History Of E-Commerce
Information Systems
For most users of e-commerce, it is a relatively young practice. People who have more than just a superficial knowledge of the history of modern technology know that there were a number of leaps and bounds made in this area in the 1990s. Yet, the quiet history of e-commerce began not in the 1990s, but in the 1960s. In the early days of e-commerce, the parties able to participate were highly restricted and limited to entities such as large banks and the military.
At this point in time, the nomenclature was not e-commerce, which is a much more modern term. The first term to describe what we now know as e-commerce was Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). (E-commerce Guide, 2012). Three key advances to e-commerce would come in the 1970s and 1980s, before the more modern and commonly known advances in the 1990s and 21st century. In the 1970s, there was a new protocol developed so that now documents and not just data could...
This protocol as ASC X12 in North America. (Miva Merchant, 2011) In the 1980s, two more protocols were developed, ones that some of us are familiar with: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP & IP, respectively). Many of us are familiar with the term IP address as a way to digitally locate from where a person is using or operating a computing device. These are now more than three decades old.
The 1990s brought great changes and advancements with respect to e-commerce, primarily, as the reader may have already guessed, due to the invention of the world wide web. Truly with the invention of the Internet and the formation of structures that could handle or conduct online payments, e-commerce emerged as what we know it commonly to be like today. Just in the approximately two short decades since the formal emergence of e-commerce in 1995 with e-commerce giants such as eBay, Amazon, even yahoo! And Google, e-commerce has…
