Online shopping, or e-commerce, is precisely what it sounds like—buying and selling services via the Internet. You might have looked at the title of this post and thought, wait - we didn’t have the internet in 1982. That's true, but it doesn’t mean e-commerce wasn’t possible.

Joseph Marie Charles, known as Jacquard, might not be a name that springs to mind when you think of early computers, particularly when you consider that he was born in Lyon, France, in 1752. Jacquard’s innovative loom engineering led to the technological revolution of the entire textile industry.

Before PayPal's creation, early retail sites had no choice but to accept payments in cheque form or through money orders. The genius of Levchin and Thiel’s idea is partly due to its innovativeness and partly to the fact that no other company has noticed the gap in the market for an online payment system.