A Marketwatch article by Ariana Tobin pointed me to the New York Times’ 1993 coverage of the first online retail purchase–a Sting CD. Here’s the opening of that piece, “Attention Shoppers: Internet Is Open,” by Peter H. Lewis:

“At noon yesterday, Phil Brandenberger of Philadelphia went shopping for a compact audio disk, paid for it with his credit card and made history.

Moments later, the champagne corks were popping in a small two-story frame house in Nashua, N.H. There, a team of young cyberspace entrepreneurs celebrated what was apparently the first retail transaction on the Internet using a readily available version of powerful data encryption software designed to guarantee privacy.

Experts have long seen such iron-clad security as a necessary first step before commercial transactions can become common on the Internet, the global computer network.

From his work station in Philadelphia, Mr. Brandenburger logged onto the computer in Nashua, and used a secret code to send his Visa credit card number to pay $12.48, plus shipping costs, for the compact disk Ten Summoners’ Tales by the rock musician Sting.

‘Even if the N.S.A. was listening in, they couldn’t get his credit card number,’ said Daniel M. Kohn, the 21-year-old chief executive of the Net Market Company of Nashua, N.H., a new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace. Mr. Kohn was referring to the National Security Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that develops and breaks the complex algorithms that are used to keep the most secret electronic secrets secret.

Even bigger organizations working on rival systems yesterday called the achievement by the tiny Net Market a welcome first step.

‘It’s really clear that most companies want the security prior to doing major commitments to significant electronic commerce on the Internet,’ said Cathy Medich, executive director of Commercenet, a Government and industry organization based in Menlo Park, Calif., that hopes to establish standards for commercial transactions on the Internet and other networks.

The idea is to make such data communications immune to wiretaps, electronic eavesdropping and theft by scrambling the transmissions with a secret code — a security technique known as data encryption.”