What Would People in the 90s Think of Amazon?

People in the 1990s would probably think Amazon was straight-up science fiction.

It started as an online bookstore, so the biggest shock would be how far it went:

• Fast delivery: getting goods in hours, not days or weeks, would seem unreal.
• Streaming and ebooks: instant movies and reading thousands of books on one device would feel futuristic.
• Alexa: a cheap voice assistant that answers questions and controls things at home would sound like the future.
• AWS: the idea that Amazon runs huge parts of the internet’s backend would be hard to believe.

They’d also be surprised that an internet company with huge spending survived the dot-com crash and became one of the biggest companies in the world.

Overall: a mix of amazement, disbelief, and a little unease at how powerful and convenient it became.