AltaVista Personal Indexer

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Probably not a good idea..

I never got into the whole ‘desktop search’ thing as I used to know where my stuff was.  But now we live in the future where not only can you just go out and buy terabytes worth of storage but downloading 10 years’ worth of usenet is something you can accomplish in a few minutes (on a good connection) but storing it as flat files only takes 20 minutes to decompress some 2,070,332 worth of files is a trivial manner.  It’s really cool to live in the future.

Total Files Listed: 2070332 File(s) 5,429,376,673 bytes 
                    168164 Dir(s) 1,119,884,468,224 bytes free

Now what about finding something in those files?

I should be embarrassed as I was using grep.

Yes, in my hunt for obscure information grep was my tool of choice.

So, after Frank had mentioned it in passing, if I’d ever used AltaVista Personal Search 97 before I thought I’d give it a bit of a test.  First, I unpacked some BSD source code, and had it index that.  The results were incredibly FAST.  So the next thing to do was to try the UTZOO archives.  I should have expanded my NT 4.0 VM’s disk first, but I got this far until I was down to 200MB of free disk space

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I should add that I’m sharing the UTZOO archvie over the network.  Not the fastest way at all.  And I only made it about 40% the way through the archive.  Even at this point the search database is only 1.2GB

So how does it run?  Well, it’s a localized web service that resides on your desktop.  Of course, it only works when you request from 127.0.0.1 as they sold a network searchable version of AltaVista, the Workgroup Edition. Even this was a retail product at one point retailing for $29 to $35

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Show me the Xenix!

So, you hit the web page, type in your search, and you get an answer like immediately.  It really is scary how fast this thing is.  Although the results can need a lot of tweaking, but we are talking 800,000 files.

But needless to say, there was the disastrous Compaq buyout of DEC, and the entrance of Google, and it was over.  From what I understand people are still selling the workgroup/enterprise search.  I can see why even though the 97 is rough it still has promise.

What a bargain!

What a bargain!

For anyone who cares, it’s geared to Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.0.. 2000 and beyond is at your own risk.  It uses a Win16 setup program, so Windows 7 x64 was out of the question, but you can download it here.

As part of the retrochallenge 2012, there is a PDP-11 running 2.11 BSD out there!

No, really!

You can get an account, just sign up here!

Sander Reiche has setup a MicroPDP-11/83 with the following specs:

So far there are FOUR users.. which means you can get in on the action for sure!

For those of you who want a sandboxed version at home, you can download my install here, which of course I touched on a while back.

For those unfamiliar, here is what retrochallenge is all about!

  1. RetroChallenge commences July 1st, 2012 and runs until July 31st, 2012.
  2. In order to qualify, computer systems must by approximately 10 years old (or older!)… in general, this means 486 or below, 680×0 and pretty much everything with an 8-bit processor, but we’ll also let you in if you have an old Cray kicking about, and exceptions can always be made for exotica!
  3. Gaming consoles and PDAs qualify if they were made in the previous century.
  4. Where appropriate, replica hardware and emulators may be used.
  5. Entrants are responsible for adequately documenting their projects and submitting occasional updates during the contest.
  6. Projects may encompass any aspect of retro-computing that tickles the fancy of the individual entrant.
  7. Winners will be carefully selected and thoughtfully chosen prizes presented (hopefully before the next challenge commences).
  8. Have fun!

Sadly I don’t have anything physical around here that really qualifies.  A G5 mac is too new, and I recently picked up a Pentium 150 based IBM Aptiva, but its too new apparently….

DEC Legacy Event

Well I just found out about a “DEC Legacy Event” being held in the UK. Sadly I already booked tickets to the UK *this* month not the correct one… But then who knows… 😉

From the site:

The DEC Legacy Event that will take place on the 17th & 18th April 2010 in Windermere, UK.

The purpose of the event is to bring together people with an interest in the company Digital Equipment Corporation and their legacy of hardware, software and ethos. There will be both vintage DEC computer hardware and software and more recent HP hardware and software being demonstrated at the event.

I suppose this would have been the place to get some win terminals going, and have multi-user access into a VMS system running on SIMH on an Alpha…

Oh well…

At any rate they promise to upload video from the aftermath, and they’ve got up some interesting promo pics