Notes on some notes from back in the day when we gave ourselves grandiose titles to make up for the lack of grandiose salaries

[There's a reason they're called stacks] [1]

Hmm, I thought. I wonder what book that is? I caught a spiral bound book I didn't recognize in a stack of books (all my books are stacked horizontally—I fit more books that way). I pulled it out and found myself holding a sketch book. I popped it open and was amused by what I found:

[THE NOTEBOOK OF PROJECT PROMETHEUS] [2]

Written across the first page of the notebook, in pencil, was:

THE NOTEBOOK OF PROJECT

PROMETHEUS

AKA (Also Known As)

BRAINSTORM

AKA

CYBER411

AKA

C4

It was the project notebook for the C implementation [3] of the suite of metasearch engines [4] I wrote during the late 90s. On the second page, I had written:

If you are reading this and are in charge of maintenance of Prometheus and you aren't me then Heaven Help you.

Tuesday, July 23, 1996 10:24pm Eastern

Going through the pages, I see I have notes on using Infoseek [5], Lycos [6], Webcrawler [7], Yahoo [8], Altavista [9], Excite [10], New Rider [11], Magellan [12], Linkstar [13] (with a note that it's no longer being used), Inktomi [14], Galaxy [15], Aliweb [16], Tribal Voice [17], Apollo [18], Open Text [19], Point Search [20] and HotBot [21] (not that I think any of these links are valid anymore—I'm just curious if they go anywhere anymore) as search engines. “But where's Google [22]?” you ask?

This is from a time before Google. It may be hard to believe but when Google first started, the “smart” money wasn't on them—it was an already crowded market. What could they do better?

Ah, hindsight is always 20/20.

It's interesting going through this stuff. Flow charts [23], state diagrams [24], Dilbert cartoons [25] (hey! How did those get in there?), notes, and quite a number of doodles.

[Sketch of a Cray-like computer] [26] [Another sketch of a Cray-like computer] [27] [He reminds me of Kevin] [28]

There's also a number of rants I wrote, which are amusing enough for me to post over the next few days, with commentary. Should be fun.

[1] /boston/2008/06/29/stacks.jpg

[2] /boston/2008/06/29/frontpage.jpg

[3] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/search.hp2.html

[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/

[5] http://guide.infoseek.com/

[6] http://www.lycos.com/

[7] http://www.webcrawler.com/

[8] http://www.yahoo.com/

[9] http://altavista.digital.com/

[10] http://www.excite.com/