Network World

Bezos was intrigued and eventually gave them the green light not just to work on it, but for Pinkham to build a team in his native South Africa to put it all together.

Reflecting on that moment in a later interview, Pinkham said, quote, It also wasn't clear it would become Amazon's next big thing, as Black later told Network World, quote, It took a long time to get to a point of realizing that this is actually transformative.

It was not obvious at the beginning.

The two main services AWS launched with in those early days were Elastic Cloud Compute or EC2, what Dwayne was talking about earlier, and Simple Storage Service or S3, which sounds like what it is, a scalable storage solution.