Here's the very beginning of the Lasso story: in the Fall of 1995 I was
trying to publish a FileMaker Pro database on the web for the company I was
working for. There were two solutions available at the time, Eric Bickford's
WEB-FM:

http://webfm.com/webfm.html

And Russell Owens' FileMaker CGI (ROFM):

http://www.astro.washington.edu/owen/ROFM_CGI.html

Both of these were implemented using AppleScript (WEB-FM was subsequently
rewritten in C), and were therefore painfully slow (at least for the
application I was developing). Both also required use of FMP calculation
fields for formatting, which I found tedious and error-prone. In order to
overcome these limitations I decided to write my own CGI, using C/C++ so it
would be fast, and using the notion of HTML-based "templates" instead of
relying on calculation fields. That CGI eventually became Lasso 1.0.

Lasso 1.0 probably owes more of a debt technically to ROFM than WEB-FM. For
example, the notion of passing commands to the Lasso via URL/Form parameters
was taken directly from ROFM (in retrospect, using the "inline" tag is
probably a better idea). Also, I had never worked with FileMaker via
AppleScript prior to this effort, so having the AppleScript source code for
ROFM to learn from was invaluable.

No offense to Eric, but the main contribution of WEB-FM was to put the idea
into my head (and probably Bill's, too) that, "WEB-FM really sucks, and if
he's making money selling it, then I can make even more money by creating
something that's ten times better." And that's in fact what happened, since
WEB-FM was pretty quickly eclipsed by Lasso.

BTW, it's a little bit sad (at least to me) that OP has taken down the
archive of the old FMPro-CGI mailing list, since that archive contains my
original announcement in May 1996 of the "alpha" version of my new FileMaker
CGI. It was fun showing that to people.

Vince

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lasso@lists.blueworld.com
> [mailto:lasso@lists.blueworld.com] On Behalf Of m i l e s
> Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 11:13 AM
> To: lasso@lists.blueworld.com
> Subject: The Top ELEVEN That Made Lasso What It Is Today!
>

...snip..

>
> 7.) VINCE BONFANTI & ERIC BICKFORD. Vince was before my time,
> but clearly without him there would be no Lasso, the literal
> 'Grand Father'
> of pre modern Lasso. He probably won't like the term, but
> that's what it is. He wrote what was 'licensed' to FMI to
> become FMP 4.0's web companion. So if you're here because of
> CDML, that's his handy work, because the early version of
> Lasso 1.2 was what went to FMI. Eric on the other hand, he
> created macweb.com and web enabled the first FMP databases in
> 1995. Its arguable here as to who was first, Eric or Vince,
> well at least in my mind. This is MAC history we're talkin
> about here...and my memory is a lil fuzzy on this point...I
> do remember at the time that there were quite a few people
> doing something similar but not quite like this...
>

...snip...



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