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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

perhaps the most surprising to me is the apparent willingness to enter credit card info online in 1999. I wasn't around for this period but wasn't the conventional wisdom back then that this was insecure? hence PayPal?

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The general wisdom was (as it still is) that you couldn't trust that anyone with a credit card form on their website would honor your trust. In this case the recipient wasn't just anyone with a credit card form on their website, but Network Solutions.

No, not at all?

SSL had been around for 6 years already, credit card transactions were quite common, especially with known, reputable hosts (Network Solutions can be safely be assumed to have qualified at the time)

Unfortunately, not all websites used https or enforced it on pages that should have had it. It was very common to see payment forms submitted over http. That is why browsers evolved to the point where Chrome now won’t submit certain types of html form fields over non-https.

I'm aware of it - even talked some people out of attempting ecommerce without SSL about 20 years ago (not all successfully).

But the linked article specifically mentions an HTTPS link.

In 1999 Amazon (for example) was already 5 years old and plenty of people were using credit cards online.

People who used mail orders before the internet might remember that the options included sending a cheque along with the order form or filling in your credit card details on the order form (that's a paper form that you send in the post), and I think that this is still the case. So I don't think that average people really saw sending card details online any differently. I even remember being asked for my card details by email!

Memory's hazy (it might have been a year or two before 1999) but I remember in the UK buying a domain from Network Solutions with a credit card but then I had to fax a signed document to their US office to actually authenticate ownership. This wasn't an automated anti-fraud thing like you might see today, it was just standard procedure for on-line orders (or at least non-US ones).

But, yeah, paying on-line with credit cards was absolutely a thing in 1999.

Back then, I remember Internic let you register a domain and you had 30 days to pay up, because people would commonly put a cheque in the post ("mail a check.")

Average non-technical people used well-known companies, but that included eBay and Amazon.

Presumably Network Solutions was trusted by this customer of theirs.

I could be wrong, but I think in 1999 Amazon was still only selling books. Certainly they did not sell the variety of goods they have now.

There were thousands of online shops at the time, selling everything that Amazon sells today, and it was common to purchase from them using CC or PayPal.

Well we had https ("check for the lock icon") back then, you could pay for plenty of things with credit cards online. Of course there was some fear of it among the general public. PayPal by no means invented online payments they just popularised it.

>PayPal by no means invented online payments they just popularised it.

I'm not sure it's even so much that PayPal "popularized" online payments as it somewhat democratized them. When I had a small side software business in the early to mid-90s, it wasn't easy/cheap to get setup with a merchant credit card. Mostly, people mailed me checks although at some point I struck a deal with a local BBS operator/reseller for him to take payments for me when necessary.

It was fairly common. Paypal was around in 1999 (only just). More remarkably it was common to mail a personal check or money order for things on ebay and for the most part, it worked.

I regularly made normal payments for normal products such as movies and nothing. It generally was considered safe.

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