Founders at Work.pdf

206 Founders at Work
At least, we thought everyone wanted online stores. There was a lot of talk
in the press about e-commerce then, because Netscape was doing a big PR
campaign for their IPO. They had to convince everyone that the Internet would
be economically important, and they picked the most literal example they could
think of. Actually most merchants didn’t want to sell online, not yet. But when
they started to want to, we were there.
Livingston: Take me back to when you were first working on Viaweb. What
were some of the first things you did? Did you have any funding?
Graham: In the very, very beginning, no, we didn’t have any funding. It was
just me and Rtm [Robert Morris] in his apartment. It was in the middle of
summer. Rtm was in grad school, but because it was the summer he had some
free time. We just said, “OK, we’ll try and write a prototype.” We wrote the first
version in a couple days.
One of the unusual things about Viaweb was that it worked over the Web.
That’s where the name came from. It was a web-based application—as far as I
know, the first one. But in the very beginning, it wasn’t web-based. At first it
was going to be software that you would use on your desktop computer to build
a website that you would then upload to a server. Then in the first couple days
of working on it, we had this idea, “Hey, maybe we could make this run on the
server and have the user control it by clicking on links on a web page.” So we sat
down and tried to write it and, sure enough, you could write a program that
worked this way.
Livingston: This was a new idea, right? Do you remember when it came
to you?
Graham: At the time most of the hackers we knew used this program called
X Windows, where you could be using a program that was running on some
remote machine, but it would be drawing stuff on your screen. There was also
this idea of an X terminal, or xterm for short, which was a computer that did
nothing but run X Windows—all the brains were on the server. So the way we
thought of web-based applications at first was using the browser as an xterm.
Could we just treat the browser like an xterm, and have the application running
on the server?
So it wasn’t that huge a conceptual leap if you came from our world, but it
was a bit of a conceptual leap. I remember very well when I had the idea. I was
staying in this spare room in Robert’s apartment during the summer, because at
the time I was living in New York, and I woke up one morning with the idea. As
I was lying there half asleep this idea of making the software run on the server
popped into my head and it was so dramatic that it woke me up. I sat up in bed,
like the letter L, thinking, “We have to go try this.”
Livingston: Do you remember how you felt when it worked?
Graham: I was pretty excited, because it meant we could start a company without
having to learn Windows. The prospect of having to write desktop software
was horrifying to us, because at the time, writing desktop software meant writing
Windows software. Neither of us knew how to write Windows software and