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.
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.
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....
