She used the ‘Videotex’ system developed by English inventor Michael Aldrich, says Jonathan Reynolds, associate professor in retail marketing and deputy dean of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Aldrich took her TV and turned it into a computer terminal: she used the Videotex technology to generate a shopping list on her TV screen, and her order was phoned in to her local Tesco. The goods were then sent to her door, like magic.
“It was originally conceived as a social service [for the elderly and disadvantaged],” says Reynolds. “The system, which pre-dated the public Internet, relied upon the development of a closed network of computers.” Little did Aldrich or Snowball know that their nifty tech experiment laid the framework for an industry now worth £118bn ($186bn) in the UK.
Following this early grocery service, the next major innovation in the online shopping space is said to have occurred in 1994, when a computer whiz called Daniel M Kohn, then aged 21, set up an online marketplace called NetMarket. It was not only dubbed a “new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace”, but also marked the first digitally secure transaction. The first purchase? A Sting CD, retailing at $12.48 (£10).
From then, the early internet – with its screeching dial-up sounds – trickled its way into people’s homes. And while today virtually all big corporations are online, in the early days only a few committed to an ecommerce strategy.
