AltaVista (1995)

Launched December 1995

It’s difficult to imagine now, but once upon a time finding stuff on the web was *hard*.  In the early 1990s, the number of web sites grew from 623 at the end of 1993 to a quarter of a million in mid-1996.. but there was no reliable way to search for information on all those thousands of websites all at once.

In early 1994, the web directory Yahoo! was founded which attempted to catalogue the web by category. If you wanted to research a topic, you would have to drill down through Yahoo!’s categories in much the same way as using a library.

In mid-1994 the world’s first “full text” search engine was launched, called WebCrawler. But it only indexed a small part of the rapidly growing web, and the results were extremely hit-and-miss.

But in December 1995 the first recognisably modern search engine was launched. Predating Google by several years, Digital’s AltaVista service made the first real attempt to index a large part of the ever-growing web, and made a good effort to sort search results in a way that was meaningful to users. Originally the site was hosted at altavista.digital.com, only moving to altavista.com in 1998.
 The effect was dramatic. It no longer took hours to find a piece of information on the web, but instead AltaVista could give the answer in a few seconds (usually) and the result you were looking for was usually on the first page.. or first few pages. AltaVista had some pretty advanced search functions which allowed users to tailor their results further.

The effect was dramatic. It no longer took hours to find a piece of information on the web, but instead AltaVista could give the answer in a few seconds (usually) and the result you were looking for was usually on the first page.. or first few pages. AltaVista had some pretty advanced search functions which allowed users to tailor their results further.

As is the case today, AltaVista made it easy to find obscure or precise bits of information, but was less good when it came to general topics. This meant that most users would use a combination of AltaVista and Yahoo! when researching topics.

Built in part to showcase Digital’s Alpha-based processors,  AltaVista temporarily transformed the stuffy old Digital Equipment Corporation into a major player.. for a short time.

But AltaVista had a significant flaw. The search engine results were initially based almost entirely on “on-page” factors (such as the title, headings and word density of a page) which meant that the the search engine could be easily manipulated, leading to a rise in search engine spam. When rivals Google came to market they used a fundamentally different approach which leaned heavily on “off-page” factors such as PageRank.

AltaVista grew quickly and in 1999 the majority was sold to an investment firm which valued the site at over $2.7 billion. A combination of the collapse of the Dot-Com Boom and the rise of Google severely dented AltaVista and after being passed around various owners it shut down completely in 2011.

For a generation of early internet  users, AltaVista transformed the way they used the web. Without doubt it helped to make the early web accessible and contributed to its phenomenal growth in the late 1990s. But sadly in the post-Google world, AltaVista has largely been forgotten as the great pioneer it once was,.

Microsoft Windows 95 (1995)

Released August 1995

Windows 95 was the fourth major release of Microsoft’s graphical operating system, launched nearly 10 years after Windows 1.0 and 20 years before today’s Windows 10.

Since the Apple Macintosh popularised the idea of graphic interfaces in 1984, Microsoft had been trying to catch up. The original first two versions of Windows were little more than crude interfaces running on top of DOS, but Windows 3.0 in 1990 and especially Windows 3.1 in 1991 had proven to be very successful, even if they weren’t as sophisticated as Apple’s offerings.

Windows 95 was still underpinned by the ancient DOS architecture, but the immediately obvious thing was a completely different user interface centred on the somewhat infamous “Start” button that lasted all the way up to Windows 8. But Windows 95 also introduced better multitasking, plug-and-play, better disk support, properly integrated network and superior memory management.

By 1995 rivals Apple had System 7 (later Mac OS 7), but although it was superior in many ways to Windows, it was much more expensive to buy a Mac than a Windows PC. A combination of stiff competition from Microsoft and some very poor business decisions from Apple nearly drove Apple at of business.

It wasn’t the only competition for Microsoft. A few years previously, Microsoft had broken up with long-time partners IBM. At the time of the break-up, Microsoft and IBM had been working on a revision of OS/2 which was meant to be the “next generation” of Windows. By 1995, IBM had started eating into the Windows market with OS/2 2.0 followed by OS/2 3.0 (known as “Warp”).


Although OS/2 was in many ways better than Windows, it was essentially an IBM-only product and you would have to buy an IBM personal computer to run it on. And because IBM’s computers were expensive, most people bought something else… and that something else would be running Windows 95.

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Windows 95 was also the first version of Windows to offer Internet Explorer, although Netscape Navigator (which eventually evolved into Firefox) had been available for some time before that. Integrated TCP/IP networking meant that Windows 95 machines could access the Internet, such as it was 20 years ago.

Later versions of Windows 95 added USB support, and the operating system had a major overhaul in 1998 with the highly successful Windows 98 environment. However, the final revision of this operating system line was Windows Millennium Edition (“ME”) launched in 2000, which was buggy and unpopular.

Even in 1995, the writing was on the walls for Windows 95 and its successors. Microsoft had launched Windows NT 3.1 in 1993, followed by versions 3.5 and 3.51 which shared the clunky interface of Windows 3.1 on top, but underneath NT was a much more modern and extremely capable operating system. Windows NT 4.0 in 1996 added a Windows 95 style interface, and eventually after several revisions it evolved into Windows 10, designed to a single OS that can run on PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Almost every version of Windows in user today runs on the NT core, so in the long term Windows 95 itself was a dead-end. However, it cemented Microsoft’s dominance of the PC industry and left them in a position that seemed unassailable until the rise of tablets and smartphones… many of which were built by the same Apple that Microsoft nearly killed off in the nineties.