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.
"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...
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."
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.
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.
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?