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I'm not a conspiracy theorist but....

#81
ElectroVibe said:
When I first got online (AOL) in the early 90's I used to hear horror stories about the early days of internet. Compuserve. Prodigy. Supposedly it was just like a bunch of ads everywhere.
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I don't really remember it that way at all. In fact, it wasn't until 1994 that the first retail transaction was conducted online.

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Prior to that the internet wasn't about selling you stuff it was about information, gaming and communication. Computer companies back then would usually include a 1-800 number for ordering. Some $60 billion in commerce was conducted over the phone 25 years ago.

To quote ComputerWorld, the internet in the early 1990's was “decidedly uncommercial.” Advertising and the use of advertising dollars, back then were no where near as prevalent or pernicious as they are today.

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#82
Spupilup said:
I don't really remember it that way at all. In fact, it wasn't until 1994 that the first retail transaction was conducted online.

Invalid Link Removed

Prior to that the internet wasn't about selling you stuff it was about information, gaming and communication. Computer companies back then would usually include a 1-800 number for ordering. Some $60 billion in commerce was conducted over the phone 25 years ago.

To quote ComputerWorld, the internet in the early 1990's was “decidedly uncommercial.” Advertising and the use of advertising dollars, back then were no where near as prevalent or pernicious as they are today.

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
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In that timeframe, for most people the internet was too effing slow to support ads along with any information you were trying to get. Ads, clickbait garbage, etc would have pissed people off more than they do now.
 
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#83
gln1955 said:
In that timeframe, for most people the internet was too effing slow to support ads along with any information you were trying to get. Ads, clickbait garbage, etc would have pissed people off more than they do now.
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I started selling vintage tubes and audio gear on eBay back in 1999. I remember bidding on and winning auctions for items that didn't even have pictures! I had to buy a digital camera so I could post photos and was never more happy to have an Apple computer to make things a little easier.

I started buying online around 1995 so by 1999 I was pretty comfortable about online transactions from sellers that couldn't post digital pictures.

You are so right about dial up connections being so slow that any kind of ad using images would take forever to load. It was that way with a lot of images back in the early days of eBay. I'll also say this, I don't think eBay ever had an idea of how large an online entity it would become. Back in the early days it was such a modest site that no one could have ever believed it would be the worldwide behemoth it is.

I think that sociopath, Bezos, back in the day, was unique in his vision of "owning" online retailing at the direct cost of brick and mortar stores, on a worldwide level. His motivation was to dominate marketshare regardless of whether it was initially profitable. As he established his monopoly, the cost of achieving it would be paid off.
 
#84
Needless to say, I won't spend a penny on an Amazon website and cringe when I learn AWS has anything to do with my online activity. It also kills me that so much of our tax dollars go to support Amazon, through defense contracts all while Amazon pays virtually nothing in the way of corporate taxes.
 
#88
gln1955 said:
In that timeframe, for most people the internet was too effing slow to support ads along with any information you were trying to get. Ads, clickbait garbage, etc would have pissed people off more than they do now.
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I wonder if it could have been like a MINOR foreshadowing of what we have today. Obviously I don't think the early internet could have been anything like today. And also, I wonder if this was the first "graphic" form of internet, which had existed for years in a text/command-line form.
 

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