1986 – 1999retired
Apple Desktop Bus
“Daisy-chained with dignity, no hub required, still plugged in somewhere inside.”
“It indexed the web before Google told it to; rest easy, FAST friend.”
AlltheWeb, sometimes known as FAST or FAST Search, was an internet search engine born from Tor Egge's doctorate thesis project, FTP Search, begun in 1994 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. That work led to the founding of Fast Search & Transfer on July 16, 1997, and AlltheWeb itself launched in mid-1999. For a stretch of the early web, it was a serious way to find things — Scandinavian engineering
Yahoo acquired AlltheWeb in 2003 and kept it running until shutting it down in 2011. By the end it was a footnote, but a fond one: proof that a doctorate project from Trondheim once helped the whole world look things up. Somewhere, an FTP server still remembers.
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“Daisy-chained with dignity, no hub required, still plugged in somewhere inside.”
“The only cigarette that told the truth - honesty, apparently, doesn't sell.”
“One little word, one big mystery — it never explained itself, and that was the point.”