The first purchase online was for a bag of weed!
Buying and selling goods online has become commonplace. With sites like Etsy, and Ebay becoming household names. It doesn’t come as any surprise to use however that the first transaction online has been discovered to have been for a bag of some kind weed!
A new book which catalogs the history and developments of the internet called “What Doormouse Said” has discovered that the first transaction ever online, was for marijuana! Students working at MIT and Stanford facilitated the sale via what at that time would be referred to as the Arpanet, which was a much smaller version of what we call the internet today. This quote from the book sums it up.
“In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.”
Nowawadys it’s much simpler to just go to a place like weedmaps, or navigate the dark web on sites similar to SilkRoad but it’s somewhat comforting to know that the first time anyone ever had an idea to sell anything online, they thought “shit let’s get a bag of green!” Since the market value was so well established it was most likely easy to price the product based upon weight, the client however, wouldn’t be allowed to smell or try the product.
