One of the main instigator of Altavista was Mike Burrows. He left DEC to work for Google in fairly early days of Google. He helped implemented some critical i

One of the main instigator of Altavista was Mike Burrows. He left DEC to work for Google in fairly early days of Google. He helped implemented some critical infrastructure including Chubby (a distributed lock manager based on paxos) and always had his hands deep in the "subtle" parts of google3 (threading bits). He's also the 'b' in 'bzip2'- the Burrows-Wheeler algorithm. I'll always remember him, he wore the same engineering outfit every day (light blue button-down shirt) and sat in his one-person at the top of steps of the main building right outside the Ougadougo(?) meeting room so basically everybody walking into the building walked right past him.