It was twenty years ago today...

[Charlie Hull]

Congratulations! We were a mile or so away working for Webtop (another 
part of Brightstation), who used the Xapian (well, Omseek) code as a 
basis for a half-billion-page web search engine. I remember not everyone 
got the open source message, especially the management (and a 
particularly amusing newspaper article), and a large scale data transfer 
involving a hard disk on a pub table...

Subsequently, Tom Mortimer and I formed Lemur Consulting Ltd. as a 
consultancy focused on Xapian projects for clients including the 
Financial Times, Durrants and the Newspaper Licensing Agency. Eventually 
we moved on to work with Lucene-based engines but some clients continued 
using Xapian for years afterwards. I also remember maintaining the 
Windows bindings using a slightly crazy build system.

Lemur stopped trading this year as we merged the business with our US 
partners, and last Saturday nearly everyone who ever worked for Lemur 
gathered in Cambridge to celebrate over 18 years of open source search 
work. It's been a long road!

Best

Charlie

On 22/10/2019 03:29, Olly Betts wrote:
> Xapian has turned 20!
> 
> Strictly speaking it was 20 years ago last month but I managed to miss
> the true anniversary - the oldest commit in the Xapian repo is:
> 
> commit 8ced76ea128c8fb2792477e09b41fa989f2e572f
> Author: Richard Boulton <richard at tartarus.org>
> Date:   Fri Sep 10 09:50:40 1999 +0000
> 
>      Martins initial code, which didn't work for him but did for me.
> 
> Back then Richard, Martin and I all worked for BrightStation, and
> Richard and I were working in a small office high above the foyer of St
> John's Innovation Centre in Cambridge, UK - just behind the "/" strut
> below the highest part of the roof about 1/4 in from the right of the
> photo on:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_Innovation_Centre#/media/File:St_Johns_Innovation_Centre.jpg
> 
> This was before the project was called Xapian.  Then 18 years ago
> (actually to the day):
> 
> https://sourceforge.net/p/omseek/mailman/omseek-discuss/?viewmonth=200110
> 
> Cheers,
>      Olly
> 
> .
>