Happy Birthday eBay - 20 years old.

[NeverSure]

Wow. Only 20 years. A lot has happened fast and a lot has happened since eBay started. Amazon is just 13 years old. Both and many others are solidly in mainstream of daily life.

Who would have imagined the tech revolution or how much money has been made or how much it now influences daily life, even just 20 years ago? We were just getting Windows 95, RAM was expensive and I built the first PC I ever saw that had - drum roll - wait for it - 512MB of RAM.

Happy Birthday.

[maanoi]

512mb of ram would of been a kick ass machine back then. 20yrs ago my first pc had a 1GB hard drive woohoo

Edited September 14, 2015 by maanoi

[NeverSure]

I remember the first 1 GB HDD I had and I was stylin'. I just don't remember when. I do remember when the HDD came out for consumer use and they were small.

I remember when DOS was run from floppies and that makes me really old. I remember having Windows 3 or 3.1 on about 30+ floppies. That's how it shipped. It was installed on a HDD by following the prompts to insert the next floppy. IIRC this was in the early 90's or thereabout. Things have progressed so fast it's hard to comprehend.

[Pib]

512mb of ram would of been a kick ass machine back then. 20yrs ago my first pc had a 1GB hard drive woohoo

1GB....durn that's huge! My first PC which was an Intel 8086 CPU based machine with 20MB hard drive (or maybe it was 10MB) back in the 80's. And before that if you can call it a PC was a Commodore 128 and before that a Commodore 64....I wasn't brave enough to try a VIC 20 which came out before the Commodore 64.

[impulse]

I still remember when EBay was the #2 auction site.

Onsale was #1, and you could browse everything on both sites in less than an hour, and that was on a dial up. You could correspond with the sellers and other bidders while the auctions were going on. It was actually a little fun friendly trash talking each other until the trolls ruined it.

Onsale got bought by Egghead Software, IIRC, and they took it into the toilet.

EBay thrived, but it's gotten completely away from its roots as a place to buy and sell eclectic stuff. I sometimes wonder if the next "EBay" could start up and go back to the auction format that made EBay its first 10 billion dollars of market value. It may not get to $100 Billion on the auction format, but who cares? I'd settle for $100 million....