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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.  
  
You may notice a certain similarity between the Viaweb and Y Combinator logos.
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.  
  
On the Company page you'll notice a mysterious individual called John
McArtyem. 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. He has since relaxed a bit
on that point.  
  
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.)  
  
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 $16,000 a month to get us mentioned in the
press. Fortunately reporters liked us.  
  
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. We had a page in our
site trying to talk merchants out of doing real time authorizations.  
  
The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test
drive. 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.  
  
We had some well known users. 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.  
  
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. If we
wanted to get lots of attention, we made the version number an integer. 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.  
  
At the end of 1997, we released a general purpose shopping search engine
called Shopfind. 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.  
  
  
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