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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.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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
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). :-)
March 7, 1995, birth of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
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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