Yahoo Puts AltaVista To Death 176
An anonymous reader writes "Remember AltaVista from the late '90s? Yahoo is finally pulling life support and letting Altavista die a noble death after over 15 years of hard service." You can only take so many years of being a running gag.
Re:Back in the Days of Kerosene Internet (Score:5, Informative)
Now, wasn't it astavista that provided me with so much reasonably priced software?
No, it was www.astalavista.box.sk
Re:AltaVista (Score:2, Informative)
It's already gone- altavista.digital.com doesn't open!
Re:Running gag (Score:2, Informative)
Lycos, Excite, Inktomi...
Don't forget those AOL signup CD-ROM's (often >1) that fell out of the bags you brought home from CompUSA.
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AltaVista (Score:5, Informative)
What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.
Where it all began (Score:5, Informative)
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
Re:Asta Lavista (Score:2, Informative)
That's a funny way to say .box.sk, Ahnold :)
Re:Where it all began (Score:3, Informative)
Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free.
Except OpenText/Yahoo who did it a year earlier.
They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines.
No they didn't. They had a single massive DEC Alpha Server with some untold number of GB of RAM, which at the time was unprecedented. Using racks of machines was an idea developed later by Eric Brewer from Excite.
The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
It was released as a demo of what a single AlphaServer machine could do. The project started by people who thought "wouldn't it be cool if..." and then the marketing droids released it as a demo. The single machine architecture bottlenecked their index size by the way. The entire architecture relied on being on main memory on a single machine and when the web grew faster that the amount of RAM available they didn't know what to do.