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Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Wow, things have come full circle. I built and launched a browser-based office suite in about 1998 called Office Wherever that used a Java Applet.

VCs laughed us out of every meeting.. "No-one will put their private documents on the Internet! You're mad!"

WHO'S MAD NOW, HUH? Huh? Huh...

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> "No-one will put their private documents on the Internet! You're mad!"

I miss the days when people had this much common sense.

Indeed, people have got used to running their stuff on other people's machines.

TBH, "In a browser" (like here) is pretty different from "on the Internet" (like google docs). Except that if someone was to make slight changes to the hosted application, it could leak everything.

In other words, a distinction without a difference.

That sounds interesting. Your concept was ahead of its time.

Do you have screenshots or a video demo to share?

> "No-one will put their private documents on the Internet! You're mad!"

They were essentially right, but unfortunately people have gotten used to having almost no private documents. Or rather, redefining privacy as "just me and the government and the large international corporations".

You still got the source?

No. I wouldn't want to inflict that upon anyone. I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com.

> I'm more bummed that I let the domains expire, especially the short one which was o-w.com.

It's ironic that you could've made more money than you would have gotten from VCs with that domain name. You probably didn't know that back then.

Ha, no. 3 letter dotcoms were still worthless in 1998, I don't think they were quite all used up. Especially ones with a hyphen in them. Going back to 1994 I owned a whole bunch of domains that later got sold for 7 digits. All dotcoms were free in 1994. It was later they started charging for them, so I let them all expire.

I'd have been a millionaire many times over if I could have read the future. All those Bitcoins I mined in early 2010 and lost all the keys/wallet.

Sure thing. I meant you could have sold it later, in the 2000s. I remember finding many 3-letter .com domains in 1996/97 but didn't want to shell out ~$100/year or whatever netsol was asking for those days.

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