The First Transaction
These days, you can buy just about anything on the internet. Factor in the deep web, and that becomes even more true. That’s why it’s fairly amusing that, long before Craigslist or The Silk Road, the very first transaction made on the internet was a drug deal.
Sometime between 1971 and 1972, a group of Stanford students used ARPANET (an internet precursor) to help set up and carry out the sale of some weed to students across the country at MIT. Though it’s not a strictly web-based transaction, it’s still likely the first purchase made facilitated by the web.