
Hardware requirements for running AltaVista search engine in 1996 - gionn
https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576
======
J_Darnley
Just think. Those machines ran a search engine. Today, only one--perhaps two--
would be capable of running a web browser, even then extremely slowly.

~~~
pjc50
This is tragically accurate. Using
[http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm](http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm) I
see that RAM was about £30/Mb in 1996, meaning that the Firefox process I'm
typing this in which is using 400Mb of RAM would have cost over ten thousand
dollars.

(I remember upgrading my PC to 4Mb so I could play DOOM round about then)

~~~
dexterdog
To be fair the price was 1/10 that a year later.

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BryantD
By 1998, there were way more than five back end servers. I don't remember
exactly how many 8400s we had -- 20? 40? Something in that range. They'd gone
up to 12 GB of RAM apiece, which came on boards the size of a fairly large
baking sheet. The servers were as big as a refrigerator.

The primary datacenter was a floor above PAIX in the middle of downtown Palo
Alto. Pricy server space.

Oft-forgotten bit of history: Elon Musk's first big success was selling Zip2
to AltaVista (under Compaq).

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dekhn
The Alphas of that age were great servers. It's not really surprising that
they used an AlphaServer for the indexer, and just one of them. Clustering was
still pretty exotic technology at the time (although IIRC VMS already had it).
At this time (which was the time I started using altavista, because it was
"fast") our machine room had a few alphaservers in it, and the managers and I
were always arguing over whether Intel boxes would replace Alphas (and HP, and
IBM, and SGI) as high performance computing servers.

When Google came along I proudly add their web search form to my home page
with the note "They use linux" because I felt it validated my belief that
Linux would become the server platform of choice.

~~~
BryantD
AltaVista was originally a DEC project, which was the biggest reason for using
Alphas. It's a search engine and a marketing tool! But I agree, the speed was
great. There was a spare TurboLaser 8400 which was occasionally used for
SETI@Home and usually lived in the top five individual servers when it was
looking for aliens.

~~~
dekhn
Yep, back in those days I loved DEC and AltaVista and Alphas, although they
were out of my budget, so I purchased linux machines. In the lab next to me
was a bunch of old DEC-heads who upgraded their alphaservers to Tru64 and then
TruCluster. I have a great deal of respect, especially for late-stage Alphas
such as clusters of GS1280s running TruCluster. They were engineered for
throughput and reliability and I know many important loads ran on them.

I don't think that DEC ever really managed to market AltaVista and Alpha to
the extent it could have in the rapidly growing period of the Internet.

~~~
hga
_I don 't think that DEC ever really managed to market AltaVista and Alpha to
the extent it could have in the rapidly growing period of the Internet._

In 1996 they had some sort of program to provide discounted hardware to web
startups, I worked for a company that took advantage of it, and while I was
there started adding their great high availability system.

This revealed perhaps their biggest problem, a legacy system, you might say,
of configuring and selling hardware, the very process of buying it from them
was difficult and required acquiring all sorts of domain knowledge.

Some years earlier when they were all proud of their expert system that would
correctly configure a system, I compared it to buying a Sun workstation where
the most difficult decision was choosing your preferred keyboard (e.g. old
school Sun/UNIX vs. PC layout, and language), and the right power cord for you
country.

I think they largely failed to capitalize on the dot.com boom, especially as
COMPAQ was fumbled just about everything they were doing when they bought DEC
in 1998, and when the dot.com bubble went bust....

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technomancy
I really hope this whole linking-to-an-image thing is just a fad. Fascinating
information; it's super annoying not to be able to copy bits out of it or zoom
in without blurring.

~~~
jamessb
I agree.

In this case, the text of the email is on the Wikipedia article for AltaVista:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista)

~~~
lucb1e
Nice find, perhaps the link could be changed to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#Origins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#Origins)
?

(In case it does, original link was
[https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576](https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/655306196128280576)
)

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joeyspn
AltaVista was my favourite search engine when I was a teenager... I remember
how back in the day I refused to change to that newcomer named Google...
Amazed to know it was running in only 5 servers with those specs! It says it
all about how many people was connected to the net in the early days of
commercial web. I'd love to know the concurrent connections they had to deal
with...

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stesch
Any information which programming languages and server software they used?

~~~
dekhn
I believe it was in C, written mostly by Mike Burrows (also known for the
Burrows-Wheeler transform). He went on to work at Google, where he has had an
extremely productive career building some of the most fundamental technologies
at google (Chubby) as well as their high performance primitives
([https://www.chromium.org/developers/lock-and-condition-
varia...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/lock-and-condition-variable)).

He is one of the few people I've worked with who is a veritable genius
programmer. He understands atomic locking at the physics level.

~~~
BryantD
This is correct, although as I recall every now and then Mike rewrote core
functionality in assembly for speed.

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jb613
Perhaps a lesson to learn here is consider who won. While AltaVista focused on
physical details (number of servers, resource usage, etc...) they missed the
boat on the bigger picture - how to significantly improve search engine
results. Brin&Page did, filed a couple of patents, secured investment,
registered google.com, scaled, etc and won.

Perhaps this is another example of what you measure is what you become. I
realize it's just one email and we're missing all sorts of context, but to me,
this email seems to boast at their technical prowess of being able to pull off
the scaling aspects. Perhaps this email indicates measuring physical resources
was a higher priority than _DRASTICALLY_ improving search engine results.

~~~
hga
Maybe a bit more nuanced than that. Google gave better search results for mere
mortals, there was a period during which I used AltaVista because it's old
school search inputs allowed me to better find what I wanted (and I miss a lot
of that nowadays, especially proximity searching).

But it was definitely branded to show off DEC's hardware.

