CDNow had more in their catalog than the huge onion-skin book that the local independent music store had.
They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular.
In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS.
Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)
That's the youngest I've felt in quite a while – I've only used CDNow's web interface. For me it was the recommendations (and search that simply worked unlike Amazon).
They were selling things online very, very early -- it seems like they were doing that an eternity before "e-commerce" became a part of the vernacular.
In the days before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web became common, I used to browse CDNow using telnet from a borrowed dialup account on a university VAX system, with a terminal emulator running on MS-DOS.
Fun stuff. (I never bought anything from CDNow -- I used it as a service to find the catalog numbers of the CDs I wanted to buy, which I'd then order from the local shop downtown.)