Amazon launched 22 years ago this week - here's how the business has evolved

The idea for Amazon was born in 1994 in New York City, while Jeff Bezos was working in finance and realizing the internet was not something he could not let pass him by.

Bezos put together a list of things he thought he could sell online and picked books, According to "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," Brad Stone's 2013 book on the origins of the company. Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore in 1995.

In 2016, some 21 years later, Amazon hit $136 billion in sales. With its recent deal to buy Whole Foods, a top-tier cloud computing business, and a line of consumer electronics that includes its popular Echo smart speakers, Amazon has come a long way from its bookstore beginning.

With help from the Wayback Machine, we took a look at how Amazon's homepage has evolved with the company.