ecommerce and shopping carts

[Vintage Computer Festival]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Andrew K. Bressen wrote:

> I got contacted by an attorney looking for prior art on ecommerce and
> shopping carts, especially web-based stuff; a bunch of lawyers ended up
> with the OpenMarket patents and is trying to shake everyone down, ala
> SCO. Amazon, among others, are working on busting the patent.

I guess Amazon is trying to make up for it's stupid one-click patent? :)

> June-July of '94 my company (Bibliobytes/HKS.net) released
> "OrderBook", which was basically a front end that would let you enter
> some SKU's and credit card info and would email us an encrypted copy
> of the order to be processed and fufilled. You got the SKUs from a
> catalog downloaded seperately from a web page, by ftp, or whatever.
>
> Around August 2004, NetMarket, a startup done by four guys from
> Swarthmore, started selling CDs over the web.

Wow, I didn't realize e-commerce was being deployed even this early.

> Anyone know of any other shopping-cart and/or automatic payment
> systems that were up and running or publically described
> before October of '94?

I've got a few very early web directory books from this timeframe that
might shed some light.

-- 

Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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