Talk:AltaVista
what is the genesis of the word Alta Vista. I am not referring to the company but the root language. Here in Ottawa you have Alta Vista drive, now that has nothing to do with the company. Any answers? Aseem in Ottawa
In Whistler, BC, a sub division overlooking Alta Lake is named Alta Vista as well. Already, Microsoft code names projrcts after the resort town. Alex, 2 hours from Whistler, not close enough
- "alta vista" is spanish. "alta" means "high", "vista" means "view" (or "vista" in english as well). It's a fairly generic name. (BTW, the specific term for 'origin of a word' is etymology)
Seems to me that altavista is the only search engine for videos. Do they hold a patent on that?
Alta Vista (disambiguation)
- Since a few small places use the name "Alta Vista" (with a space), we might want to think about turning Alta Vista (with a space) into a disambiguation page, with a link to this article as its first entry. Currently, no article links directly to Alta Vista, so making it the disambig page, would cause no harm. I started the disambig page Alta Vista (disambiguation) because altering Alta Vista itself, should probably only be done with advance agreement. --rob 22:47, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
Not THAT Mike Burrows
The link to Mike Burrows, of DEC SRC, Microsoft Research and Google, co-developer of the bz2 compression algorithm and (as correctly pointed out) one of the AltaVista people isn't the same Mike Burrows who designs bicycles.
Alta Vista's beginnings
I continously see references to AltaVista being launched in 1995, but this is not correct. I was an engineer at DEC from 1989-1993 and was a user of AltaVista in 1992 while there. I clearly remember that it was the only internet search engine at the time, even while the internet was still a large user of uucp protocols and before portals like Yahoo existed (which according to it's own web site was founded in 1994). Even email was often path specificed (ie. "fred!test!ibm!") and often went through DEC's free email gateway.
When AltaVista first came out, it was a free and volunteer service supported by DEC employees. 1995 is probably a public marketing launch date in response to companies making brand and money off similar technologies. We need to report on the real beginning of AltaVista and correct the historical account.
Keith Barrett DECmessageQ developer at that time
possible error
In the article is the statement "Each machine had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard disk space, ..." -- both of those numbers seem outrageously large, especially for 1998. I believe that should be "MB", not "GB", so it would read "Each machine had 130 MB of RAM, 500 MB of hard disk space, ...", much more reasonable numbers at that time. Even today (2008), 130GB of RAM would be crazy hard on most computers. No, actually, 130 GB of RAM is impossible on most current computers. But these were DEC machines, however, so who knows what cutting-edge crap they loaded on them.
I'm not about to change it (GB to MB) without confirmation from somebody. Afterall, as I said, DEC had been very cutting-edge in the past, and maybe these were really whack machines. And the disk space number could be correct (500GB) as DEC has long been a provider of cluster solutions (lots of disk drives hooked together and accessed as a unit).
Anybody know? Any old DEC engineers out there? 76.243.129.217 (talk) 21:36, 27 June 2008 (UTC)
confusing article
At least the introduction needs to be rewritten. Even after reading the entire article, one isn't sure if Alta Vista still exists as an independent search engine and/or company or not. --Espoo 09:20, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
Untrue Statement
"Rationalized that AltaVista would be a showcase for its new line of servers."
This is not true. It was run by employee volunteers who, like a few othre major companies and most colleges, were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.
kgb 21:11, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
poor quality article
There are several "facts" here that needs to be sourced or removed:
"AltaVista was misunderstood by its parent company." "Digital Equipment Corporation, a hardware company, missed the potential of the Internet." "[Digital] rationalized that AltaVista would be a showcase for its new line of servers." "in 1999 Compaq ... alienat[ed] their core userbase" "The failed attempt at a 'portal' was dropped" (this last statement alone needs to source no less than three separate claims: it was #1 an attempt at being a portal, #2 it was failed, and #3 it was dropped)
Furthermore, the text says "but it continued to lose marketshare, especially to Google" but no previous discussion of lost marketplace (or market position at all) exists.
Moving on, the text says: AltaVista was also one of the numerous websites which promised "free email for life", only to subsequently reverse this policy by charging a subscription fee for its email services. This is not correct. AV sold off their email services, to Iname, which later was bought by Mail.com. (I started an account at AV which is still free at Mail.com myself. While riddled with ads and clearly inferior to the mail services of Yahoo and Google, it's fully functional - and still free)
All in all, a very poor article clearly biased against the company. 195.24.29.51 08:51, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
hello
- I agree that this article sucks. I think that AltaVista deserves better, since they played an important role in the "early" (pre-Google) days of the Web's history.--85.124.169.143 00:38, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
other AltaVista products
I don't see the tunnel (early VPN) and firewall products mentioned at all... --67.116.30.57 22:14, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Fair use rationale for Image:AltaVista.svg
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