

Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998 - ananthrk
http://www.paulgraham.com/vw.html

======
bebna
The best thing about old site designs is for me their small footprint. The
whole payload of viaweb is 62.5kb, a nice size for fitting in the 64kbps of
ISDN.

Why do I think this is relevant today? In many countries like Germany for
example it is common to have a mobile traffic upper limit around between 200mb
and 512mb per month. After that you only get GPRS. Use your smartphone for a
week with only 2G (53.6kbps), to get a feeling what many smartphone users here
think about it: "It is better to have a Wifi ap in reach."

~~~
Yaggo
The irony is that nowadays we have better tools than ever to build small
footprint sites, thanks to HTML5 & CSS3. We have versatile native HTML
controls supporting styling; CSS gives us gradients, box-shadows, rounded
borders, etc, eliminating the need for bitmaps. Why many sites are more
bloated than ever is totally another story.

~~~
untog
_Why many sites are more bloated than ever is totally another story._

Because it isn't as important. If there were all the time in the world, we'd
all be able to make our web sites as small as possible, but in reality, it's
just not necessary. Yes, there are minorities of users that need it, and
depending on what market you're in it _could_ be important. But for most
people it isn't.

~~~
gdubs
It's actually important in two major ways. First, conversion rates have been
known to increase in correlation with site speed [1]. Second, mobile devices
are often on _terrible_ connections.

1: [http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-
load...](http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2010/03/31/firefox-page-load-speed-
part-i/)

------
jere
I'm surprised by how good the copy is.

>Viaweb Store is the fastest, easiest way to open an online store. You create
your site on our server, using nothing more than the browser you're using to
read this page. So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes.

"Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on
shopify.com if you ask me.

~~~
soheilpro
Yeah! That's the first thing I noticed. I'm sure PG has written that.

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themckman
Honestly, other than the blocky buttons and bullets, that's a very pleasing
site to look at, even by today's standards.

~~~
Yaggo
YMMV.

~~~
moheeb
He just stated what his mileage was. Why would it vary?

~~~
Yaggo
In English, "you" can be used to refer to people in general.

------
ghshephard
"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."

Ironically - Apple still does this on apple.com. Most of their large nice
looking text is actually an image.

------
pjungwir
I remember Cybercash! They were no Stripe, to be sure, although I don't
remember ever having problems with their functionality or reliability. I
wonder what his issues were?

------
ananthrk
Discussions from an year ago <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071>

------
asciimo
Interesting Morris Worm connection! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm>

------
witek
Is this in response to another Yahoo buyout today? ;]

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yuchi
The logo it's an animated gif. That's awesome. The only animated gif I ever
seen on a web site that actually is stylish.

~~~
themckman
Took forever to animate for me. Had my face almost against my screen trying to
see it change.

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serichsen
Continuous deployment! In your face, Agile! :)

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lefinita
sadly, the functionality not work anymore :(

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apunic
looks like a mobile site from 2010

