pelle

I was the first corporate web master for AltaVista and joined in January 1996 to manage everything except for the actual search engine itself.

It was my first real job at a large company and taught me a lot about working in corporate America.

I saw so many mistakes made within the year I worked there that were obvious even at the time for a lot of us that worked there, but at the same time there are many similarities to what happens with other very well funded projects trying to make sense of a new technology and way of doing businesses within a large very important company with a very different business model.

I have seen virtually the exact same playbook happen in the enterprise blockchain space in multiple occasions over the last 5 years.

It is sad in many ways to see what happened to DEC (probably more so than AltaVista). It was such an innovative company back in the 60s and 70s, but unlike IBM weren't able to reinvent themselves in first the new 80s world of PCs and then later internet. Classic case of innovators dilemma.

AltaVista itself largely died, because in a misguided attempt to manage the innovators dilemma they just tried to rebrand everything network oriented they had as AltaVista.

People only remember the search engine now and for good reason. But we had AltaVista firewalls, gigabit routers, network cards, mail server (both SMTP and X400 (!!!) and a bunch of other junk without a coherent strategy. Everything that had anything to do with networking got the AltaVista logo on it.

The focus became on selling their existing junk using the now hip AltaVista brand, but the AltaVista search itself was not given priority.

I learnt a lot from my experience there, grew to be extremely skeptical, learnt to love Dilbert and also learnt how cool the DEC Hardware and Digital Unix was compared to the Sun Sparc and Solaris stuff I had to work on afterwards.

Git blame is one of the best tools for understanding the history and archeology of a large legacy code base.

There is nothing worse when you're trying to do solve some problem that you discover a giant reformatting commit typically instituted by a youngish developer.

It obviously doesn't remove the history, it just makes it so much harder to actually find out why the code was written as is.

It explains the reasons why the community should not do this. Also the community has generally updated and followed whatever the "leadership" has done so far and for good reason.

If the "leadership" decides to go this way as it appears they do, the community will likely follow them as they have done in the past.

This is a big test for Ethereum. The DAO holders were warned clearly about these kind of issues before hand, yet some sort of collective mania made very smart people go deaf.