A Brief History of eBay

Sept. 24, 1998: EBay announces its initial public offering.

April 26, 1999: EBay agrees to acquire the 134-year-old auction house Butterfield & Butterfield for $260 million.

Aug. 26, 1999: A human kidney is offered on eBay. Before the auction is taken down, bids reach $5.7 million. All sorts of human body parts have been put up for auction - and taken down by eBay, which prohibits such sales - including livers and sperm.

July 15, 2000: A rare Honus Wagner baseball card sells for $1.265 million, a record high on eBay.

Sept. 18, 2000: Philip Kaplan puts FuckedCompany.com, his Web site covering disintegrating Internet firms, on sale on eBay. Bids reach $10 million but Kaplan later admits that many bids were made by friends.

December 2000: Under industry pressure, eBay self-polices the site for software, movie and music copyright infringement.

Feb. 8, 2001: Adam Burtle of Seattle sells his soul on eBay for $400. EBay has a policy of not allowing souls to be sold, but Burtle's offer was undetected until after bidding closed. Burtle is suspended from the site.

March 23, 2001: Nude photos of Marilyn Monroe don't raise enough money to sell on eBay.

May 5, 2001: Palm Beach County decides to auction infamous punch-card voting machines on eBay. In February, a Florida man was sentenced to 18 months of probation for trying to sell a stolen Palm Beach voting machine on eBay in November.

May 17, 2001: EBay bans the sale of murder-scene mementos and murderer correspondences. The ban extends to anything related to crimes committed in the past 100 years, as well as Nazi paraphernalia. In May 2000, eBay shut down a death row inmate's sale of seats to watch his execution and the sale of an automatic rifle supposedly from the Branch Davidian compound.

May 25, 2001: Levi's goes shopping on eBay and picks up a pair of its own jeans - made in the 1880s - for $46,532.

June 23, 2001: Bob Dylan's boyhood home in Duluth, Minn., sells on eBay for $94,600. Other properties such as a Santa Cruz, Calif., apartment complex and a 100-year-old Kentucky jail have been offered in the past couple of years.