In the modern days of the internet, with smartphones and other smart devices, anyone can buy almost anything online.
But before that, before Amazon, eBay, or Alibaba, or Rakuten, Etsy, Walmart, Flipkart, Tokopedia, Shopee, JD, Taobao and many many others, the internet was a quiet place.
At the time the internet was created in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information, computers were large and immobile.
And because not all computers could connect to the internet, and not every household owned a computer, one had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.
After the login that crashed, and the film that correctly predicts online shopping decades before it happens, the first thing that was sold online, was marijuana.
This happened back in 1972, when Stanford students used the university's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory accounts to conduct a business transaction with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Before e-commerce and what the internet is then known for, the students used ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, to discreetly create an agreement to the sale of an indeterminate quantity of marijuana.
This was revealed in the book The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld by author Jamie Bartlett.
"In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever online transaction. Using the ARPANET account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a tiny amount of marijuana," he wrote.
A similar statement was made in a book written by John Markoff, entitled What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
"In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Before Amazon, before eBay, the seminal act of e-commerce was a drug deal. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana," the book reads.
This was also revealed in a video made by Shopify, an e-commerce software company, that tells the story of a deal struck between the students.
It's worth noting that the deal did not involve an online transaction of money. Instead, the students just used the internet to arrange the meeting place for their deal.
Furthermore, the deal doesn’t check all the boxes for e-commerce: it was illegal and money wasn’t transferred online, because all the students did, was using the internet to facilitate the deal.
ARPANET was a computer network created by the U.S. Department of Defense as a means of communication between the country's various academic and state institutions, and which formed "the backbone of the Internet until 1990, after completing the transition to the TCP/IP.
However, some people could dispute whether this transaction was really “an online sale” because, despite the fact that the students used the "internet" to communicate and agree on the sale, the financial transaction itself was made in person.
So, it may be more accurate to say that it was the first deal facilitated by a computer network featuring the purchase of cannabis.
A lot has changed since then.
Decades after that, humanity's compulsion gets extremely high, and people are buying things online live never before.
And the purchases, of course, include narcotics and other illegal substances. This particular activity is frequently found on the dark web.