Amazon.com Homepage (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon.com Homepage (1999)

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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.

You can’t even see that on Ebay. The purchase history is only two years (which really annoys me).

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

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.

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).

Some of the sketchier product pages have changed to a completely different product since I ordered -- and this was for orders less than 10 years old!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My university's webstore has this exact flaw even today

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.

> 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!

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.

this is great, i hope you don't have to work anymore!

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.

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.

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.

I find their privacy policy interesting. Wonder if never@amazon.com still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991012214158/http://amazon.com...

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.

Was that part of some kind of growth hack?

I'm more curious/surprised about the fact that you still have a 19" CRT TV ..

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?

Because it didn't look good at the day, even if it was state of the art.

For old game consoles, CRTs can actually look better than a modern day LCD.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/JGr57WE

Games then were designed to be displayed on CRTs.

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.

Well, it's currently embattled in a domestic dispute and is hiding under some clothes in the basement.

I don't have a great reason for keeping it to be honest. It's probably a dash of the memories it triggers when I look at it, a dash of respect for its ability to have survived multiple moves and 20+ years of not getting thrown away, and a dash of not being an inconvenience to keep around.

It came in handy a few years ago when I was testing the coax cables/attic antenna network I ran in the house. Much easier to carry around than the 50" lcd mounted on the wall.

They are worth $100 now because people use them to play $150 16-bit consoles

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?

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.

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

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... claims early 2000s

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.

"tl;dr" was around when I hung out on LiveJournal, so definitely pre-2010. This would have been around '01-'06.

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).

There was more of a time penalty for clicking to different pages, now it doesn't matter if you "waste" page loads

Remember all the text that used to be in 1980's magazine ads?

Quite the contrary, we didn't like waiting for image-heavy sites to load.

“ 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.

View Source reveals glorious image maps and tables.

Oh, image maps. Those I had forgotten about.

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

this was back when the whole website was written in perl

20 years later, only 60% of the website is written in Perl!

The website was NEVER written in Perl. Source: guy that wrote the code.

I heard it was written in perl

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.

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.

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.

Calling it an "internally developed macro language" is stretching it a little bit. It was an extremely simple blob of C++ code that scanned text looking for one of a very small number of known placeholders, and filled them in with the relevant value (session ID, user name, user email etc.) I suppose that over the years between 1996, the capabilities of catsubst may have been expanded somewhat, but certainly when it started there was no formal concept of it being a macro language. In fact, at the very beginning, we experimented with just using m4 (which is a formal macro language) but it wasn't quite right for the job.

Fair enough. I maybe should have put language in scare quotes. :)

I would love to read stories about the old tech stack of Amazon. It would be very fascinating to read.

I only read little bits about them, e.g. Obidos and Gurupa.

I also heard that content authoring used Emacs back in the day, was that true?

Link: https://www.quora.com/How-did-Google-Amazon-and-the-like-ini...

The original (1996 era) tech stack at Amazon wasn't related to anything anyone would use today. When we built the site, there was no such thing as a webstack. PHP did exist, but neither Shel nor myself were familiar enough with it to even consider it as a candidate. We were building an entire system from scratch, with zero off-the-shelf components other than:

   * Berkeley DB (the original bibliographic database)
   * Oracle (the original customer database)
   * Netscape (the original web server)

Even the first two were not really used as-is; Shel convinced Margo to add some mmap-related extensions to bdb to suit what we were doing, and rather than using any Oracle technology in a visible way, I wrote an entire wrapper for their APIs that looked like sscanf(). We were not just writing a website, but the entire ordering system, from the web front end all the way to the back-office/warehouse stuff, as well as financial management, customer support and content management. There were no tools for any of this stuff; when we looked at existing online sales software, it always assumed that the company would have things on the shelves, which was more or less the opposite of Amazon's early corporate strategy, and was such a deep assumption (e.g. if it is not in stock and we don't know when it is arriving, the user is actively dissuaded from buying it) that we could not just buy this sort of thing.

Because Shel and I were both Unix heads (neither of us had ever used Windows), and also both Emacs users, we encouraged the use of a Unix-y ecosystem in the early days. We had no interest in providing support in-house to Windows users, so a lot of the very early back-office infrastructure included various Unix-centric tools, including Emacs. Similarly, the very early versions of invoice/shipping label printing used LaTeX, but I moved away from that even before I left in Feb 1996.

I find that most (notably) younger web developers have a very difficult time understanding why we would have done things the way we did back then, because they essentially cannot conceive of a world more or less completely without any of the tools they are used to thinking of. For most of the initial development, for example, we were not even willing to use cookies (or at least rely on them).

The stuff we created was fast (extremely fast) but not scalable (because none of us anticipated the scalability requirements that would be faced within such a short time). Almost certainly faster on a per-request level than anything on the site today, but also massively simpler and completely unable to be distributed.

Website was written in C for NSAPI. obidos was the name. If you see current URLs that contain /gp/, that is when they transitioned to java backend. GP stands for Garupa.

Technically, it was C++ limited to a tiny subset of C++ features. Shel wasn't so keen on all that fancy C++ stuff but thought there was a role for "objects".

I believe it's actually called Gurupa, and named after the island on the Amazon just downriver of the delta. The only place I know that refers to the area as Garupa is Selfridge's survey at https://www.history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading... — and even so inconsistently.

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