Today in 1995, Amazon.com opened for business.
The website was run from a converted garage in Bellevue, Washington, on three SPARC workstations rigged to ring a bell each time Amazon recorded a sale. The first book sold by the company was Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thoughts.
Brad Stone in The Everything Store:
It was an eclectic team operating under unusual circumstances in a challenging environment, and together they took their first tentative steps into an exotic river called the Internet. To everyone’s surprise, they all got swept up in a swift current. The first week after the official launch, they took $12,000 in orders and shipped $846 worth of books… The next week they took $14,000 in orders and shipped $7,000 worth of books. So they were behind from the get-go and scrambling to catch up.