In 1996: the power of AltaVista on CD, to privately index and search your computer files
Pioneering search engine AltaVista opened its service to the public 30 years ago. The original fast and clean internet search destination launched on December 15, 1995, with an enormous (for the time) 16 million pages indexed. Within a year of its establishment, it scaled from a day-one workload of handling 300,000 user queries to tens of millions of requests every day. That’s impressive, given that the service went live ostensibly as a tech demo for DEC’s Alpha server hardware.
AltaVista rises - propelled by powerful hardware
A big part of the initial success story of AltaVista was indeed due to the hardware that powered it. As a showcase project created by Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory, it isn’t surprising that this search engine’s performance was propped up by some of the most powerful servers of the era.
Specifically, AltaVista was launched as an Internet search service powered by a DEC Alpha 8400 Turbolaser system, say some sources. We think credit to that precise server model might be uncertain, due to upgrades over the years and exact specs being lost in the sands of time. The 8400 servers came with up to 14 CPUs running at up to 612 MHz, up to 28GB of RAM, and had 144 PCI slots.
We’ve already sketched out the explosive but almost accidental success that the youthful AltaVista would see. Its architecture, mixing a web crawler dubbed Scooter and a back-end index server called TurboVista, delivered fast and accurate results in the early days of the public adoption of the World Wide Web.
AltaVista at approximately one-year-old. Its first Web Archive capture. (Image credit: The Internet Archive
At its inception, AltaVista stood apart from the dominant Internet directories, which had become the default home pages of many. Instead of some kind of curated directory, surfers could tap into the quickly expanding full extent of the Internet thanks to Scooter and TurboVista tirelessly beavering away.
Illustrative of its rapid climb to being a top-tier Internet company, in 1996, AltaVista became the exclusive provider of search results for Yahoo! That’s the year after it launched.
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