While on SlashDot I caught this article about Overture to buy AltaVista. I used to work there back in 1996 as their web master and have followed the whole sordid affair since then. (Any other old Altered Vista employees out there????)

I was brought in during the time that Digital Equpiment Corp. (Now Compaq oops HP) wanted to capitalize on it’s accidental success with the original Alta Vista search service. Digital who as usual were doing poorly tried to group all it’s networking related products under the Alta Vista brand and it spin it off as a seperate company.

I guess it made sense with all the early internet frenzy. But the end result was an operation much like Dilbert in everyway. The Digital culture was traditionally Engineering led. However the management of Alta Vista was very marketing oriented. I was stuck as the main engineer in the Marketing Department and was constantly caught in cross fire between the two departments.

How about when we were getting ready to release the first version of our AltaVista Personal Search edition. For searching your hard disk and email. The development team were a bunch of class A guys out in Australia. Who received their 4 weeks notice 2 weeks before the release deadline of the product. Hmm.

There was also the near religious fervor about the quality of the AltaVista search engine. I used to quietly mention that Excite turned up more relevant results. But this was always laughed at. The true secret behind the search engine was the TurboLaser the AlphaServer 8400. When I left we had I think 12 machines with each 10 cpu’s in production and 2 waiting to be thrown in if the average query time was more than 2 seconds.

I did get to work with some cool people such as Jim Gettys, Dan Kalikow and Richard Seltzer.

Many of the projects I worked on were fun as well. I did everything from perl to tcl, to Oracle to ISAPI. And I got my first real exposure to real corporate internet security. I believe Digital was one of the first companies to have such a strategy inplace.