Wow, DEC... gone nearly 30 years. They used to sponsor the Nightly Business Report during its golden age (Paul Kangas et al). Some years ago I saw a pile of tech arriving at the local electronics recycler, and there was a DEC workstation or two in the bin, looked to be in good shape. I passed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista#Origins
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Network Systems Laboratory and Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Paul Flaherty came up with the original idea, along with Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, who wrote the Web crawler and indexer, respectively. The name "AltaVista" was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto, California. AltaVista publicly launched as an Internet search engine on December 15, 1995.Another good article...Whatever Happened to AltaVista, Our First Good Search Engine