Hosted by Mission Objectives
- To document milestone efforts in the development of electronic commerce.
- To preserve access to resources that might otherwise be lost to the public.
- To recognize those that might otherwise be forgotten.
Mission Statement
The E-Commerce History Project (ECHP) was created because to fill a void in the collective history of electronic commerce. Software has an ephemeral quality, and in the context of the World Wide Web, this is even more acute. Many thousands of websites have had only a brief existence in Internet time and many pre-Web applications relied on hardware that no longer exists, and hard evidence of their capabilities is disappearing rapidly.
While the Wayback Machine represents one effort to preserve the ephemeral Web, it is insufficient in many ways. First, WM didnt exist until late 1996, so it does not contain information from the early years of rapid commercial development on the Internet. Second, by respecting the robots.txt files of current domains owners, the WM inadvertently censors access to historical information that it collected about previous efforts. For instance, suppose that foo.com was acquired in 2005, and the new domain owner introduced a robot exclusion file. All of the previous incarnations of the website will be blocked even though the new domain owner has no rights over the prior content served by the domain. Third, WM does not provide semantic context for its resources.
The ECHP fills that gap by acting as a centralized repository for information that might otherwise not be accessible. For instance, the flagship content of the ECHP includes a reconstruction of the Hot Hot Hot! website created by the 1994 archive tapes of the site principal developer, Altadena Instruments. Although Hot Hot Hot! still exists on the web today, it is not based on the original software, and thus the original features and capabilities of the website have been preserved.
Additionally, the ECHP strives to place the contributions of each of the first movers in perspective.
Contributions
The ECHP welcomes contributions from individuals and businesses that improve the historical accuracy of this website. This includes email archives, brochures, even software. We cant guarantee that every piece of software will made operational like H3, but hopefully we can make it available to those who want to take that extra step.