January 2012A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998I took a snapshot of Viaweb'ssite. I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are. Screenswere a lot smaller in 1998. If I remember correctly, our frontpageused to just fit in the size window people typically used then.Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fontsand they weren't antialiased. If you wanted to make pages thatlooked good, you had to render display text as images.You may notice a certain similarity between the Viaweb and Y Combinator logos. We did thatas an inside joke when we started YC. Considering how basic a redcircle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started Viaweb howfew other companies used one as their logo. A bit later I realizedwhy.On the Companypage you'll notice a mysterious individual called John McArtyem.Robert Morris (aka Rtm) was so publicity averse after the Worm that hedidn't want his name on the site. I managed to get him to agreeto a compromise: we could use his bio but not his name. He hassince relaxed a biton that point.Trevor graduated at about the same time the acquisition closed, so in thecourse of 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionairePhD. The culmination of my career as a writer of press releaseswas one celebratinghis graduation, illustrated with a drawing I did of him duringa meeting.(Trevor also appears as TrevinoBagwell in our directory of web designers merchants could hireto build stores for them. We inserted him as a ringer in case somecompetitor tried to spam our web designers. We assumed his logowould deter any actual customers, but it did not.)Back in the 90s, to get users you had to get mentioned in magazinesand newspapers. There were not the same ways to get found onlinethat there are today. So we used to pay a PRfirm $16,000 a month to get us mentioned in the press. Fortunatelyreporters likedus.In our advice aboutgetting traffic from search engines (I don't think the term SEOhad been coined yet), we say there are only 7 that matter: Yahoo,AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot. Noticeanything 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 productcomparisons. But Cybercash was so bad and most stores' order volumeswere so low that it was better if merchants processed orders like phone orders. We had a page in our site trying to talk merchantsout of doing real time authorizations.The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to thetest drive.It was a novel thing to be able to try out software online. We putcgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how oursoftware worked.We had some wellknown users. Needless to say, Frederick's of Hollywood got themost 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 justover 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed whatat 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. Evencolocating servers seemed too risky, considering how often thingswent wrong with them. So we had our servers in our offices. Ormore precisely, in Trevor's office. In return for the uniqueprivilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had toshare it with 6 shrieking tower servers. His office was nicknamedthe Hot Tub on account of the heat they generated. Most days hisstack of window air conditioners could keep up.For describing pages, we had a template language called RTML, whichsupposedly stood for something, but which in fact I named afterRtm. RTML was Common Lisp augmented by some macros and libraries,and concealed under a structure editor that made it look like ithad syntax.Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually haveversions. But in those days the trade press expected versions, sowe made them up. If we wanted to get lots of attention, we madethe version number aninteger. That "version 4.0" icon was generated by our ownbutton generator, incidentally. The whole Viaweb site was madewith our software, even though it wasn't an online store, becausewe wanted to experience what our users did.At the end of 1997, we released a general purpose shopping searchengine called Shopfind. Itwas pretty advanced for the time. It had a programmable crawlerthat could crawl most of the different stores online and pick outthe products.
