Snapshot: Viaweb, June 1998
January 2012 A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site .
2012 年 1 月 在 1998 年 6 月宣布收购雅虎之前几个小时，我拍了一张 Viaweb 网站的快照。
I thought it might be interesting to look at one day.
我想有一天看看可能会很有趣。
The first thing one notices is is how tiny the pages are.
人们注意到的第一件事是页面非常小。
Screens were a lot smaller in 1998.
1998 年的屏幕要小得多。
If I remember correctly, our frontpage used to just fit in the size window people typically used then.
如果我没记错的话，我们的首页曾经正好适合人们当时通常使用的窗口大小。
Browsers then (IE 6 was still 3 years in the future) had few fonts
当时的浏览器（IE 6 还是 3 年后）的字体很少
and they weren't antialiased.
而且它们没有抗锯齿。
If you wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to render display text as images.
如果您想制作看起来不错的页面，则必须将显示文本呈现为图像。
You may notice a certain similarity between the Viaweb and <a href="http://ycombinator.com">Y Combinator logos.
您可能会注意到 Viaweb 和 <a href="http://ycombinator.com">Y Combinator 徽标之间存在一定的相似性。
We did that as an inside joke when we started YC.
当我们创办 YC 时，我们把这当作一个内部玩笑。
Considering how basic a red circle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started Viaweb how few other companies used one as their logo.
考虑到红色圆圈是多么基本，当我们创办 Viaweb 时，我感到惊讶的是，很少有其他公司使用红色圆圈作为徽标。
A bit later I realized
过了一会儿我意识到
why .
为什么。
On the Company page you'll notice a mysterious individual called John McArtyem.
在公司页面上，您会注意到一个名叫约翰·麦卡蒂姆（John McArtyem）的神秘人物。
Robert Morris (aka Rtm) was so publicity averse after the Worm that he didn't want his name on the site.
罗伯特·莫里斯（又名 Rtm）在蠕虫病毒发生后非常不愿意公开露面，因此他不想让自己的名字出现在网站上。
I managed to get him to agree to a compromise: we could use his bio but not his name.
我设法让他同意妥协：我们可以使用他的简历，但不能使用他的名字。
He has since relaxed a bit on that point.
此后他在这一点上放松了一些。
Trevor graduated at about the same time the acquisition closed, so in the course of 4 days he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire
特雷弗 (Trevor) 大约在收购完成的同时毕业，因此在 4 天的时间里，他从一贫如洗的研究生变成了百万富翁
PhD.
博士。
The culmination of my career as a writer of press releases was one celebrating his graduation , illustrated with a drawing I did of him during a meeting.
我作为一名新闻稿撰稿人的职业生涯的顶峰是庆祝他的毕业，并用我在一次会议期间为他画的一幅画来说明。
(Trevor also appears as <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/tlbwebdesign.html">Trevino Bagwell in our directory of web designers merchants could hire to build stores for them.
（Trevor 还以 <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/tlbwebdesign.html">Trevino Bagwell 的身份出现在我们的网页设计师目录中，商家可以聘请为他们建立商店。
We inserted him as a ringer in case some competitor tried to spam our web designers.
我们将他插入为铃声，以防某些竞争对手试图向我们的网页设计师发送垃圾邮件。
We assumed his logo
我们假设了他的标志
would deter any actual customers, but it did not.) Back in the 90s, to get users you had to get mentioned in magazines and newspapers.
会阻止任何实际的客户，但事实并非如此。）早在 90 年代，为了获得用户，你必须在杂志和报纸上被提及。
There were not the same ways to get found online that there are today.
当时在网上寻找信息的方式与今天不同。
So we used to pay a PR firm $16,000 a month to get us mentioned in the press.
因此，我们曾经每月向公关公司支付 16,000 美元，以让我们在媒体上被提及。
Fortunately reporters liked us .
幸运的是记者喜欢我们。
In our advice about getting traffic from search engines (I don't think the term SEO
在我们关于从搜索引擎获取流量的建议中（我不认为 SEO 这个术语
had been coined yet), we say there are only 7 that matter: Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Lycos, and HotBot.
），我们说只有 7 个是重要的：Yahoo、AltaVista、Excite、WebCrawler、InfoSeek、Lycos 和 HotBot。
Notice anything missing?
注意到有什么遗漏了吗？
Google was incorporated that September.
