I was thinking about my first internet purchase on the drive home last night. Not my first Amazon order. Not my first eBay bid. My first internet purchase—made before I’d ever heard of the World Wide Web.
Sometime in the early 1990s, I ordered two CDs from my dorm room at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. No browser. No shopping cart icon. No checkout button. Just a blinking cursor on a text terminal.
The Setup
From my PC, I dialed into the campus VAX cluster over an analog phone line, heard the modem handshake, and logged in. From there, I used TELNET—a protocol for remote text-based connections—to reach a service called CD Connection. The entire interface was text. White characters on a black screen—my 486’s VGA monitor, not the green glow of a campus terminal. You’d navigate to a search prompt, type the name of a band or album, and if they had it in stock, you could order it.
The transaction required typing my shipping address and credit card number directly into the terminal. Unencrypted. Sent across the network in plain text. I didn’t think twice about it at the time. There was no other way.
CDs Were Everything
It’s hard to overstate how dominant CDs were in the early 1990s. They had displaced vinyl and were crushing cassettes. A CD collection was a statement. I had a wooden crate that held 96 CDs—and it was nearly full.
But buying CDs meant going to a store. Musicland. Sam Goody. The music section at your local mall. If you lived in a small town in Arkansas, your choices were limited to the local Wal-Mart or driving an hour to McCain Mall in North Little Rock—if you had a car. If you wanted something they didn’t have in stock, you were out of luck.
CD Connection changed that. For the first time, I could search a catalog that dwarfed anything within driving distance. Type in a name, see what they had, order it. The CDs would arrive by mail a week or two later.
Before Everything
This was before Napster made music free and disposable in 1999. Before iTunes turned songs into 99-cent digital files in 2003. Before streaming subscriptions made the very concept of “owning” music feel quaint.
It was also before the web made e-commerce mainstream. The first secure online credit card transaction—the one that gets cited in the history books—didn’t happen until August 1994, when a college student sold a Sting CD through a website called NetMarket. By then, I’d already been ordering CDs via text terminal for at least a year.
I didn’t know I was an early adopter. I didn’t think of it as historic. I just wanted to try something new.
The Trust We Had
Looking back, the most remarkable thing isn’t the technology. It’s the trust. Or naivete.
As a computer science major, I understood what was happening. The connection wasn’t encrypted. The characters I typed were transmitted in the clear, hopping from my dorm room to the campus VAX to wherever CD Connection’s servers lived. But this was before HTTPS. Before certificates. There was no secure alternative—this was simply how it worked.
Today, we agonize over HTTPS padlocks and two-factor authentication. I spent a good deal of time on this blog’s security, and I’m neither selling anything nor offering data entry fields. We worry about data breaches and identity theft. In the early 1990s, I just typed my card number into a terminal and hoped for the best.
The CDs arrived. My card wasn’t stolen. It worked.
What I Can’t Remember
I wish I could remember what albums I ordered. Two CDs, purchased from a dorm room in Arkansas, delivered by mail to a college student who didn’t know he was participating in the prehistory of e-commerce.
The specific titles are lost. But the experience isn’t. That blinking cursor. The search results appearing line by line. The moment of hesitation before typing my card number—and then typing it anyway.
That was my first online purchase. Little did I know how common this would become. Today, there are young adults who can’t remember a time when online purchasing didn’t exist. To them, it might feel like it always had.