January 2012
A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site.
I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.
The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are.
Screens were a lot smaller in 1998.
If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then.
Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts and they weren't antialiased.
If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images.
Hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site.
The first thing one notices is how tiny the pages are. Screens were a lot smaller in 1998.
Browsers had few fonts and no antialiasing, so good-looking pages meant rendering display text as images.
Hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998, I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site; the first thing you notice is how primitive the web was then.
We did that as an inside joke when we started YC.
Considering how basic a red circle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started Viaweb how few other companies used one as their logo.
A bit later I realized why [blocked].
Robert Morris (aka Rtm) was so publicity averse after the Worm that he didn't want his name on the site.
I managed to get him to agree to a compromise: we could use his bio but not his name.
Trevor graduated at about the same time the acquisition closed, so in the course of 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire PhD.
The culmination of my career as a writer of press releases was one celebrating his graduation, illustrated with a drawing I did of him during a meeting.
(Trevor also appears as Trevino Bagwell in our directory of web designers merchants could hire to build stores for them.
We inserted him as a ringer in case some competitor tried to spam our web designers.
We assumed his logo would deter any actual customers, but it did not.)
The Viaweb and Y Combinator logos are similar as an inside joke. A red circle is so basic it surprised me how few companies used one.
The Company page lists a mysterious John McArtyem. Robert Morris was so publicity averse after the Worm that we used his bio but not his name.
Trevor graduated as the acquisition closed, so in four days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire PhD.
Trevor also appears as Trevino Bagwell, a ringer in our web-designer directory in case a competitor spammed it. We assumed his logo would deter customers; it did not.
The site is full of inside jokes: a red-circle logo YC later echoed, a colleague hiding his name after the Worm, and a fake web designer planted as a ringer.
Back in the 90s, to get users you had to get mentioned in magazines and newspapers.
There were not the same ways to get found online that there are today.
So we used to pay a PR firm [blocked] $16,000 a month to get us mentioned in the press.
In our advice about getting traffic from search engines (I don't think the term SEO had been coined yet), we say there are only 7 that matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot.
Notice anything missing?
Google was incorporated that September.
We supported online transactions via a company called Cybercash, since if we lacked that feature we'd have gotten beaten up in product comparisons.
But Cybercash was so bad and most stores' order volumes were so low that it was better if merchants processed orders like phone orders.
It was a novel thing to be able to try out software online.
We put cgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how our software worked.
In the 90s you got users by getting mentioned in magazines, so we paid a PR firm [blocked] $16,000 a month. Fortunately reporters liked us.
Our search engine advice says only 7 matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot. Notice anything missing?
Google was incorporated that September.
We supported transactions via Cybercash to survive product comparisons, but it was so bad we had a page talking merchants out of it.
The whole site was a funnel to the test drive; trying software online was novel then. We put cgi-bin in our urls to fool competitors.
To get users in the 90s you paid a PR firm, since there was no good way to be found online, and our list of search engines that mattered tellingly left one out.
Needless to say, Frederick's of Hollywood got the most traffic.
We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores, so it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic.
I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth, and it was about $300/month.
Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what at the time seemed a lot of bandwidth.
We had 2 T1s (3 Mb/sec) coming into our offices.
In those days there was no AWS.
Even colocating servers seemed too risky, considering how often things went wrong with them.
So we had our servers in our offices.
Or more precisely, in Trevor's office.
In return for the unique privilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had to share it with 6 shrieking tower servers.
His office was nicknamed the Hot Tub on account of the heat they generated.
Most days his stack of window air conditioners could keep up.
Our biggest well known user was Frederick's of Hollywood. We charged big stores a flat $300/month, and Frederick's cost us about $300/month in bandwidth.
Our stores got over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, served over 2 T1s. There was no AWS, so the servers lived in our offices.
Or more precisely, in Trevor's office, where he shared the room with 6 shrieking tower servers. It was nicknamed the Hot Tub for the heat; his window air conditioners mostly kept up.
Frederick's of Hollywood was our biggest user, our flat fee barely covered its bandwidth, and our servers ran not in a datacenter but in Trevor's office, nicknamed the Hot Tub.
For describing pages, we had a template language called RTML, which supposedly stood for something, but which in fact I named after Rtm.
RTML was Common Lisp augmented by some macros and libraries, and concealed under a structure editor that made it look like it had syntax.
Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have versions.
But in those days the trade press expected versions, so we made them up.
That "version 4.0" icon was generated by our own button generator, incidentally.
The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though it wasn't an online store, because we wanted to experience what our users did.
It was pretty advanced for the time.
It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out the products.
Pages were described in RTML, supposedly an acronym but really named after Rtm: Common Lisp under a structure editor that faked syntax.
Continuous releases meant no versions, but the trade press expected them, so we made them up; for attention we made the number an integer.
The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though it wasn't an online store, because we wanted to experience what our users did.
At the end of 1997 we released Shopfind, a shopping search engine with a crawler that could crawl most stores and pick out products.
The site ran on RTML, a Lisp dialect named after Rtm; we invented version numbers for the press, built the whole site with our own software, and even shipped a shopping search engine.