E-commerce Turns 25

BOSTON, Feb. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 4, 2008, buyers and sellers will conduct their trade online, as if it's business as usual -- but on that day just 25 years ago the Boston Computer Exchange (BCE) was making history by selling a product (a computer) "on-line" for the first time ever.

BCE was started in 1982 by Alex Randall and Cameron Hall as a way for people to buy and sell computers. It was a time when personal machines like the Osborne, Apple 2, Tandy and Sinclair were becoming available. People wanted the latest and greatest, the new IBM PC, but were stuck with obsolete technology they had bought just a few months earlier.

"What chaos that was," Randall says. "Prices were all over the map, the descriptions were cryptic and the models archaic."

Randall and Hall came up with a solution -- a marketplace where people could sell machines they outgrew and move up to their next one. They started at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society with trading cards and conducted hundreds of transactions over the phone. They began to dominate trading in used computers as a paper and pencil company.

Then they purchased a 300 BPS modem (so slow you could read text faster than it comes to the screen), bought a new database system called Alpha 2 and struck an agreement with the owners of Videotext Corp. (which became Delphi about the same time), an online bulletin board system that ran "new" software that allowed users to dial into the system over a phone line.

By partnering with Delphi and using its own dual floppy disk drive computer (with no hard drive), BCE could post its database of products on a public access system for the world to see. On March 4, 1983, Randall and Hall made e-commerce history when they received a call from Chile and their first "on-line" transaction was made.

"Our little living room business suddenly had buyers from the edges of the known universe," Randall says. "I turned to my wife and said, 'This is not going to just be Roxbury and Back Bay. The world is playing this game.'"

Randall and Hall also wrote a Seat on the Exchange, a book of instructions for creating a freestanding computer trading enterprise in any city. They sold BCE in 1990. Randall is presently Professor of Communication at the University of the Virgin Islands. Hall died of cancer in 1998.

View a video about the origins of e-commerce as told by Randall at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wan896ZO4aY.