’Tis the time of year when the primary function of the Internet switches from being a communication or information gathering tool to being a shopping tool. And this year we’ll be shopping online–and spending more than ever before, according to Adobe’s holiday shopping forecast . Starting with Black Friday and continuing until Christmas Eve it’s projected we’ll spend $83 billion buying online goods this holiday season, with $3 billion alone spent on Cyber Monday .

Those dollars will be spent on everything from iPhones to cat-scratching DJ decks, as we snap up deals from behind our screens in the comfort of our PJs and near a plate of leftovers. But what was the first actual encrypted online transaction?

A new video made by Shopify, an e-commerce software company, delves into this bit of Internet history to track down the first official e-commerce transaction. The trail begins on the ARPANET, with a 1971 deal between computer science students at Stanford and MIT to buy some pot. But, explains the narrator, that technically didn’t count because money wasn’t exchanged online: they only used the network to arrange a meeting place.

Next, the trail leads to 1984, when a 74-year-old British grandmother named Jane Snowball used a Videotex—essentially a TV connected to telephone lines—to order provisions from her local grocery store: margarine, eggs, cornflakes. However, the groceries were delivered by hand, and Snowball paid for them in cash. That’s not exactly e-commerce.

The first true e-commerce transaction didn’t happen until 1994 with the advent of the Internet as we more or less know it today. Though Pizza Hut often gets credit for the first e-commerce transaction (they started selling pizzas online in late August 1994) the actual credit goes to Dan Kohn, a 21-year-old entrepreneur who ran a website based in New Hampshire called NetMarket.

On August 11, 1994, Kohn sold a CD of Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales album to a friend in Philadelphia, who used his credit card to spend $12.48, plus shipping costs, in a transaction that, for the first time ever, was protected by encryption technology.

Sting’s Ten Summoner’s Tales

“Even if the NSA was listening in, they couldn’t get his credit card number,” Kohn told Peter Lewis of the New York Times in an article the following day about NetMarket—what Lewis called “a new venture that is the equivalent of a shopping mall in cyberspace.”