| How time flies when some $260 billion worth of goods and services are being sold online. At least that was the estimate of the total value of goods and services that would be sold in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study released a year ago by Forrester Research and Shop.org.
Next Tuesday, March 4, will mark another significant figure for e-commerce. It was on that day 25 years ago, when the Boston Computer Exchange made history by selling a product (a computer) online over a computer bulletin board. While there may be some debate whether that exchange marked the true beginning of ecommerce, or whether technologies such as electronic data interchange (EDI) ushered that era in much earlier, it none-the-less is a significant milestone for what has become the world’s most dominant platform for conducting business.
The Boston Computer Exchange, or BCE, actually got off the ground in 1982. It was started by Alex Randall and Cameron Hall as a way for people to buy and sell computers. It was a time when PCs like the Osborne, Apple 2, Tandy and Sinclair were just becoming available, and people were looking for ways to upgrade to newer technologies and get some return on their expensive purchases.
“What chaos that was,” recalls Randall, who now serves as a communications professor at the University of the Virgin Islands. His partner, Hall, died of cancer in 1998. “Prices were all over the map, the descriptions were cryptic and the models archaic.”
Randall and Hall initially created a computer marketplace via the telephone. Using paper and pen, they created the equivalent of trading cards – blue cards and yellow cards for people who wanted to sell or buy. They would go to Boston-area computer clubs and hand the cards out, then go home and match buyers with sellers.
The exchange made its big leap when Randall and Hall got their hands on a 300 bits per second modem (so slow you could read text faster than it appeared on the screen), bought a database system called Alpha 2, and struck an agreement with Videotext Corp. (which later became Delphi) to create an online bulletin board system that allowed users to dial into the system by computer via the phone.
On March 4, 1983, Randall and Hall made their first online transaction, to a buyer from Santiago, Chile, and the rest is e-commerce history.
If you’d like to take a trip down the e-commerce memory lane, Randall has posted his own telling of the story. |
