Tuesday, July 6, 2004

A little bit of Internet history AltaVista was developed as a research project at Digital Equipment Research Labs in spring of 1995, and announced as a publicly available search engine in December 1995. As one of the world's first indexes of the entire World Wide Web, it became very popular very quickly, and if I remember the announcements by some of the principals right, traffic doubled every month for most of 1996. For its first few years AltaVista had a Google-like[footnote] simplicity which I think was a key factor in its initial success. It's perhaps not surprising that quite a few people from Digital Equipment's research labs now work at Google (whose search engine first became available sometime in 1998). This page at Search Engine World provides an overview of AltaVista's history: http://www.searchengineworld.com/engine/players.htm and AltaVista has a brief outline http://www.altavista.com/about/ Recently I was reviewing some old panoramas and I realized that three I shot at my work in 1996 were no longer online. A co-worker at Network Systems Laboratory (NSL) at Digital Equipment had asked me to shoot some panoramas of the Western Research Labs (WRL)/NSL machine room which housed the AltaVista servers. So in February 1996 I captured three scenes with a Canon T90 SLR and 17mm lens, and they used them on their website. Well since then, AltaVista got spun off to CMGI, while the DEC research labs ended up merged with HP's or closed down. Now the NSL website is history, as is the WRL/NSL machine room, and the panoramas went offline at some point. So here are the WRL/NSL machine room panoramas, circa early 1996: Machine Room Location 1 Machine Room Location 2 Machine Room Location 3 (to launch the VRs into FullScreen mode, click on the 'Display as FullScreen' button below the panorama). The big refrigerator size cabinet you see when panning to the right in Location-1 was a multiprocessor Alpha 8400 5/300 server (aka turboLaser), which built the web index, and the ni2 indexes most likely resided on the racks of disks to the left of the AlphaServer; while the AltaVista webserver was handled by some AlphaStation 250 4/266 systems in the rack visible in the initial view. I'm not sure where in this scene the Scooter (web crawler) computers lived, or the machine with the Usenet index. In its first year of public accessability, AltaVista handled 4 billion queries. It's amazing that this extremely popular web service (and the accompanying crawl/index infrastructure) lived in such a small amount of rack space when you see other company's webserver farms (often populated with hundreds of servers just to support one website). That's testimony to the brilliance of the DEC researchers, as well as to the power of the 64 bit Alpha processor, which was ahead of its time. This site seems to have a snapshot of the AltaVista story at an early stage: http://www.voelspriet.nl/geschiedenis.htm The description of the configuration matches what I recall in this panorama, plus gives good details some of the components behind AltaVista, like the "ni2" indexing technology, Scooter, and the Alpha machines. DEC employees had been using AltaVista internally for much of 1995 and many of us were already frequent users of the search engine when it became publicly announced. The AlphaServer 8400 could have up to 12 EV5 processors, I believe the AltaVista server at this time had eight. I recall hearing that as time went on, they had to keep upgrading it with additional processors and adding more machines to keep up with the load. Why was AltaVista in the WRL/NSL machine room? As I recall, the best reason was they had some incredible bandwidth connections to the backbone of the Internet; but also they already had the famous DECWRL gateway from DEC's internal network to the Internet there, which made it convenient to move updates from research to the live servers; plus they probably had room for it at the time compared to DEC's other machine rooms. I've been in a few machine rooms over the years, and this one seemed particularly well organized and run. Who says all those blinking lights are not cool? Later AltaVista's burgeoning equipment collection moved a block over to the then new Palo Alto Internet eXchange (PAIX) at 529 Bryant the old phone company building. These scenes were built using QTVRAS and Photoshop, and use the PhotoJPEG codec. The originals were built with the MPW tool, and used the Cinepak codec, which tended to make most scenes look worse than they were because it was designed for movie encoding and not panoramas. To those readers who notice the "Alternet" cloud drawing or other blurred inscriptions on the whiteboard--remember, these computers are gone, this machine room is no longer, the "WRL" office has been decommissioned, this network topology ceased to exist some time ago, and DEC is history. Some years later, the Librarian at Compaq's Systems Research Labs (http://research.compaq.com/SRC/home.html) asked me to shoot VRs of the library area (which is also where my office was in the building). I put together a little tour which allowed researchers in other cities or countries could check out the SRC library. Since then SRC moved to an HP building on Page Mill, and I'm pretty sure those VRs are no longer online. [footnote]: said with irony, as AltaVista was first, so Google could be described as having AltaVista-like simplicity, if only... AV hadn't later decided to clutter their pages with ads and portaljunk, so few people probably remember the early AltaVista simplicity. 7:07:17 AM

DPreview has a review of the Kodak DCS Pro SLR/c, a 14 megapixel camera. 6:45:16 AM

Evidently MacNN got fooled on July 2nd by this April Fools article: Developing QuickTime Applications for the iPod, from iPod Hacks. Ipod Hacks got permission from MacTech to post the 13 page article as a PDF file. Anyway, when you follow the link from Google, it's missing from the MacNN site -- I wonder why? 6:28:42 AM

I see that there is an interactive map of Boston provided for attendees of MacWorld this year. Macworld Expo and Conference/Boston, the International QuickTime VR Association (IQTVRA), and CheathamLane have teamed up to create an interactive look at Boston attractions and a look at Macworld Boston's new home,  the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The interactive tour contains about two dozen QuickTime VR panoramas and an interactive aerial map of the downtown area. 6:22:25 AM

On the Solstice weekend, June 19-21, more than 110 photographers in 32 countries around the world created VR panoramas with the common theme of World Heritage. This site showcases the results of their efforts. Announcing the World Wide Panorama: World Heritage Solstice 2004  http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/wwp604/ 6:15:59 AM

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