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Viaweb's First Business Plan (1995)
- wakatime 7y ago> We thought we only needed $15,000 in startup capital; this proved to be an underestimate. When did you find out that wasn't enough money, and how much did you end up needing at that time?
- krm01 7y agoIt’s interesting to see that what ever worked in the early days of the web, still works today. Viaweb —> Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc. Myspace -> FB IRC -> Slack Aim -> WhatsApp It seems that, to come up with a good startup idea, one can look at the early days of the internet and replicate it for today. Preferably for a specific niche audience first, then grow from there.
- redis_mlc 7y agoSince the late 90's, that advice has been worded as: "Make a cloud-version or app of something in /etc/services"
- rodw 7y ago> Myspace -> FB Some of you may be surprised how far back this chain goes. Back in the (pre-www) day we used the `finger` command and `.plan` / `.project` files as rudimentary versions of social profiles. I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used in practice but if you have no idea what I'm talking about there's an animated .plan demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw. I've always assumed that the MySpace (and later, Facebook) verb "poke" was inspired by `finger` but I have no evidence for that.
- iamwil 7y agoI used .plan in college. Email was provided by a telnet system, and you can update your own .plan account and see what your friends wrote by fingering their unix account. It's kinda like how statuses were used in AIM/ICQ, or if tweets/fb messages only held the latest message. A good modern example are how people use twitter profile bylines. Something pithy and clever to show how cool and funny you are to your friends.
- adventured 7y ago> I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used in practice Here you go, the id Software .plan reads on Blue's News. That's how a lot of people consumed id's .plan files back then (with id being one of the more famous publishers at the time). It's not pre-www, however it gives a pretty good sense (for those not exposed to them) of what .plan files were like to consume. On the right side panel you can click through the emloyee names and then change the date with the "Archived Dates" select box above the names: An example by Paul Jaquays: https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=8 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=8 Brian Hook from 1999: https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=7 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=7 John Cash from 2000 and 1998: https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9&time=19981130182411 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=9&time=199811... Paul Steed in 1998: https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=2&time=19980626105044 https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/finger.pl?id=2&time=199806... And John Carmack's .plan archive from 1996 forward: https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/tree/master/archive https://github.com/oliverbenns/john-carmack-plan/tree/master...
- fnord77 7y ago"webrings" were primitive social networks, too
- rodw 7y agoWere they though? In my experience webrings were more like rudimentary, off-white-to-gray-hat link-farms. Were webrings ever used like a friend-list or is that not what you meant by "primitive social networks"?
- danielpal 7y agoSo ahead of their time: For security, the commit command will use one-time passwords. This way, even if someone gets the ordinary password of a user, they can't modify the catalog that actually appears at the site. Yet, it was another era....: Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen.
- keiferski 7y agoIt makes me wonder what practices we consider normal today will be considered horribly insecure in the future.
- doublerabbit 7y agoWell, username and passwords for one
- new2628 7y agoI'll bite: what's wrong with username and password?
- wbl 7y agohttp://bash.org/?244321 http://bash.org/?244321 is probably the most egregious example. People reuse passwords, humans are bad at making them, etc.
- new2628 7y agoThat's funny and I agree that _some_ people are bad at using passwords, but I have a feeling whatever replaces them will be worse for everyone. It's like some people cut their fingers with knives so let's all use plastic knives instead.
- 7y ago
- gist 7y ago> 2. Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen. But catalog companies may believe that a secure link is necessary, and spending this $5000 would give Webgen a much more professional look. For those who were not around then yes you had to buy at the time for roughly that amount software to do SSL it was not like just installing openssl as is done now. This part I found interesting in it's naivete even back then for one thing 'no reports of' does not equate to 'not happening': [1] > and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen. > But catalog companies may believe that a secure link is necessary This sounds even more like 'younger person willing to take chances older experienced person to risk adverse'. [1] Even today I can say 'no reports of houses in my neighborhood being broken into' but I don't really have an accurate source for things going on in my area only ad hoc.
