, or by the early 00s VISA had something called e-card or similar, where you could generate a temporary one time use CC via a Java applet, this card was only valid for a day and could only be charged by a pre-determined amount, making the risk very low.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWe were aware of this in the earliest days of amzn, and included a phone-in payment option to try to deal with this reluctance. It was rarely, rarely used.