I think I created the first digital shop and download site. Ez-legal software ( be your own lawyer, do your own divorce!) did not want to spend money mailing out disks.
I looked around and could not find any other site that had pulled this off. I used Cybercash for the credit card piece and modified the Hazel Shopping Cart (CGI)to use FTP rather than snail mail.
People would purchase and we would send a temporary FTP link to their email. Problems arose when customers newly on the web from AOL would give us just their screen names. Same with Lotus users.
Ugh, of course we had to create tests for proper email text entry. Sounds so obvious now.
We had to be careful about advertising in newsgroups or we'd receive retaliation from the users of the then non commercial internet.
It was much easier to manipulate search engines to get to the top of the list - infoseek, ask Jeeves, etc. - infoseek was the easiest. Meta words and invisible text that copied whatever other company was currently on top onto our page. Back and forth we and our competitors went. Quicken was a big competitor at the time.
Yahoo actually had a person answering the phone whenever we called about their lists.
I nor the company did not think to patent the process.
I find it misleading how so many of these articles talk about dial-up Internet at home, as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the Internet. For most people in the 90s, their first exposure to the Internet was on a public or company computer. The heat from a couple dozen CRT displays packed into a slightly too small room, was an integral part of the experience. As was "Downloading... (134 B/s)" while a couple dozen instances of Netscape all tried to cram their request packets over the 128 kbit/s ISDN line that served the whole campus.
It really was though. A lot of people with computers got their first modem to dial into BBS systems or the compuserve type systems. Small ISPs got started up and you usually found out about them through BBSes as well because they didn’t really have ad budgets and it was so niche.
A friend of mine and I split the cost of a 1200 baud modem for the c64 and took turns with it.
Of the hundred(?) or so AOL CDs that my parents and I got, only one came with a freephone (0800) number; the others were local-rate (0845) numbers that made it the same cost as all the other dialup ISPs.
For me at Columbia Gopher was almost completely gone, although the university's public terminals still used it for the intranet. I used pine for email only, preferring trn for netnews. (I would soon switch to Emacs VM for email and slrn for Usenet, both of which I still use today.) I used X Window terminals, but even there most use was the above via xterm. Netscape was horribly unreliable and slow whether via X or on PCs/Macs; the fact that we used it at all regardless shows how immediately and obviously compelling the web was.
The alternative to those X Windows terminals on the computer lab, were even older green or âmbar phosphor terminals, or even worse, terminal application from Windows 3.11 for Workgroups.
It took another two years for something better, when we got new computer labs with a mix of Windows 95 and Red-Hat PCs.
I believe Carl Malamud (Internet Multicasting Service) was behind these.
The audio files are in Sun Audio format, which all browsers supported natively back then. Chromium apparently no longer does, requires saving and opening in VLC.
I remember vividly the day "WWW" showed up in the university's Gopher menu. I asked my friend what it was all about and he said, "I looked at it; it sucked."
I looked around and could not find any other site that had pulled this off. I used Cybercash for the credit card piece and modified the Hazel Shopping Cart (CGI)to use FTP rather than snail mail.
People would purchase and we would send a temporary FTP link to their email. Problems arose when customers newly on the web from AOL would give us just their screen names. Same with Lotus users.
Ugh, of course we had to create tests for proper email text entry. Sounds so obvious now.
We had to be careful about advertising in newsgroups or we'd receive retaliation from the users of the then non commercial internet.
It was much easier to manipulate search engines to get to the top of the list - infoseek, ask Jeeves, etc. - infoseek was the easiest. Meta words and invisible text that copied whatever other company was currently on top onto our page. Back and forth we and our competitors went. Quicken was a big competitor at the time.
Yahoo actually had a person answering the phone whenever we called about their lists.
I nor the company did not think to patent the process.
It was a great ride.