Amazon.com Job Posting on Usenet

Amazon.com is a billion dollar enterprise today, but way back in 1994, it was an adventure taken by a man in Seattle – Jeff Bezos.

Here is the snapshot of a job posting done by the Amazon.com founder in 1994 seeking C/C++/Unix programmers for a commerce project on the internet.

The requirements are ambiguous, and if somebody posted something like this on the net today, it would crack me up. But, let’s introspect here. In those days, computer programming was not a common art as today, and expressing what is needed had to be original. Today, I see the same sentences, including the commas get plagiarized across organizations when they advertise job postings.

By the way, in 1994, Jeff’s company was called as Abracadabra and only in the following year, it was christened Amazon. The project he started was of his parents’ savings, and one could say that he put them to good use.

The posting in the image above was originally posted on Usenet, and is currently archived on Google Groups.