Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998

21 hours ago

Viaweb's 1998 website had very small pages due to smaller screens, with display text often rendered as images because browsers lacked fonts and antialiasing.
The Viaweb and Y Combinator logos share a red circle design as an inside joke.
Robert Morris (Rtm) avoided publicity after the Worm incident, using the pseudonym 'John McArtyem' on the site.
Trevor Blackwell went from impecunious grad student to millionaire PhD when the acquisition closed, celebrated with a press release and drawing.
A fake ringer 'Trevino Bagwell' was inserted in the web designer directory to deter competitors from spamming.
Viaweb paid a PR firm $16,000 per month for press mentions; reporters liked the company.
SEO advice listed 7 important search engines (Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.), notably missing Google, which was incorporated that September.
Online transactions were supported via Cybercash, but merchants were advised to process orders manually due to poor service.
The site funneled visitors to a test drive, and used 'cgi-bin' in dynamic URLs to mislead competitors about how the software worked.
Frederick's of Hollywood was a notable user; its bandwidth cost matched the $300/month flat fee.
Servers were in Trevor's office (dubbed the 'Hot Tub'), connected via two T1 lines, without AWS or colocation.
The template language RTML (named after Rtm) was Common Lisp augmented with macros, hidden under a structure editor.
Version numbers were made up for the trade press; the site was built using Viaweb's own software.
In 1997, Viaweb released Shopfind, a general-purpose shopping search engine with a programmable crawler.

Hasty Briefsbeta

viaweb

Lisp for Web-Based Applications

Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998