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Yahoo, Apache, Ebay, Amazon, Netscape Celebrate 10 Year Anniversaries
tagish writes "Roy Fielding writes on the Apache dev mailing list: 10 years ago today, the Apache Group decloaked with the creation
of the new-httpd archive and initial accounts on hyperreal.org.
I had the lucky timing of having the first message archived on
the list, though we had actually been talking about what to do
for at least a week before that (sadly, without any archives)." At the same time, Mike Porter simply writes "Yahoo celebrates its tenth anniversary on March 2nd." News about some other anniversaries available via an MSNBC article.
Happy BD, to the lot of them. Interesting to see how some of them have grown into being huge companies (amazon), and continue to develop, others being manhandled by opposition (Netscape)illegaly, and yet others outdone by fair competition and still being in business (yahoo).
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I personally credit Filo with making open source accepted...when the market cap topped $150 billion (for a short time) it was hard to argue you could not make money with open source.
I really want to know how exactly a site like Yahoo! makes money. Are click-thru ads really that profitable?
Someone explain this, I'm in the dark.
Sony ha
From the MSNBC article: "Relative youngster Google has been lauded for reaching $1 billion in sales in just six years. Well, Amazon did it in four, Yahoo in five and eBay achieved it in seven. Compare those companies with Wal-Mart, which aged to 18 before it could slap the phrase, 'the billion dollar company' on its annual report; and McDonald's took 24 years to hit the benchmark."
Page and Brin of Google, Filo and Yang of Yahoo were in Stanford Ph. D. program; Jeff Bezos of Amazon graduated from Princeton (EE and CS); Pierre Omidyar, Ebay founder, went to Tufts (CS); Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, went to Princeton and Harvard. What's the lesson here? Hitting the books pays. I guess.
Sun and Fun
I guess we're here now, and we probably have been for some time - but that appears to have quietly slipped in while I wasn't looking.
Then I moved into a position with a company selling a solution with PAID FOR LICENSES of Netscape included. We were happy to pay the fee though, because it did things for us that simply didn't work otherwise on Windows 3.1(/1) - the choice of clients of my old employers...
Now, although I thought those large warrior women were around a bit longer ago than 10 years, at least I know what they are... but what's an "ebay"??
Here's my experience with Apache about (almost) ten years ago. I was working at a place where we were running NCSA httpd 1.3 on SunOS 4.1. Our web site had become more popular due to a news article or something. Performance was bad because NCSA httpd waited to receive a new TCP connection, and then forked a child to service that connection. The child served the request, then immediately exited. Not a horrible model when the web was some guy's fun little research project, but not optimal either.
So, we needed something better. I had heard about this new httpd called Apache, which had started off life as a series of patches to NCSA httpd. Hence the name: it was a-patchy-server. I thought the pun was mildly lame, but when I read the info on how it worked, I was impressed: here was an httpd that forked off N different httpd server children in advance and then communicated with them to assign tasks as TCP connections came in. It would start out with N of them, and if all N were busy at the time a new connection came in, it would create child N+1, and so on. Performance was supposed to be something like an order of magnitude better, and since it was a branch of NCSA httpd, it could read all our config files (although we'd want to tweak them a little to get good performance).
NCSA httpd 1.3 had been released, but no new changes had come from NCSA in a while, and these Apache people seemed to have gotten a lot accomplished in a short time, so I had a good feeling about them. So, I talked to my boss and suggested that this new Apache thingamabob might be the solution to all our problems.
He thought about it and decided he wasn't sure some obscure bunch of hotshot developers creating their own rogue branch from the well-respected NCSA code were the type of people we should expect to be around for long. He thought it'd be much safer to just wait for NCSA httpd 1.4, which was supposed to have its own pre-forking implementation. So we did.
A few years later, I had to look back and laugh that my boss was skeptical that this weird new Apache thing could ever catch on. But all in all, there was nothing wrong with his decision. He may've been a little too conservative, but a good system administrator makes decisions that will make the system work, and doesn't let the coolness factor of this or that technology sway him.
On the other hand, I get some satisfaction from looking back and knowing that my gut instinct was right on target.
On the other other hand, I get even more satisfaction from looking back and realizing I'm not a systems administrator anymore, and I've actually manage to escape to a different part of the technical universe (knock on wood). :-)
I remember the spring semester of my final year at college (1994) when they added the www and mosaic browsers to the existing internet services.
:-)
I'm pretty sure the first time I saw yahoo it was a single page -- http://www.yahoo.com/yahoo.html. Originally it was a list of a hundred or so links on a single page.
In the first few months there the "list of links" was a common feature on a lot of sites. It was related to the best feature of gopher -- here's all the places to go from here.
March 7, 1995, birth of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
10th year of "Year of Linux"
- 9th year of "Linux in the server room"
- 8th year of "Linux in the enterprise"
- 7th year of "Linux in a cluster"
- 6th year of "Linux on the Desktop"
- 5th year of "Random WTF Linux (e.g. pen, Dreamcast)"
- 4th year of "We need some standards in Linux"
- 3rd year of "Company X Aligning with Linux"
- 2nd year of "Linux means Communism(tm)"
- 1st year of "Linux means Litigation(tm)"
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Oh come on. Yahoo didn't copy anything. Advanced users of yahoo were using search.yahoo.com all the time and it was simply like that.
w ww2.yahoo.com/ . So, Google copied Yahoo's clean interface?
Also http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http://
You guys may hate all the information on front page but there are people already using it. Thats why Yahoo is still nr1 destination on web.
Have fun with ex NSA founded Google which harvests your private mail text to show you relevant ads. Wonder what would you geeks do if any other company did it.
Have fun censoring me too, mods.
So, I'm confused how the current FAQ can even endeavor to call it "incorrect". At the least they should say "no longer correct" or something.
It's called "rewriting history". It used to be that only dicatorial governments who strictly censored newspapers and other media and dictated what was taught in school could rewrite history to make past events cease to exist. Now, with modern internet technology, that capability is available to anyone!
Seriously though, the idea that Apache started out as a patch to another program is a seen as a bad thing by the current group. I agree with them. It is bad to have people think that your code is somehow smaller than or less important than some other thing.
Not that their situation is unique. The very high quality LAME mp3 encoder used to stand for (Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder) because it was a patch against the Fraunhaufer dist10 MP3 encoder source code. That changed though when they purged the dist10 code and rewrote necessary routines.
Also, WinAmp was originally a port of a command line mp3 player called amp. As they gained popularity they replaced all of the amp code with thier own MP3 decoding routines.
My other first post is car post.
/me looks at www.hyperreal.org Hmm, so Apache was created by drugged up ravers? Well, that explains a lot... ;)
And Google Groups is always a lot of fun.. you can see Jeff Bezos asking some questions about marketing Amazon here, and even searching for developers here
I know somewhere the very first attempt at a bookstore by Jeff Bezos is still archived, but I can't remember where..
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