The Remarkable Influence of Bob Taylor: The Man Behind Modern Computing Part 4 of 4
SUMMARY: In part four of this four-part series, I shine a light on one of the unheralded heroes of the computer age: Robert Taylor. Although he is unknown to many, his innovations have changed our lives in innumerable ways.
This is part four of a four-part series on the remarkable influence of Bob Taylor. If you haven’t already, check out part one, part two, and part three.
Internet Search
After departing Xerox PARC in 1983, Taylor decamped for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the world’s leading manufacturer of minicomputers. DEC founder Ken Olsen created the DEC Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto for Taylor and a devoted core of his researchers who chose to follow him. Taylor would spend the remainder of his career at DEC SRC contributing to a number of technologies developed there during the 1980s and 1990s, including the Modula-3 programming language as well as the first multiprocessor workstation, the DEC Firefly.
However, the most important innovation to come out of Taylor’s work at DEC SRC was AltaVista, the leading web search engine of the pre-Google era. AltaVista was not the first search engine, but it was by far the most capable and robust upon its introduction to the public in 1995 at the address altavista.digital.com. It had begun as a demonstration of DEC’s newest 64-bit processor, the Alpha, capable of parsing large databases very quickly, but it rapidly grew in popularity.
AltaVista was the first search engine to “crawl” the web, indexing all the text content of every web page. Later on, options to search for images, audio, and video were introduced. On its launch day in 1995, the site attracted 300,000 visitors; two years later it was drawing 80 million visitors a day!
Unfortunately, during this same time DEC was going out of business and would eventually be sold to Compaq. AltaVista itself was sold to a tech startup called Yahoo.com, which used it to power its own search results for many years. However, the writing was on the wall for the nascent search engine industry with the advent of another service which drew on many of AltaVista’s pioneering innovations: Google.
Taylor retired from DEC in ‘96 and largely receded from public life. He died in 2017 in Woodside, CA. Speaking shortly before his death, he recognized that the new world of networked personal computers he had ushered into existence might not be an unadulterated force for good: “Will it be freely available to everyone? If not, it will be a big disappointment.”