Livingston: This was a new idea, right Do you remember when it came in Font

Encode Data Matrix in Font Livingston: This was a new idea, right Do you remember when it came

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

we didn t want to learn. It seemed like this huge steaming turd that was best just avoided. So the main thing we thought when we first had the idea of doing web-based applications was, Thank God, we don t have to write software on Windows.

worked with us on Artix. He gave us $10,000. After about 6 weeks or so, it seemed like it was going to be more work than we thought, so we got Trevor Blackwell to work on it too.

Livingston: How did you know Trevor Graham: Trevor was in grad school with Robert. I asked Robert, Who s the

smartest grad student in the computer science program and he said Trevor. I couldn t believe it actually, because at the time I thought Trevor was a total goofball.

Livingston: But you were soon convinced he was talented Graham: Trevor is a prodigy, in the original sense of the word. When we first recruited him, we asked him to write this little piece of image-manipulating software, to kind of test him out. For 2 weeks we heard nothing from him, and I had pretty much written him off. Finally he sent me an email asking me to come to his office to see what he d done. I went there expecting to see this new image software, and instead he s rewritten our entire system in Smalltalk everything I wrote, plus everything Rtm wrote. I basically said, OK, you re hired. Now go and write the damn image software, because we re not rewriting everything in Smalltalk. Livingston: You and Robert were already good friends, right Graham: Oh yeah. We had been friends then for about 10 years since way

back. In fact, I think in the beginning it was only because he was friends with me that Robert even did this. In the beginning he was just humoring me. It was a year before he thought Viaweb had any chance of ever making any money.

conversation where he said something like, We ve been working on this thing for a whole month, and it s still not finished. It s funny in retrospect, because we were still working on it 3 years later. At the time, I was just thinking about how to get him to keep working on it for another month. But that was the main reason we got Trevor. Robert basically rebelled, so I thought, All right, we need more programmers.