You May Not Believe It, But The First Thing Ever Sold On The Internet Was A Little Bag Of Weed

Between 2011 and 2013, the ¡®Silk Road¡¯ made infamous the online buying and selling of illegal drugs. However, you¡¯d be surprised to note that illegal narcotics were being sold through computers a lot earlier than that.

In fact, it seems the very first online transaction was a drug deal.

Author Jamie Bartlett recounts the incident in his book The Dark Net: ¡°In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction,¡± he writes.

¡°Using the Arpanet account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana.¡±

The incident is less of a secret and more of a frequently whispered story about the origins of e-commerce. Other authors have also written similar accounts of the drug deal in the past. Of course, it¡¯s not nearly the same scale as how Silk Road was operating, selling vast varieties and quantities of banned substances, but the little baggie of weed is still a milestone in the history of technology.

The only controversial thing here is that, Arpanet was the precursor to the Internet as we know today. It was purely for informational exchange, so there was no way to process transactions as such. That means money changed hands offline, so some don¡¯t technically count it a sale.

Others instead point to an online transaction by Dan Kohn, the creator of a website called NetMarket. According to The New York Times, he sold a friend a copy of Sting¡¯s ¡®Ten Summoner¡¯s Tales¡¯ CD on August 11, 1994. The recipient paid for it online, using encryption to exchange his credit card number.

Despite that retelling, a report from CNET indicates another website called The Internet Shopping Network, claims to be the first. They say they began selling computer equipment online at least a month before the audio disk exchange occurred.

Any way you look at it, the first online shopping experience either involved PC hardware, a pop/rock album, or a packet full of marijuana. Frankly, we¡¯d like to stand by the more entertaining version of those three, thank you.