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A comment on Webvan.

Re:Webvan by CPLX on Monday July 22, 2019 @04:04PM (#20501791)
The part this thread seems to be missing is that like we didn’t have much internet back then.

Sure you didn’t have it in your pocket, but also most people didn’t have it in their house either. And if you did you had to dial with a phone line (which is a thing attached to a wall) and make it so you couldn’t get any calls while you were doing it.

And it would take like 41 seconds for a grainy picture of a banana to roll in from top to bottom. And you’d get disconnected and lose your cart. And so on.

It was different back then.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Webvan by davidjnelson on Monday July 22, 2019 @07:03PM (#20503093)
Lol, amazing how fast the internet has gotten. Started on a 14.4 modem, now I’m being told gigabit fiber is available in my neighborhood. Just... wow.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Webvan by bjhkx on Monday July 22, 2019 @04:10PM (#20501847)
Disconnected, okay. Lose your cart... why? Cookies and sessions existed back then.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Webvan by useful on Monday July 22, 2019 @04:44PM (#20502166)
cookies are sent with every request, you were lucky to have >28k modem back then. Json didn't really exist, xml was king.

There were plenty of reasons. Apache needed a mod to store a session in a cookie instead of a url and HTTPS was really hard to do. Java had its way, PHP had another, ASP had another... everything was different and there were no patterns.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Webvan by rongenre on Monday July 22, 2019 @04:54PM (#20502230)
56k modems were pretty routine by 1999 and ISDN (It still does nothing) was a thing. But by 2000, DSL rollouts were starting to happen.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Webvan by clairity on Monday July 22, 2019 @05:17PM (#20502407)
my area at the time was one of the first to get cable modems. 10mbps (and as much as 40) vs 56k dial-up. it was heavenly. the webvan site would have been no match, had it been offered where i lived.
[ Parent | on HN ]