http://www.businessinsider.com/flashback-this-was-the-internet-in-1995-2013-4?op=1
Yep = Compuserve & that NOISE :'(
"Markoff says you shouldn't put your password on the Net, or your credit card.
"
i did email my cc# once in 1995- or 6. Companies were online with brochureware and a contact page which sometimes had an email address. Rare to have a form for product inquiry. Cart? No, that'd be rocket science.
>or your credit card.
I remember I was looking at shopping cart solutions back in the mid 90s and there was a popular one that stored CC numbers on a plain text document with a conventional name. I did an AltaVista (i think) search for the file name and came up with dozens of pages of CC numbers for the taking. Crazy stuff.
In 95 I was introduced to the Usernet and UUDECODE and porn was everywhere. All done at on university networks too haha
That compuserve screen brought it back. I remember by dad going mental when he got the first phone bill in after I discovered it! (in fairness he did show me how to set it up and created the compuserve account - so it shouldn't have been a massive surprise)
Re early commerce: We did our first real-time online payments in 98 from memory. We were definitely doing some scary wrong shit prior to that (involving webforms and click-clack machines). In fairness we would have nailed online payments earlier, but it took over a year to get approval from the bank. All that they knew about the internet at the time was that it was scary.
I moved from CompuServe to EarthLink early on.
http://www.internetservice.net/2011/10-descriptions-of-offerings-from-early-isps/
At the time I was able to walk into their Portland OR office to pay my bill in cash or check.
I ask an employee where I might host a website. He didn't know but said they had a corporate client in Vancouver WA who had there own server and MIGHT let me use a potion of it.
Never did that but that was a long time ago...
1995 was when I was in California starving.
But in 1994....No nice interface like that for me. I was using a Sun Sparc station and TALK to talk to people all over the place and making my html/ perl pages with vi text editor. Black background with lime green text. Everything was command line driven. I think my email address was grnidldy@ksu.ksu.edu or something along those lines...
I still had a mainframe account on the K-State mainframe and would play dungeon and dragons and I'd have *at least* 8 windows open talking to people and working.
That was a *long* time ago. I can't remember the commands to do all that stuff...
Takes me back to memories of Pegasus Mail and Mosaic in the mid 90's...