Blog
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Amazon history
I read a post on someone's blog today that made me a bit curious. He mentioned that some other bloggers had been posting their first Amazon.com purchase. I decided to go back and check mine. It was on June 26, 1997, and I ordered two books: Mort, by Terry Pratchett, and the Sybase DBA Companion. Mort was a great, and very funny, novel. It was out of print at the time, and didn't actually ship until May 17, 1998. At that time, Amazon had a service where you could order a book, and whenever a used copy became available, it would be shipped to you. I'm not sure if they do that anymore. So many people are selling used books through Amazon now, that it'd be pretty odd to find something that you couldn't get from a secondary seller right away.
The other book I ordered, the Sybase DBA Companion, was pretty useful at the time, since I was just getting started on Sybase. I've since moved to Microsoft SQL Server, but a lot of the skills I developed working on Sybase are still useful, since Microsoft's product was kind of a spin-off from Sybase, though it's diverged a lot over the last ten years.
My second order with Amazon was on August 15, 1997, and was for a book called Programming for the Newton Using Windows . That sure brings back some memories! I don't think I ever got around to writing anything more that a couple of trivial programs for the Newton, but it was fun to play around with Newton programming for a while. I've since given away my first Newton, and sold my second. I'm using a Palm PDA now, the i705. I still haven't gotten around to giving it up in favor of a smartphone or anything like that. Maybe I'll get an iPhone, and then I'll have come full circle, in a way, back to an Apple PDA of sorts.
The other book I ordered, the Sybase DBA Companion, was pretty useful at the time, since I was just getting started on Sybase. I've since moved to Microsoft SQL Server, but a lot of the skills I developed working on Sybase are still useful, since Microsoft's product was kind of a spin-off from Sybase, though it's diverged a lot over the last ten years.
My second order with Amazon was on August 15, 1997, and was for a book called Programming for the Newton Using Windows . That sure brings back some memories! I don't think I ever got around to writing anything more that a couple of trivial programs for the Newton, but it was fun to play around with Newton programming for a while. I've since given away my first Newton, and sold my second. I'm using a Palm PDA now, the i705. I still haven't gotten around to giving it up in favor of a smartphone or anything like that. Maybe I'll get an iPhone, and then I'll have come full circle, in a way, back to an Apple PDA of sorts.
Labels: books
Comments:
Post a Comment
© 2011 Andrew Huey
