AOL Cache

[Michael Tibor]

> Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1998 13:19:02 -0600
> From: "Michael Sauers" <msauers at bcr.org>
> To: "Web4Lib" <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Re: AOL Cache
> 
> I just re-read my original posting and realized that I typed "does anyone
> else have a problem" when I meant "does anyone have a problem."  I didn't
> mean to necessarily imply that I found oh so much wrong with what AOL is
> doing as that message may have led you to believe.  I posted it to bring up
> some issues that others have raised with me in the past and I wanted to get
> the opinions of others (of which I have received many already.)
> 
> On the issue that some have raised regarding "but everyone caches and it's a
> normal part of the net" I will generally agree.  But, isn't what AOL is
> doing, i.e. caching on a much grander scale and not just on an individuals
> machine, a little different than what has been going on all along?

Not at all.  In fact, caching http objects has been around far longer than
most people know.  The Harvest project ( http://harvest.transarc.com/ ) 
might perhaps be the first web cache project, which was originally funded
by the US Dept. of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA--and as
most will recall the 'Internet' as we know it evolved from ARPANET) 

Here at our Library we use Squid ( http://squid.nlanr.net/ ) to cache http
objects for all our computers.  NLANR (National Laboratory for Applied
Network Research) maintains the Squid package (which is free), and also
operates a hierarchy of web caches (see http://ircache.nlanr.net/ --very
informative), partially funded by the National Science Foundation.  In
fact, I would probably argue that NLANR's cache network is larger in scale
than what AOL is implementing. 

Mike
-- 
Mike Tibor        University of Alaska Anchorage    (907) 786-1001 voice
LAN Technician    Consortium Library                (907) 786-6050 fax
http://www.lib.uaa.alaska.edu/~tibor/    mailto:tibor at lib.uaa.alaska.edu
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