<story><title>Viaweb&apos;s First Business Plan (1995)</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gist</author><text>&amp;gt; 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 &lt;i&gt;believe&lt;/i&gt; that a secure link is necessary, and spending this $5000 would give Webgen a much more professional look.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;This part I found interesting in it&amp;#x27;s naivete even back then for one thing &amp;#x27;no reports of&amp;#x27; does not equate to &amp;#x27;not happening&amp;#x27;: [1]&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; But catalog companies may &lt;i&gt;believe&lt;/i&gt; that a secure link is necessary&lt;p&gt;This sounds even more like &amp;#x27;younger person willing to take chances older experienced person to risk adverse&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;[1] Even today I can say &amp;#x27;no reports of houses in my neighborhood being broken into&amp;#x27; but I don&amp;#x27;t really have an accurate source for things going on in my area only ad hoc.</text></comment>
<story><title>Viaweb&apos;s First Business Plan (1995)</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>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&amp;#x27;s revenue. Dropped Yahoo Store.&lt;p&gt;It was written in LISP, incidentally. Only language back then that could represent an HTML tree easily.</text></comment>