"The problem with quotes found on the internet is you never know if they are genuine." — Abraham Lincoln
We've talked about a lot of ideas that began with Plato, and the internet system also began with a PLATO ... but not the Greek. The PLATO system allowed teachers to develop their own courses, using a language developed by Paul Tenczar. In 1973, Tenczar asked David Wooley to write a program to allow PLATO users to report bugs while in the system, where each note could be an ongoing response to previous notes.
Sound like a series of emails and replies? That was the beginning. Wooley later developed the "Talkomatic" so messages could be transmitted instantly as a chat message exchange.
Later there was ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1969, created to allow researchers to share information, and because of fears of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, "packet switching" was adopted, which split up large data packets to allow for no central server junction, making the server system less vulnerable to attack. J.C.R. Licklider, the head of ARPA for a time, wrote an article in 1960 called, "Man-Computer Symbiosis," suggesting man would eventually not be able to live without computers, relying on them for everything.
Email, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is the current underpinning of the web), URLs, HTML (HyperText Markup Language, which is what browsers use), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, which is the code language that structures the look of web pages) all came quickly to build the internet, once it was freed up to become commercial in 1994.
The Commercialization of the Internet: Pssst, Hey Buddy—wanna buy a....??
Buying things on the internet is almost synonymous with the term, "internet," largely because we separate out social media and other things like it as apps. The internet is where you buy things, look for things, and find out things.
There's some argument as to whether Pizza Hut allowing orders electronically or whether the sale of Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales qualifies as the first commercial sale, but needless to say, once the internet was open for business in 1994, it never looked back. As mentioned previously, France had already delved into internet business, and its offering of news, banking, travel reservations, retail sales, and pornography seems to be a mirror of much of today's business ventures. Today, however, one of the largest revenue streams seems to be "Surveillance Capitalism," where the corporations spy on you, the user, and sell the information they glean to other companies. We'll talk more about that in later chapters.
The behemoth of retail internet sales seems to be Amazon.com, but it wasn't always the "everything store" giant it is today. It started by sellilng textbooks to students quite a bit cheaper than they could buy them in a campus bookstore and shipping them quickly so no time was lost. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, wanted something he could count on, and buying textbooks is something that has happened for hundreds of years, so it was a pretty good bet that it would continue. Bezos is all about basing decisions on what you can know won't change, and not basing them on things that might change. He has since built an empire on knowing that small businesses are willing to pay fees and percentages for selling goods on his site.
Walmart, yes the Walmart you have down the street, is the #1 retailer in the world because of its brick and mortar stores plus its online presence. It has adopted Amazon's business model of allowing 3rd party retailers to sell on its site, though that aspect of sales can't rival Amazon's. Amazon, on the other hand, is seeking to get a foot into the door of brick and mortar sales and has settled on food as being something people will always need, as has Walmart. The Walmart Superstores are all now 1/3 grocery stores and Amazon has purchased Whole Foods to compete. Both are exploring delivery services to further enhance their sales.
On the other side of the world, China's JD.com is China's #2 online retailer and #5 in the world in online sales. JD.com's main competition in Asia is the Alibaba Group and it has become China's second largest e-commerce retailer.
It would be an oversight to not at least mention "digital" companies, in that they are connected irreversibly to the internet. The popularity of the smartphone is due largely because of that connection, and since government statistics suggest more than 2/3 of mobile users access the internet through their phones, which by some statistics is how many mobile users purchase items through their internet connection, and 69% tend to use their phones for product research. Then there's checking maps, checking traffic, using search engines for information, looking for restaurants, and 100 other things all tied to the internet.
Sadly, as foretold with France's Minitel, pornography has become a huge online industry, earning over $100 billion dollars a year worldwide. The heart of mankind is desperately wicked, and cares not for the evil it causes (Jeremiah 17:9) and the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:10). None of the above are exempt from that.
