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viaweb.com

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15 pointsvolida16 comments

Check this out:

John McArtyem (rtm@viaweb.com) is in charge of Viaweb's ordering system, hardware and security.

So this is Morris staying incognito!? ("Mac - RTM") Probably because of being in the PhD program at the same time?

Robert was so anti-publicity that he refused to let me list his name on the About page. As a compromise he let me list him under a pseudonym.

"The Bunster" was his girlfriend (now wife).

John McCarthy (discoverer of Lisp) + RTM = John McArtyem.

http://web.archive.org/web/19971022011842/www.viaweb.com/cgi-bin/master/EDITOR/cgi-bin/ownacct

the html forms submit to /x like YC.news do!

We put a gratuitous cgi-bin in the urls to throw off potential competitors, so they wouldn't guess how our software worked. Not sure if any were even sophisticated enough to wonder about that, in retrospect.

Would you recommend a similar tactic now?

yah dude, put .asp or make it look like a java based server. Even .php would probably work nicely that way.

"Our software submits your pages to Altavista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, WebCrawler, OpenText, and HotBot." Nice. Those were the days. Does anyone else remember when google was underground? I remember when it seemed just me and a few of my friends knew about them. For 2 years I would say "don't use altavista- use google." and whoever it was would say "Googol? Ogle? What?" Guess it wasn't that long ago at that...

Google wasn't just underground then; it didn't exist. Google wasn't founded till a year later.

I remember back when you had to manually submit your website to 30 different search engines. It's amazing how fast times change.

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/bugbear/how.html

The original white paper for the company, then called WebGen.

"We do not expect that the web will replace printed catalogs. We do expect that it will eventually account for a substantial fraction of catalog sales. The Internet, like the telephone and the print media, will be a valuable sales tool for those who know how to use it."

I found out about RTML at Viaweb. Would Arc have anything to do with it? Maybe inspired by it?

http://web.archive.org/web/19971022012152/www.viaweb.com/vw/rtml.html

That is great. I've been wondering about RTML lately. Could users run an RHTML page without having to republish their entire site? How interactive was the structure editor (the language environment)? Did it have an interactive toplevel? Was each page independent of all others, as far as executing RTML?

PG, RTM, TLB: any chance you could show us some of the Common Lisp code that implements RTML? I suppose code snippets of the internal implementation wouldn't go over with Yahoo's lawyers... I've read everything I can find (like this: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt) already; what I really want is to look at the code.

Read (I think) "Beating the Averages". It's a domain-specific language built out of Common Lisp macros.

Edit: Sorry, the essay I was thinking of was "The Other Road Ahead".

Wasn't Omar Khudari a founder of ViaWeb or did he come later? I met Omar a couple of times when he was on the board of my friend's company and what a terrific guy.

I love the search page... "Words to look for".

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