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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Saying that you're going to "use AI" is more akin to saying "we're going to have a web application" back in 1998.

Back then a lot of startups didn't have websites, because they were making other products (hardware, boxed software, etc). If they had a website it was just a marketing page.

So saying that you were going to make a "web application" did in fact differentiate you, in that it showed your approach was very different from the boxed software folks, but it didn't tell you much beyond that.

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"Web application" came later. In the nineties it was called a "cgi web page" by your webmaster.

In the nineties, there was a huge difference between 1995 and 1998. It wasn't all that apparent to some of us until later, but things moved really fast in that timeframe. The years leading up to 2000 were almost like the imagining of approaching an event horizon or asymptote.

What you’re describing is so hard to convey to people. In 1994 the we were building raised-floor data centers with halon for suppressors and marveling at our 2GB behemoth UNIX boxes. And writing our own web application framework using CGI. In ‘99 we were renting a suite at a colo and putting our own hardware there, running ColdFusion web apps. In ‘04 we were renting half a rack at the same colo and trying not to write three tier Java servlet based apps with 1,000 line web.xml files. And then AWS happened.

CGI to ColdFusion to Java servlets. Sounds enterprise-y.

It was all very start-uppy. What were you using to build your commercial web applications in 1996 if not CGI? Mod_perl did not even exist until 1995, and FastCGI didn't exist IIRC until after Netscape released their enterprise server.

Huh. I agree with CGI, but CF certainly had alternatives.

The boring low-risk unsexy thing that works is often underrated. I didn't choose CF — at the time I argued that it was a tool for scrubs, but the VPE said, "Hey, I know it, and I know it can do the job." We launched that CF-based web site on time and sold the company for $350MM fewer than six months later. Only then did we incrementally port it to Java.

I can recall chugging along with a Pentium 133mhz and 56k dialup between 95-98.

Its fantastic to think that we didn't see 1ghz cpus and 1mb cable/dsl Internet until 2000.

The resourcefulness from that pre-2k era was amazing! It was leaps and bounds!

I know, but I'm writing to a modern audience. :)

Or from time to time, a webmistress.

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