谷歌于当年九月成立。
We supported online transactions via a company called Cybercash , since if we lacked that feature we'd have gotten beaten up in product comparisons.
我们通过一家名为 Cybercash 的公司支持在线交易，因为如果我们缺乏该功能，我们就会在产品比较中被打败。
But Cybercash was so bad and most stores' order volumes were so low that it was better if merchants processed orders like phone orders.
但Cybercash实在太糟糕了，大多数商店的订单量都很低，如果商家像电话订单一样处理订单会更好。
We had a page in our site trying to <a
我们的网站中有一个页面试图<a
href="http://www.ycombinator.com/viaweb/cybercash.html">talk merchants out of doing real time authorizations .
href="http://www.ycombinator.com/viaweb/cybercash.html">劝说商家不要进行实时授权。
The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive .
整个网站的组织就像一个漏斗，引导人们去试驾。
It was a novel thing to be able to try out software online.
能够在线试用软件是一件新鲜事。
We put cgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how our software worked.
我们将 cgi-bin 放入动态 URL 中，以欺骗竞争对手我们的软件是如何工作的。
We had some well known users .
我们有一些知名用户。
Needless to say, Frederick's of Hollywood got the
不用说，好莱坞的弗雷德里克获得了
most traffic.
大多数流量。
We charged a flat fee of $300/month for big stores, so it was a little alarming to have users who got lots of traffic.
我们对大商店每月收取 300 美元的固定费用，因此拥有大量流量的用户有点令人担忧。
I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth, and it was about $300/month.
我曾经计算过 Frederick's 花费了我们多少带宽，大约是每月 300 美元。
Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998, we consumed what at the time seemed a lot of bandwidth.
由于我们托管了所有商店（1998 年 6 月每个商店的页面浏览量总计超过 1000 万次），因此我们消耗了当时看似大量的带宽。
We had 2 T1s (3 Mb/sec)
我们有 2 个 T1（3 Mb/秒）
coming into our offices.
进入我们的办公室。
In those days there was no AWS.
那个时候还没有AWS。
Even colocating servers seemed too risky, considering how often things went wrong with them.
考虑到服务器出问题的频率，即使是托管服务器也似乎风险太大。
So we had our servers in our offices.
所以我们在办公室里有服务器。
Or more precisely, in Trevor's office.
或者更准确地说，在特雷弗的办公室。
In return for the unique privilege of sharing his office with no other humans, he had to share it with 6 shrieking tower servers.
作为与其他人共享办公室的独特特权的回报，他不得不与 6 台尖叫的塔式服务器共享办公室。
His office was nicknamed the Hot Tub on account of the heat they generated.
由于其产生的热量，他的办公室被昵称为“热水浴缸”。
Most days his
大多数日子他的
stack of window air conditioners could keep up.
一堆窗式空调可以跟上。
For describing pages, we had a template language called <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/rtml.html">RTML , which supposedly stood for something, but which in fact I named after Rtm.
为了描述页面，我们有一种名为 <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/rtml.html">RTML 的模板语言，据说它代表某种东西，但实际上我以 Rtm 命名。
RTML was Common Lisp augmented by some macros and libraries, and concealed under a structure editor that made it look like it had syntax.
RTML 是由一些宏和库增强的 Common Lisp，并隐藏在结构编辑器下，使其看起来像有语法。
Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have
由于我们进行了持续发布，我们的软件实际上并没有
versions.
版本。
But in those days the trade press expected versions, so we made them up.
但当时商业媒体期待的是版本，所以我们编造了它们。
If we wanted to get lots of attention, we made the version number an integer .
如果我们想获得更多关注，我们可以将版本号设置为整数。
That "version 4.0" icon was generated by our own button generator, incidentally.
顺便说一句，“4.0 版”图标是由我们自己的按钮生成器生成的。
The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though it wasn't an online store, because we wanted to experience what our users did.
整个 Viaweb 网站都是用我们的软件制作的，尽管它不是一个在线商店，因为我们想体验我们的用户所做的事情。
At the end of 1997, we released a general purpose shopping search
1997年底，我们发布了通用购物搜索
engine called <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/shoprel.html">Shopfind .
名为 <a href="http://ycombinator.com/viaweb/shoprel.html">Shopfind 的引擎。
It was pretty advanced for the time.
这在当时来说是相当先进的。
It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the different stores online and pick out the products.
它有一个可编程的爬虫，可以爬行大多数不同的在线商店并挑选产品。