Viaweb was a

web-based application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

that allowed users to build and

host A host is a person responsible for guests at an event or for providing hospitality during it. Host may also refer to: Places * Host, Pennsylvania, a village in Berks County * Host Island, in the Wilhelm Archipelago, Antarctica People * ...

their own

online store Online shopping is a form of electronic commerce which allows consumers to directly buy goods or services from a seller over the Internet using a web browser or a mobile app. Consumers find a product of interest by visiting the website of the ...

s with little technical expertise using a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

. The company was started in July 1995 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris (using the pseudonym "John McArtyem"),How a grad student trying to build the first botnet brought the Internet to its knees
by Timothy B. Lee, at ''

the Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

''; published November 1, 2013; retrieved November 1, 2018 and

Trevor Blackwell Trevor Blackwell (born 4 November 1969, in Canada) is a Canadian-American computer programmer, engineer, entrepreneur and roboticist based in England. Blackwell is a developer of humanoid robots. Blackwell is the founder and former CEO of Anyb ...

. Graham claims Viaweb was the first

application service provider An application service provider (ASP) is a business providing application software generally through the. ASPs that specialize in a particular application (such as a medical billing program) may be referred to as providing software as a service. ...

. Viaweb was also unusual for being partially written in the

Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. The software was originally called Webgen, but another company was using the same name, so the company renamed it to Viaweb, "because it worked ''via'' the ''

Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

''". In 1998,

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

Inc. bought Viaweb for 455,000 shares of Yahoo!

capital stock In economics, capital goods or capital are "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production" of goods and services. A typical example is the machinery used in a factory. At the macroeconomic level, ...

, valued at about $49 million, and renamed it Yahoo! Store. Viaweb's example has been influential in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

's entrepreneurial culture, largely due to Graham's widely read essays and his subsequent career as a successful venture capitalist.

References

External links

* * Discontinued Yahoo! services Internet properties established in 1995 Web applications Lisp (programming language) software Yahoo! acquisitions {{commerce-website-stub

See also

References

External links