The internet was a different beast 21 years ago – logging on sounded like two robots engaged in the dirty dance, ‘likes’ were just a word people typed excessively into chat rooms, and there wasn’t a ratio of four website designers to every business owner.

It’s throwback time, and we’re headed to August 1995 for this one. That’s a month after Amazon’s launch, and long before the operation had become as slick as it is today.

Feast your eyes on this:

Yes indeed, those were simpler times. Here’s QZ:

Notable on the upper lefthand corner is Amazon’s first logo, featuring a snaky, river-like path over a stylized [sic] letter “A” on a faux marbled background. (The company’s current logo, with its clever “A to Z” visual pun, was introduced in January 2000)

CEO Jeff Bezos, who left his job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and drove west with an idea to capitalize on the growing internet, sold his first book from the garage of a rented home in Seattle. The book was titled Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, and it was purchased for $27.95 by John Wainwright, an Australian computer scientist in Los Gatos, California. To honor its first customer, Amazon named an office building on its campus after Wainwright.

That last bit is pretty epic, and certainly makes for some good PR.

The site has definitely come a long way since 1995, but then again you don’t sell over $100 billion in 2015 if customers don’t dig what you’re offering.

[source:qz]