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Once we had a name, we really got to hacking-well, actually it
was Alex Chaffee who did all the work. The rest of us just breathed
down his neck and made comments that he mostly ignored. We started
with a simple text-based database backend populated with the few
existing applets and other resources that we found on Sun's "Applets
at Other Sites" page and on a few other sites on the Net.
Two weeks after we started writing code, the site went live and
we commenced our marketing strategy: Build it and they will come.
After only a few postings to the new Java mailing list (there
wasn't yet a Usenet group), Gamelan began to receive hits.
Among the first of them were a number of visits by students from
universities in Indonesia wondering what this new Gamelan site
was about. Soon after that we were paid very cordial visits by
various Javanese dignitaries: the cultural ambassador for Indonesia,
and the head of the largest Gamelan orchestra in the USA. The
ambassador was very interested in our project and thought it was
wonderful that a New York Internet company would create a major
Web site to promote Gamelan music and Javanese culture. We tried
to explain that we were promoting Java software, and he seemed
to understand. However, as he left our office, he happily suggested
that we collaborate on future Gamelan performances in the USA.
Within a few weeks, Gamelan became the central site for Java on
the Internet. Java developers and programmers from around the
world flocked to the site to find out what was going on. We were
pleased to see domains from the best labs and companies in the
world in our log files, coming back every day, and sometimes every
few hours. Soon our applet listing was larger than Sun's. Not
long after that, Sun's Java Team abdicated to us, stopped listing
new applets on their Java site, and simply linked users to Gamelan
instead. Within a few weeks of launch, Gamelan was the most successful
site EarthWeb had ever built. And it didn't stop there-Gamelan
kept growing and growing.
We received our one millionth hit on the thirtieth day after launch.
Soon we were receiving up to 200,000 hits a day and we moved the
site from its training wheels (a shared Sparc 10) to a dedicated
Sparc 20. We started running ads for Symantec. Within two months
hit levels had grown beyond 500,000 hits per day and even the
new server was groaning. We appealed to Sun for help and Alex
Davidson and Kate Christopherson, of Sun's Netra Internet Server
division, came through by providing us with sponsorship in the
form of a custom built, prototype Ultra Sparc server. On the basis
of this new, much faster machine, we launched the second version
of Gamelan, which was more graphically intensive and incorporated
a number of our own Java applets into the interface. A few months
later, we moved the site and the Ultra to a dedicated 10MB port
on a T3 Internet hub point. Now we were really wired!
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