On September 3, 1995, programmer Pierre Omidyar launched a scrappy little auction site out of his San Jose apartment called AuctionWeb — the site that would eventually become eBay. It was one of several experimental pages on Omidyar’s personal website, built over a Labor Day weekend as a side project to test whether a fair, open marketplace could work online. The very first item listed and sold was, fittingly, something nobody actually needed: a broken laser pointer, which went for $14.83. When Omidyar reached out to make sure the winning bidder understood the pointer didn’t work, he got a reply that has become tech folklore: “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”
What made AuctionWeb different wasn’t the idea of an auction — it was the feedback system. Letting buyers and sellers rate each other gave strangers a reason to trust one another with money, sight unseen, which turned out to be the missing piece for consumer-to-consumer commerce on the internet. The site made $1,000 in its first month, more than enough to cover Omidyar’s hosting bill, and kept climbing from there. It wasn’t renamed eBay until 1997 — a shortened nod to Omidyar’s consulting firm, Echo Bay Technology Group — but the DNA of the marketplace, strangers trading directly with strangers, was there from day one.
Also worth noting on this date: September 3, 1996 saw the public launch of Hotmail, one of the first free webmail services, which helped normalize the idea of checking your email from any browser rather than a single home computer.
Source: Wikipedia — eBay
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.
