> 2. Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen. But catalog companies may <i>believe</i> that a secure link is necessary, and spending this $5000 would give Webgen a much more professional look.<p>For those who were not around then yes you had to buy at the time for roughly that amount software to do SSL it was not like just installing openssl as is done now.<p>This part I found interesting in it's naivete even back then for one thing 'no reports of' does not equate to 'not happening': [1]<p>> and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen.<p>> But catalog companies may <i>believe</i> that a secure link is necessary<p>This sounds even more like 'younger person willing to take chances older experienced person to risk adverse'.<p>[1] Even today I can say 'no reports of houses in my neighborhood being broken into' but I don't really have an accurate source for things going on in my area only ad hoc.
I was a customer of Viaweb back then. It worked fine. They charged a fixed fee each month. Then they sold out to Yahoo and became Yahoo Store. Yahoo demanded a cut of the merchant's revenue. Dropped Yahoo Store.<p>It was written in LISP, incidentally. Only language back then that could represent an HTML tree easily.
So ahead of their time:<p><i>For security, the commit command will use one-time passwords. This way, even if someone gets the ordinary password of a user, they can't modify the catalog that actually appears at the site.</i><p>Yet, it was another era....:<p><i>Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen.</i>
It’s interesting to see that what ever worked in the early days of the web, still works today. Viaweb —> Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc.<p>Myspace -> FB<p>IRC -> Slack<p>Aim -> WhatsApp<p>It seems that, to come up with a good startup idea, one can look at the early days of the internet and replicate it for today. Preferably for a specific niche audience first, then grow from there.
This is super fascinating in so many ways.<p>E.g. the list of features that made webgen "the most sophisticated web catalog generator available" includes:<p>> 2. Webgen generates all the buttons [as images] in a site automatically.<p>> 3. Webgen creates all the thumbnail images itself.<p>> 4. Webgen has a wide variety of page styles. Our default [...] puts three thumbnails horizontally across each page. But there are already six other possible section styles.<p>I'm not saying they are wrong (this was only a year or two after browsers - actually probably _browser_ - supported inline images after all), but it's funny that "generates thumbnails" and similar were seen as killer features.
> We thought we only needed $15,000 in startup capital; this proved to be an underestimate.<p>When did you find out that wasn't enough money, and how much did you end up needing at that time?
Computer, server, internet connection were huge costs back then. As was the web server software.<p>You could use a $200 refurbished Dell, internet at Starbucks, $5/month VPS these days.<p>Heck, it was hard to get a 5MB web hosting account back then for $10/month!