[Info-vax] AltaVista background information

[John Wallace]

On Oct 15, 8:52 pm, MG <marcog... at SPAMxs4all.nl> wrote:
> Recently I thought about AltaVista, the search engine I used in the
> 1990s, without any doubt my favourite one back then.  I remember the
> "[d|i|g|i|t|a|l]" branding well, but unfortunately didn't really look
> beyond that back then.  (I was also quite young.)
>
> I was wondering, are there documents (articles, books and so forth)
> telling a thing or two about how it came into being and outlining
> the technological foundation?  I'm, needless to say, interested if
> VMS was involved.  (Else Tru64 or any other DEC operating system
> and hardware platform of interest.)
>
>   - MG

Digital? Yes.
VMS? No. Tru64? Yes. Alpha? Yes.

No VMS, and one of the reasons there was no VMS was that Altavista was
(iirc) intended as a showcase for what becomes possible when you have
a 64bit address space. VMS didn't have real 64bit support at that
time.

I was going to suggest you have a look at the Digital Technical
Journal, which is always informative, but it seems they didn't do an
article on Altavista Search. Altavista Mail, Altavista Firewall, etc
are covered, but not the one that started the Altavista brand.

The Wikipedia article says there are books on the subject. I'm not
familiar with any of them.

Maybe someone else can add some more detail - but there won't be much
VMS content in AltaVista Search.

There was (at least) one search engine that started life on VMS.
Northernlight.com was in some ways more like an online searchable
library than what we now think of as a classical search engine.
Content was organised by subject area, and some of the content was
"for fee" stuff as well as the usual "for free" stuff. They're still
around, and still in the same basic line of business. No idea if VMS
is in their business.