These days it’s hard to remember life without e-commerce. Buying a plane ticket seems like an impossible task without it. By definition e-commerce means the buying or selling of products or services over electronic systems like the internet, but just as the technology has evolved, so has the meaning of the word. Although people have been using a type of e-commerce since the 1970’s, its early forms were a lot different than what we have today. From the early days of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Transfer funds (ETF), until now, where advances in networks, servers, and security allow us to buy, sell, or trade everything and anything imaginable. The history of e-commerce may be short but it, along with technology’s development and growth, is huge and it plays a larger role in everyday life than most people realize.
The origin of what we know as e-commerce dates back to the 1970’s where two major things were happening. For one, the first examples of e-commerce were being established. Businesses were using primitive networks and EDI to share electronic documents such as invoices, order forms, and shipping confirmation, with other companies. These transactions were some of the first forms of e-commerce, back when the word simply meant the execution of commercial transaction electronically. It took a few years for the system to become organized because before 1979, each company had its own standards for formatting documents. Then the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) stepped in and created something called ASC X12, a universal standard for sharing business documents over electronic networks.
The other major event was the development of the ARPAnet. This was a network, built by the military to keep communications during a nuclear attack, which connected four large universities. The original system used giant sized computers and it wasn’t until 1971, when the Terminal Interface Processer (TIP) was built, that individual...