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Comment by PaulDavisThe1st | Hacker News Reader

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 ]

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There were a few using telnet before the web gained wider traction. For example, CDNow started out that way in 1994.

I 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.

That is an epically cool story from the early days of the Internet / web. Thanks for sharing!

A brief reminder that SMS has nothing to do with the internet (TCP/IP) or the web (HTTP).

Netflix also was founded in 2007, not 1997.

That's how I ordered my first CDs online: via a Telnet interface. It sounds crazy 30 years later.

I 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.

Yes, they were the original books.com, and I used to buy from them via telnet before they had their www site up.

Do 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...

Yes, books.com was based in Ohio. I bought from them via the mentioned telnet interface.

More info is: I was wrong, Ohio is right.

> 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?

In 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

In 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.

I 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.

We 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.

A large bookstore was using CLI for their internal inventory management system well into the 2000s.

amzn was likely doing that too. the original tools that we wrote in 94-96 for store ops were all CLI.

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