
viaweb.com - volida
http://web.archive.org/web/19971022011536/www.viaweb.com/vw/com.html
======
chris_l
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?

~~~
pg
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).

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volida
<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!

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
nostrademons
Would you recommend a similar tactic now?

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

------
danielha
<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."

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jwecker
"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...

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

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volida
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>

~~~
herdrick
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.

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chandrab
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.

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

