Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998

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.<p>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."

I'm surprised by how good the copy is.<p>&#62;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.<p>"Start taking orders in minutes" is better than the above the fold copy on shopify.com if you ask me.

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

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

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?

Discussions from an year ago <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071</a>

Interesting Morris Worm connection! <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm</a>

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

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.

Continuous deployment! In your face, Agile! :)

sadly, the functionality not work anymore :(

looks like a mobile site from 2010