Which meant that after they built the thing, they naturally would face competition from companies that did understand this, like its eventual conqueror Google.Ī September 1996 New York Times article described it as such:īy floating Altavista, analysts said, Digital is hoping to receive more recognition for developing a cutting-edge Internet technology. So why did AltaVista lose? Well, while it was a great idea for a marketing tool, it was almost as if DEC didn’t realize that the search engine was a worthy business on its own until it was too late.

It was groundbreaking: Someone had built an internet search engine that treated the internet with the respect it deserved.

But the name, registered in 1993, was the one that most users associated with DEC in the 1990s, thanks to AltaVista.Īt regular users could search the web for items with a degree of depth and sophistication that most other search engines could not offer at that time. In 1985, the company registered one of the first commercial domains on the internet, DEC.com, as technology companies staked their claims for top-level domains. And what better database to chew through than the World Wide Web? Hence, we got AltaVista, a shining example of what a struggling company’s server hardware could do.ĭEC was not new to the internet-hardly. DEC was an important company for computer history, but it missed out on trends as fundamental as the personal computer and (initially) the popularity of UNIX-based operating systems, and the company struggled to reshape its fortunes throughout the 1990s.ĭEC, trying to kickstart things, needed a way to promote what the Alpha could do, and it was decided that a project to highlight the Alpha’s capabilities at chewing through a massive database was just the way to do it. Founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957, the two former MIT researchers leveraged venture capital to build computers for industry-and found success by focusing on relatively small minicomputers over mainframes. How AltaVista, our first good search engine, fell into the digital abyssĭigital Equipment Corporation survived for more than 40 years as an independent company, but it was a company built for an earlier era of computing-and while it adapted better than contemporaries like Wang Laboratories, it ultimately began to struggle at the start of the 1990s, and ultimately could not find its footing into the modern day.īut on the way, less than three years before the company was sold off, DEC almost accidentally stumbled upon a mainstream web application that in many ways is more familiar to regular users than the groundbreaking PDP and VAX computer lines that the firm made its name on in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.ĭuring that period, DEC was one of the most important computer companies around.

Altavista by Fernando Calvi