Hacker News Reader

There's also a survivorship bias. We don't hear about any Brazilian catalog shops that opened in the 1980s or that didn't have an aunt and uncle who were already in the retail business backing them. (This is not to say she didn't work extremely hard, but there's also luck, good timing and family involved)

View on HN

Ordering from an online catalog wasn’t a revolutionary idea in 1996-1999 but in 1992 it was very forward thinking. And obviously placing an ordering terminal in a store at the time was revolutionary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise

Not exactly. Again, not saying she wasn't clever or didn't bust her ass but it wasn't an entirely unique concept and luck/connections count for a lot.

There were online services before "the internet" meaning the WWW, was a thing, where you could do many of the things that were later reinvented in the late 90s.

I just looked up one, Prodigy, and it appears that it started around 1980 at which point online shopping was one of the motivators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

I'm not saying that I, or most people, were shopping online by 1992, but I think that's way too late to call the idea "forward thinking". Whoever was considering the idea in the 60s or 70s was "forward thinking".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com