After reading THIS post about a NY Times article on Apple and Oracle from 1997, I did a search on the NY Times site for some other articles around that time. I found the short article pasted below interesting. I may be going out on a limb, but I think things have progressed fairly nicely for Amazon since that offering.
Amazon.com Inc.'s newly public stock began trading yesterday nearly $12 higher than its offering price as investors chased after one of the hottest offerings this year. Amazon.com stock was priced Wednesday night at $18 a share and it opened yesterday at $29.15 on the Nasdaq stock market. After climbing as high as $30 a share, it retreated and finished at $23.50, up 30.5 percent. Amazon.com, an Internet bookseller, has said that it sold $16 million worth of books in 1996 to 180,000 customers in 100 countries. Average daily visits to the company's Web site rose to 50,000 in December 1996 from 2,200 in December 1995.