| 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. It was a great ride. |