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Viaweb

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Submitted By josephanthony
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Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998

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

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