- brudgers 7y agoThe size of the internet in 1995 was such that typical path for a web based credit card purchases used a toll-free call with a landline phone over POTS. Long distance was still charged per minute and so was cell service. So was most internet access. If people were online, it was probably through AOL or Compuserve. There weren't older people experienced with internet sales. It was all brand new. Looking back, unencrypted credit card information was probably less risky than it sounds twenty five years later. The technical risks are the same for sure, but in 1995 the vast majority of credit card transactions used carbon paper, the physical card, and an imprinter. To be really useful, a stolen credit card number would need to be made into a physical card. There weren't a lot of places to use a credit card online...that's why Viaweb grew. And there wasn't widespread internet access in the places where credit card fraud at scale became a black market industry.
- lubujackson 7y agoIt is hard to imagine the mindset back then if you didn't live though it (and even if you did). This was a time when people debated if anyone might even buy anything online, at all. And somehow, despite all our security advancements we still use plain 16 digit credit card numbers in the U.S. with no passwords or any protections outside of a 3 digit code on the back. The day we change that everyone will say "now how did that work"?
- rodw 7y agoThis is super fascinating in so many ways. E.g. the list of features that made webgen "the most sophisticated web catalog generator available" includes: > 2. Webgen generates all the buttons [as images] in a site automatically. > 3. Webgen creates all the thumbnail images itself. > 4. Webgen has a wide variety of page styles. Our default [...] puts three thumbnails horizontally across each page. But there are already six other possible section styles. I'm not saying they are wrong (this was only a year or two after browsers - actually probably _browser_ - supported inline images after all), but it's funny that "generates thumbnails" and similar were seen as killer features.
- Animats 7y agoI was a customer of Viaweb back then. It worked fine. They charged a fixed fee each month. Then they sold out to Yahoo and became Yahoo Store. Yahoo demanded a cut of the merchant's revenue. Dropped Yahoo Store. It was written in LISP, incidentally. Only language back then that could represent an HTML tree easily.
- iamwil 7y agoHow did you find Viaweb as a customer? Google wasn't around in 1995, so I imagine it was hard to find anything.
- spullara 7y agoThere were search engines and directories. Google didn't invent search.
- iamwil 7y agoOf course not. That's silly. But search engines were terrible back then. I remember using the lot of them, and it was hard to find anything. Using Google for the first time was incredible in 1998/1999. It just showed you exactly what you were looking for.
- jiofih 7y agoDid not have that experience. Altavista and friends were good enough, and for a long time google’s ability to understand natural language searches was nothing more than a gimmick. Most of my discovery came from blogrolls, link sharing and portals. Until the SEO era began and the volume of noise became unbearable...
- jacquesm 7y agoThey worked fine, until the keyword spam.
- brudgers 7y agoIn 1995, search engines were both worse and better. They were worse because they tended to rely on word frequency, boolean search, and an inverted index. They were better for the same reason. The search engine returned results based on what was in the box. It didn't second guess the user. Even when Google arrived, it was not clearly better (at least for me) because it was hard to drill down a search by refining the specific search terms. But it was more adaptable to the first generation SEO methods.
- bluedino 7y agoComputer, server, internet connection were huge costs back then. As was the web server software. You could use a $200 refurbished Dell, internet at Starbucks, $5/month VPS these days. Heck, it was hard to get a 5MB web hosting account back then for $10/month!
- ken 7y ago5MB went a lot further back then. Viaweb is older than Javascript or CSS -- not to mention custom fonts, video, or high-resolution bitmaps. In 1995, 5MB was hundreds of pageloads. Today, it's one.
- dustingetz 7y agoViaweb could have been Amazon
- throwaway1777 7y agoPaul Graham isn’t Jeff Bezos
- statictype 7y ago>Smaller clients will have orders forwarded to them by fax---an attractive alternative, because it is secure and uses familiar technology. Wow.