How e-commerce began and developed

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 be transferred over large distances. 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 gone from an obscure and limited process to an activity that quite literally, most people on the planet participate in on a daily or at least regular basis.

E-commerce truly flourished and expanded to stunning proportions once restrictions set by the National Science Foundation were lifted. A prototype of the Internet as we know it was launched by France in 1982, more than ten years before formally made public to the world, primarily from the United States. (Miva Merchant, 2011) This prototype was called Minitel. This system flourished up until last year when it was formally announced that the Minitel would be shut down, though the users were in the tens of millions, but yet could not compete with the Internet. (Miva Merchant, 2011)