Thirty years of e-commerce development

The first commercial uses of the Internet date back to the mid-1990s. However, the Internet was not initially intended to be a place for commercial transactions, nor to develop as a new distribution channel.

In 1958, President Eisenhower founded ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), attached to the Department of Defense, with the aim of asserting U.S. leadership in information processing and computing. At the time, research in the United States was largely shaped by the context of the Cold War. In 1972, a group of international scientists began to think about data networks, initiating the first steps of the TCP/IP protocol, which enabled the connection of different computers and networks and became the basis of the Internet.

Initially created by scientists with the aim of collaborating, sharing knowledge and exchanging ideas, it has...